Arabelle Sicardi’s Favorite Word to Say is “No.”
⤏ IN CONVERSATION WITH RHIANNON MCGAVIN
⤏ PHOTOS BY SABINE OSTINVIL
Arabelle Sicardi is a writer whose work focuses on the intersections of beauty, technology, and power. They write a kicker industry newsletter and are publishing a forthcoming book called House of Beauty (not yet available for pre-order). Arabelle is also a Hot Cheeto enthusiast and a class act friend. It was a treat to talk with them about perfume, fear, and other intimacies.
RHIANNON MCGAVIN: Hello Arabelle Biscotti, thank you so much for joining me for this illustrious interview.
ARABELLE SICARDI: Thank you, I really need to have snacks for my launch party based on all the snacks that people call me. Biscotti, Bacardi, I think it’s really on brand.
RM: Biscotti Bacardi cocktail.
AS: Oh yeah, oh that sounds disgusting, that’s gonna make us all sick.
RM: It’ll be totally appropriate. So what’s the scent story right now?
AS: Right now it smells like lip gloss, because I'm wearing some matcha latte that I made. Also Chinese food because that’s all I eat, and probably unwashed hair, so really disgusting and specific, but homey. I haven't been wearing fragrance at the moment because it feels really overwhelming, to be wearing any of it? When I am confronted by an actual composed fragrance, I’m like, oh my god, there’s just so much going on. It's too much. And then I feel like, Catholic guilt. I’m not sure why, I’m not Catholic. It just makes me aware of my mortality in ways that I don't need to deal with.
RM: The pleasure principle is just entirely too much.
AS: It is, I like reading about fragrances more than smelling them right now, which isn’t surprising at all, it’s librarian culture. It does make the current conversation about decolonizing fragrance a lot more interesting to experience right now, because I am not smelling any of the fragrances that are being discussed, even though I have them? So it's kind of like eavesdropping on a conversation down the hall.
RM: Yeah, I’ve been seeing more conversation around the terms that people use to discuss fragrances, which feel fucking Victorian. I don't want to be shocked that they’ve stuck around so long because I know how slowly the industry changes, but it is like, are you kidding me?
AS: Yeah, I guess I’m so used to having to navigate outdated institutions that in some ways, I have become deadened to how terrible they were, just because fragrance is the oldest industry when it comes to beauty in so many ways. Taputti was the first woman fragrancer and she would make fragrances for royals, and she’s not really well-known, but she’s an icon and a legend and she has so few archives. The amount of people who have been intensely and violently forgotten or dismissed within the industry because people prefer marketable binaries is generational. So I'm both incredibly relieved we’re having conversations about why we use these words to describe these things and the way we live our lives, but I'm also like, I hope you don’t get exhausted, and I hope that this is for the long haul and leads to bigger community investment in what fragrance means. And how we talk about history and how we access history. Who's getting priority? Because we really don’t need any more like, agender fragrance launches. We need actual community learning. That’s why the staff at the Institute of Art and Olfaction, what they’re doing is so amazing, and why I passed it along to you. they’re doing the work, and they’ve been doing the work, and now more and more people are showing up. That’s exciting.
RM: It is really exciting. It's such a contradiction, because scent is so linked to memory, but the industry is so focused on erasure. I suppose some of it is tied up with the product itself, because the transformation that perfume undergoes from a living flower, a hunk of an animal to a colorless liquid, it’s very intense. In that vein, what’s your favorite smell to happen upon in the wild?
AS: Fried chicken. Fried chicken makes me so happy, and fresh laundry. I love passing laundromats, and I love walking by barbecues. I'm a simple person when it comes to public smells. I want things that gesture towards community and caregiving. So food and clean laundry.
“The amount of people who have been intensely and violently forgotten or dismissed within the [FRAGRANCE] industry because people prefer marketable binaries is generational.”
