Nikole Hannah-Jones, Pulitzer Prize Winner, Winds Down With Silk Pillowcases, TJ Maxx PJs, and $10 Candles

For the two months that New York has been under lockdown, journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has committed to getting dressed (in a real outfit) and putting on makeup (which she now has no excuse for failing to remove before bed) at least once a week.

It’s a modest ambition, but for Hannah-Jones—who was just awarded the Pulitzer Prize earlier this month for her groundbreaking 1619 Project in the New York Times—it has paid unexpected dividends.

“I love makeup. I love color. And I love to present myself in a very specific way, especially now—just to keep my sanity,” she says.

Even in quarantine, the New York Times Magazine correspondent doesn’t need a reason to put on real clothes or even an audience to see her do it. But last week she had both. In a surreal moment, Hannah-Jones accepted her Pulitzer Prize and delivered the talk that winners give via Google Hangout.

“I have my bright red hair,” she says. “I put my lashes on. I got dressed, except I left on house slippers, which no one could see. It was honestly a good look even though it was on the phone.”

She wanted to feel like herself, she explains, and she wanted to send a message. Toward the end of her speech, Hannah-Jones, whose work on persistent, structural racial segregation in American education has also won her a MacArthur Genius Grant, made a final point.

“I said, ‘This is for every black girl who’s been told she has to shrink herself or her blackness in order to succeed,’” she recalls. “I want to tell that girl, ‘You don’t.’”

Hannah-Jones has been serious about skin care and makeup since she was a department store cashier, but her convictions about how products and fashion and even a solid eight hours of sleep each night might be used as tools of self-actualization are newer.

“I think beauty can seem frivolous, but beauty is also a political statement,” she says. “And I don’t mean beauty in terms of looks. I mean beauty as in the process of looking, of presenting, of showing up.”

Here, she walks Glamour through her wind-down routine, her candle habit, and the advice from Ta-Nehisi Coates that transformed her relationship to self-care.

On winding down

Typically, I’m an early-to-bed, early-to-rise person—ideally eight hours. But like a lot of folks, I’m having a much harder time winding down and getting to sleep now. I still have to get up early and I still start my nighttime routine early because I’m home all day; I just don’t go to sleep early.

One thing I’m doing is lighting candles. I am obsessed with the Bath and Body Works three-wick candle. Teak Mahogany is my favorite scent. Normally, they’re $25 each, so when Bath and Body Works has its $10 sale, I’ll buy a lot. I’ve got boxes of them downstairs, and even before this, I would burn them every night. I would come home from work, light one, and keep it lit until I went to bed, and that was kind of a signal that the work day was over.

Now I’m still doing that, even though I’m working from home. Otherwise, the hours just blend together. I close my laptop for work; then I get up and light that candle. Before the pandemic I bought the Mirror, so I’ve tried to use that too around 7 p.m. After that I take a shower.

I’ve never in my life been a person who struggles to sleep. You can ask anyone who knows me. By 9:30 p.m. I’m usually nodding off. But right now I just can’t shut my mind down, so I’ve been watching a lot of Netflix and staying up much, much later than I want to. I haven’t really found a way to deal with it yet. I definitely have my bourbon every night—I like High West and I like Four Roses Small Batch—but it is not helping me sleep.

I think a lot of people know that I like bourbon, so people send it to me. It’s like, “Oh, we know what to get her.” But then I started to think, Have I been talking about bourbon too much? Now, though, I feel like I’ve been winning with that. I have friends who are like, “Oh God, I’m all out.” And I’m like, “I have supplies.”

Between the candles and the bourbon, I didn’t know I was stocking up for a pandemic, but I was.

On her skin-care routine

I have a rotation of three skin products that I use in the shower, and I rotate them every three days. I always wash my face with just Cetaphil because it’s a plain cleanser. And then the rotation is the Fresh Sugar Face Polish, the Fresh Rose Face Mask, and then two to three times a week, it’s this Youth to the People Yerba Mate Resurfacing Facial that I love.

I’ve always been into skin care—at least since I was a Macy’s cashier. I was working there and got the Clinique three-step moisturizing set, and that was how I started to really care about my skin. But I haven’t had as much time to spend perfecting it until now. Sometimes, depending on how tired I was, I might not have removed my makeup at night. Or, in the morning, I’d just have to rush out and not have the time to layer products like I wanted to. Clearly, now that’s not a problem. I’m hoping the one good thing that comes out of the pandemic is that I’m going to have the most amazing skin. I’m working really hard on that.

After those three products, Herbivore makes this facial mask called Prism that I really, really like. I use that three times a week. You leave it on after you get out of the shower for 20 minutes, and it just makes your skin so smooth. If I’m not using the Herbivore mask after the shower, then I do this thing that Kiehl’s makes—it’s called Powerful Strength Line-Reducing Concentrate. I put that on. Then I put on an eye cream. Right now I’m using Shiseido. And then I will layer that with Lancome’s Advanced Genifique. I’m telling you—I’m a professional. I use a lot.

Right before I go to bed, I’ll put on the Clarins Blue Orchid Facial Treatment Oil. And I tend to be a one scent kind of person, so in the shower I use Nubian Heritage African Black Soap Body Wash and then when I get out, I use this superthick lotion from the same line.

On self-care

I love products and all that stuff, but I had never given “self-care” as a concept a lot of thought. After the 1619 Project came out and I started giving talks, during the Q&A, it was almost inevitable that it would come up. Wherever I went, someone—almost always a black woman—would want to know about how I handled self-care.