RM: I mean, those are perfect picks for your interests, and your philosophies. For years, your thesis has been that beauty is terror, which calls to the Rilke line, “Let everything happen to you, beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” The title of your upcoming book, House of Beauty, partially emerged from a Mark Doty poem, and I know Anne Carson’s work occasionally drags you by the ankle through the cold stream of feeling, as she does to us all. Have you written poetry before?
AS: Yes, under duress, and it’s not my greatest skill. I think at a stretch I’m a writer of prose, but I would never ever consider myself a poet. And that’s fine, but I’m in love with poetry. My favorite writers are poets, my favorite co-conspirators are often poets, and it was the way that I gave myself permission to structure the book, with these book ends of stanzas that shaped my brain. I find comfort in how precise and expansive poetry can be. I found a sense of permission in the Rilke, and that one page from the Secret History, and that was the page that was like oh, she knows what I’m doing. Beauty is terror is my known framework, but I also strongly believe that citation is a form of love, so I try to build it into my work, whether in the book or online, where if you ever are curious about the structure of something or how I got there, I try to make it easy to find my references. And take it forward on your own terms. because at the end of the day, I grew up on tumblr, you know? I grew up creating my own library of references. Any of the work that I do, I'm always going to try to build in that library, because none of this knowledge is mine. I didn't pull it from the air, but I worked to discover these things and find access so I could share them with other people and use them together. It's never about hoarding knowledge, I want us to survive the world together.
RM: That reminds me so much of this Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay, “A carrier bag theory of fiction.” What if we imagine the carrier bag as the original invention of humanity, as opposed to the spear or other weapons? What if the first thing that people made was just a basket in order to carry babies and food to other people, right? And from there, applying that to the novel, or any kind of writing. How can you overcome ego and ground your work and your process in the world of other people? I've found such a productive line of questioning in the last few years. Especially because we both came up through the internet and writing online, and the way that monetization and advertising works is like, take every piece of yourself and then segment it off from the real world and then present it as a product. It's to be disconnected from any other kind of community, unless you’re the person in front of everybody. How has that education both shaped your work, and helped you sharpen it towards something more beneficial?
AS: Well, I don't think being online has helped me. It's been just this situation in which I lived, but it helped me discover people, and their writing, and helped me figure out what my boundaries and where my lines needed to be. I would have tried to find my people anyway, I just happened to find them at that time, that place, which was online. But I think poets helped me do that. Coming back to Anne Carson, there’s a line from one of her interviews: if prose is a house —
RM: [Gasps]
AS: — Then poetry is a man on fire running through the house. And I was like, you absolute bitch. I love this.
RM: [Laughs]
AS: The greatest compliment I can give anybody is, “I'm so angry you did this before me, and so glad that you did.” I feel that way about most of her work. In any case, I wanted to mention that before it fled my brain, but back to your actual question. I got asked the other day, I used to share so much of myself online, and now I don't, and why is that? When you grow up you become more protective of yourself because hopefully as you grow, you feel a little less lonely because you’ve found more of your people, in a way that doesn’t feel transactional or analyzed for traffic and surveillance and someone else’s cultural cache. I mean, I literally have been writing online since I was 14, 15? And I've had it better than a lot of my friends who are more visible, growing up online. But I still had people dropping magazines off in front of my parents’ house when I've never posted my address online. I’ve had stalkers for literal years. I have tens of thousands of emails who either really hate me or are obsessed with me. And I’ve had it good in comparison. But that stuff still shapes you, how you choose to share your creativity so for me, and writing, to get past the burnout point, the sense of perpetual involvement with other people’s projections of who I am. The writing that I do reflects the time and space I have alone to explore the ideas that I want to. I can’t do that on a treadmill of content generation. That's not the writing that I’m good at, or that I want to do, and it’s not the writing that I'm known for. So that’s what I had to do, to make sure I was still finding joy in something that I loved doing.
RM: I can't express how much I agree! With all of this, it feels like there’s a tiny Arabelle in my brain. I’m gonna jump around to my next question, but your writing is decisive, tying together threads of time and space otherwise unknotted, but you keep an intimate tone. You cover violence with great care. What’s your relationship with your readers? When are you breaking the 4th wall to make sure they know?
AS: My relationship is something that changes depending on the piece, because my relationship to the reader and the writing changes. I'm not always writing for the reader. I’m writing often to clarify something for myself, and then by the time it’s ready to be edited, I've given it away. A lot of the time the writing isn’t “done” yet even when it’s published, because that’s how content deadlines work. I think writing this book was, and still is, a labyrinth of figuring out my own brain, and figuring out how much I actually wanted to share and give away, and to what end. And that’s obviously what any book is, it’s going to be a version of that. But I spent a lot of time trying to clear my throat in terms of who it was for, and in what voice I was writing it, and to get through the imposter syndrome idea that anyone would even pay me to write something like this. So it went through a lot of different versions and so many of them were shaped by the opinions of other people. At a certain point I just had to throw it out and pick up the corpse of the thing I loved the most, that I was told not to believe in by more than one person. And all of the other versions, even if I get why people think they make common sense, that’s the thing! It makes common sense! That’s not my sense of how the story goes. Of course you found out about this in five seconds, I've been thinking about it for ten years. I can hear something that you can’t right now, and I've been listening for way longer, so you actually need to move out of the way!
RM: Mm!
AS: So when I'm thinking about the direction of who the book is for, it’s changed because I've had to change. Before Trump won, it was going to be something entirely different, because I was operating under different circumstances of how the world worked, and what the book needed to be. and then one of the worst things happened that could have possibly happened, so I threw it all out. It needed to be more active and it needed to be its own kind of weapon. But what does that weapon do? I had to spend so much time building that back. How do I say this in a way that doesn’t sound rude — I don't need the reader to like me, or even trust me. I want them to be a little frightened by the fact that something they may have taken so easily, and probably found great joy in, this thing that we know of as the beauty industry — it’s so much bigger, powerful, older, more frightening and complex and more heartbreaking than they know.
RM: Yeah.
AS: And that’s what they need to know going in. They need to know that I don't have the epiphanies to solve the most troubling things about it, but I'm still here. and that’s where we’re starting from. It’s not a place of, “Oh, welcome to the glitz and glamor of my so-called life, and we’re gonna put on a face mask together and chill out.“ That is not my agenda, that is not what I offer, and they need to know that going in, and then they can go through the gauntlet that I have gone through, a rollercoaster of discovery and knowledge and pain and love and all the things that life can be, not only about beauty.
But I’m not trying to build unconditional devotion in my readers. I would rather have it be as passionate and weird as life can be. I want the trust that my reader has for me to be earned by both of us. I think curiosity matters more than a lot of other things. I’m not a fluffy person, I’m a very prickly person and I think my writing reflects that.
RM: You’re my favorite blooming cactus. What you say about specificity and the kind of reader you imagine changing for each piece, I love that so much. It reminds me of what danah a. boyd talks about with context collapse on the internet and that precision that you bring to your craft and thinking about how it moves through the world, I think is such a neat way to combat that feeling. You don’t wanna be everything for everyone, you have a very sharp idea in mind.
AS: I often feel like people put too much on a writer to tell them how to feel about something. I think that’s a generational thing as much as it is anything else, because I know that when I talk to older writers and readers, the way that they approach writing or reading is not from a place of campaigning for something to be felt by the reader as much. Maybe this is also an old school institutional journalism thing, where objectivity is key here. Some of that has to be unpacked and obliterated, because there is no objectivity, but on the other hand, I think a lot of people — especially my age and younger — come to expect to be told that something is terrible or infallible in the end. That’s just not how power or people works, it’s always going to be more complicated. When I'm writing something, I'm usually trying to examine what those complications are. What can we learn from what cannot kill us?
“hopefully as you grow, you feel a little less lonely because you’ve found more of your people, in a way that doesn’t feel transactional or analyzed for traffic and surveillance and someone else’s cultural cache.”