The first couple of times it was asked, it did catch me off-guard because I was like, “Well, I never even thought about it. I don’t know what my self-care is.” And back then, the both kind of flippant answer and the true [answer] was that my self-care was drinking too much and eating too much, which actually is not self-care. It’s the opposite of self-care. And that’s when I realized, “This might be an important thing.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who’s a friend of mine, likes to tell me, “You have to take care of yourself because you have to be here to fight these battles. You can’t not take care of yourself and then you lose your health or you lose your life, and then you’re not able to produce the work that you’re here to produce.”

I’ve been trying to think a lot more about that. I wasn’t one of those people who thought about self-care in those terms. But I actually do understand it more now—that taking the time and the space to ask yourself how you’re feeling and to check in and to care for yourself when you are committed to the kind of work that is about helping other people or helping to make a broader change in the world is an act of self-affirmation.

I probably gained 20 pounds working on the 1619 Project. That’s not good. If I’d kept that up, I might not be here to do transformative work 15 or 20 years from now. It is absolutely a political act to say, “I have got to take care of myself so that I can continue to do the work that I hope will make this world a little bit better.” I didn’t understand that for a long time. I have completely come to understand that now.

One of the things that I do now, whenever I go to a town, if I have time, is schedule an hourlong facial, which seems really indulgent. But I have the kind of mind that never shuts down. I go to sleep with the TV on at night because I can’t stop thinking about things. And when I get facials, it’s one of the few times where I can relax to the point where I don’t remember thinking at all. That time became important to me. I do want to have less stress and amazing skin, but it’s really about time in a dark room—a dark warm room with that new age spa music with no words and your eyes are closed and all you feel is human touch and quiet. I need that time for my own self-preservation.

On comfort

I’m an avid TJ Maxx, Marshall’s type shopper, and I spend a lot of time in the pajamas section. I find the nicest pajamas for $15, so I have a lot of them. I like to be supercomfortable when I’m sleeping.

I don’t have a favorite set of sheets, but I do sleep on a silk pillowcase, which is just good for your hair and your skin. I have no idea what brand it is. I’m sure I found it on Amazon—probably the first one that has more than three stars. It’s a magenta silk pillowcase, and my husband liked how it felt so much that he ended up ordering himself one too. He had to get it in the same color, because it had to match too, so that’s great. Once you’ve tried a silk pillowcase, you kind of wonder why you ever slept on a regular pillowcase. It’s that good.

On scrolling into the void

The last app I check before bed is Twitter, I think. I spend way too much time on it. Most days it’s not rewarding, but it can be. I definitely use it as a reporting tool. I end up coming across a lot of good academic research and just interesting ideas and stories, but it seems like that’s getting more and more rare.

Instead I mostly find myself arguing with people who I shouldn’t be spending my time arguing with. I’m an Aries, so it’s my nature to argue. But clearly, Twitter brings out a really ugly side of communicating with a lot of people. So I’m trying to get better. I’ve actually started putting my phone upstairs for the last couple hours of the night so I don’t even have the ability to check it. Right now it feels like we’re all spending so much more time on our phones, so at night I just want to take a complete break from it, which I didn’t do before.

On her social life

I’m a super-social person. It’s part of what I do now. For the past two years, I’ve been traveling two to four times a week. So not being able to see people feels very, very strange. And [my husband and I] are not people who have family in New York, so I’m thinking a lot about the fact that I don’t know when I’m going to see my mom again or the rest of our family. But then again, I know I’m so lucky compared to so many other people who are struggling. It’s this constant battle between feeling like This really sucks and also knowing that millions of Americans are having a hard time even paying their bills.

[Zoom] is just not the same as seeing people in real life. I’ve never been a person who loves talking on the phone. I don’t FaceTime a lot. In general, that’s not how I communicate. So this has been a challenge.

My daughter just turned 10 [a few weeks ago], and I even tried to have a surprise Zoom birthday party for her, but it was so hard. She was over it in five minutes. It’s like every time someone talks, they’re talking over each other, and the screen is moving all around. I was like, “This is not working.” She definitely appreciated the thought, but I was like, “Trying to re-create these moments on Zoom—not so good.”

And then, of course, the Pulitzers were announced, and we did it over Google Chat and a livestream. And I am so, so grateful, but it’s like when you’ve been waiting for this moment for 20 years, and then you have to accept your Pulitzer over Google Hangout? It was actually surprisingly good for what it was, but still.

On quarantine’s unexpected gifts

It hit me recently that I haven’t spent this much time with my daughter since I was on maternity leave. She’s right at this cusp age now, getting ready to be a preteen. I know she’ll be at that stage soon where she starts to pull away from me. And so what I have found to be the most amazing and unexpected gift in all of this is that I get to spend every single day—every moment of the day—with my child. And I’m really, really grateful for that.

I’ve kept a journal for her since she was a little girl. I write her letters, and I keep them for her to read one day. I wrote to her that I had been thinking about this time as these lost months, but for her and for me, I think of it now as the found months because there will never be a time again when we’ll get to spend this much time together. And for it to come at such an important juncture in her life—it is a beautiful gift.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

Mattie Kahn is the culture director at Glamour.

All products featured on Glamour are independently selected by our editors. However, when you buy something through our retail links, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Originally Appeared on Glamour