RM: Yeah. Ugh! Thinking more about structure and poetry — your upcoming book is called House of Beauty. How has that architectural image informed your writing on beauty, as an industry and ideal?
AS: The key reference, besides the Mark Doty poet, was Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space. I read that very early on in trying to figure out what the structure would be. And chronological was just overpowering, it would’ve ended up being five fucking tomes. I wanted it to be something that felt more like how we live. In one way, the book is structured exactly like a house, that you move through for different reasons, and we all have our different circuits through where we live and how we live it. In another way, it’s structured a little unexpectedly. Figuring out the way stories fit together is often more rewarding than actually editing or writing, because it builds up in these multitudes. It's like the perfect temperature of tea when you get the structure right. It was these things together in this way, it wasn’t just this separately, they are always speaking together. And that’s what a good conversation is as well, no?
You have to be able to figure out if [the pieces] stand alone as strongly as they stand together, and also you have to figure out if they’re stronger in a certain order. All that stuff, it makes you examine the pacing, how much time you devote to specific characters — the actual essence of each piece — all at a way bigger scale than you’re initially taught. I'm still finding different scenarios, and whatever I find will get ahead of me hopefully, and knowing that the things you know can still surprise you is the best part.
RM: I’m biased, so I’m gonna say that part of why you’re so attentive to structure comes from you reading so much poetry.
AS: [Laughs] Yes! A great deal of it yours!
RM: [Laughs] Because you really have to think, “Okay is this thing that I’m trying to say — this idea, this image — best suited to a sonnet, does it need to repeat itself a lot like a villanelle, picking where you break the line —
AS: That stuff is so important! Like I can’t write poems for shit, but when you read an impeccably structured poem or like — I love erasure poems, because I’m galaxy braining all the time. The amount of discipline it takes to figure out what doesn’t need to be there, and the grief that goes into a hanging comma, or a bracket that goes nowhere, that makes every word hit so much harder. I fucking love poetry.
RM: I also love that you have written poetry before, even if you don’t think it’s good. I think everybody should have an art or a craft that’s just completely for themselves, private, and will never need to be trotted up for various forms of monetization or public approval. Like I’m a really bad singer, but I love singing, and I know I’ll never feel compelled to release a single.
AS: I think it’s important to resist the urge to market ourselves. That's what we’re taught all the time, and with great love, no.
RM: Well, this goes perfectly into my next question. One of the many books I read, because you said to, was a Handbook of Disappointed Fate, essays by Anne Boyer. The opening essay is on the strength of NO, which has become a real touchstone for me. Similarly, Phoebe Bridgers has said that her favorite part of the production process is putting as many sounds as possible into a song, then paring it down to the fewest, most important elements. How has refusal shaped your work? That level of curation?
AS: I’m a capricorn, my favorite thing to do is say, “No.”
RM: [Laughs]
AS: “No” is an erotic. “No” shapes the work. There’s a book here…I think Anne recommended it to me. It's A Primer for Forgetting. There's a page about Philip Glass in it, about how he creates his music. Philip Glass is totally a writer’s musician. He basically just also throws a bunch of shit together, and then doesn’t leave the room until everything is removed from it, including himself.
RM: Mm!
AS: That’s when you’re done, when you’ve created something that doesn’t need you there. That is hard. I don't think I'll ever get there, to be honest. Everything that I write is still so me, but I think that’s fine. Not getting that feeling of satisfaction is also just part of my practice. It’s like the Martha Graham thing of queer dissatisfaction, you’re never gonna be happy with what you do, and if you are, you need to be concerned.
RM: Edging as praxis.
AS: It really is. Gay rights!
“The writing that I do reflects the time and space I have alone to explore the ideas that I want to. I can’t do that on a treadmill of content generation.”
RM: Along with saying no, and refusing things, and carving things away, what’s something that is integral to your writing process that is not reading or writing? I love asking writers this and discovering their secret habits.
AS: That's a good question. I go on walks, that’s important to me. And I watch my flowers dance. I like taking photos of the decay of the flowers we keep in the house, because all flowers die differently. I like being able to observe how the smell changes, and if they end up fostering little gnats or fuzz, all that stuff is really satisfying to me. It’s a fragrance story and a story about death, and all that stuff is just poetry. I used to bake a lot more, I don’t bake as much now because I recognize now that I am lactose intolerant —
RM: No!
AS: But I’ve always found a really nice sense of blankness and control when it comes to baking things. And that’s nice, I don't really have an interest in eating the things that I bake, but I love taking care of others, so that’s something that matters to me. When I was going through the most difficult parts of writing the book, I got into adult coloring books like everyone else in the pandemic, because i needed something that would off-board me slowly from writing, so I could move from writing paragraphs or cutting things to a different part of my table that had nothing to do with what I was doing before, and think about nothing except colors.
RM: That's lovely. I think coloring and baking are also really nice because you have a clear point of when something is finished. There’s only so much stuff you can do to a cake before you have to start eating it. You might reach across the country and strangle me for asking, but how can you tell when a piece of writing is done?
AS: I don't know, I'll let you know when I find out! [Laughs] When it comes to finishing something, one of the reasons I really like writing books is just that you have more time. It lets you get closer to finishing things, or at least see how it could further evolve. So that’s something that matters to me, to know that there’s a sense of growth. It’s not just a deadline, it’s something that requires you to actually give a fuck, but you end up growing when you actually spend time returning to something over and over again. I think people that find ways to make time or refuse timelines, that stuff is really important. It’s as important as showing people your work or getting it out there. It’s being able to sit with something difficult and letting it transform you.
RM: I love and appreciate that so much. Is it Prince who has hundreds of unreleased songs?
AS: Yeah, I mean I'm sure he has more than hundreds. I think his estate is releasing a lot of them now. Prince, Beyonce; they have huge archives. And I’m so grateful that Beyonce releases her documentaries. She's pretty transparent about having a village work with her on these ideas, and having these song camps, and you can find her demos pretty easily online. Whenever I've done writing retreats with my friends, there’s always some moment where all we do is listen to demos and finished songs and compare them. And workshop why choices were made, and analyze the biography of the song. Because that’s also analyzing structure and writing, just doing that with music.
RM: That is such a good prompt.
AS: It makes such a good exercise, and if you haven’t done it you totally should. You go in with the same writing, the same lyrics, but you may be coming from a different place emotionally, and then you see the halfway point when a new producer comes in and pushes one thing forward, one thing back. Revisions! And then at the end, you hear the finished thing, and you’re like, “Oh that’s what editing is. She grew up.”
RM: Do you write by hand?
AS: Yeah, a lot of the time. I must have like 8 notebooks for the House of Beauty. I don't even know how many I have at this point. And I have to. I will write on the computer, I'll turn things in and write little bits, and I structure my outlines on the computer, but I do all of my actual writing by hand and I physically cut up my drafts and tape them together in the right way.
RM: That's what Proust did! On opium in the canopy bed all day, just surrounded by mood boards.
AS: Nothing but vibes!
“I DON’T WANT A REDEMPTION ARC. FUCK A REDEMPTION. I USED TO BE REALLY INTO THE IDEA OF REDEMPTION, AND THEN I REMEMBERED THAT I’M BUDDHIST, AND YOU CAN’T TAKE THAT SHIT WITH YOU. SO YOU JUST HAVE TO TRY TO BE GOOD WHEN YOU CAN.”
RM: We've been talking for a while, and I want to ask my silly questions before you go cut up your pages again. You’re hosting a dinner party for your favorite dead strangers. The dinner is totally planned and prepared, but you need appetizers while people chat about war crimes and 15th century beauty hacks. You’ve got 10 minutes to run through the market of your choice, where are you going and what are you grabbing?
AS: I'm picking up crackers, mozzarella, and charcuterie stuff. I could happily exist on charcuterie. It's definitely more expensive than just making yourself a meal, but I love snacks. If I do that, I'll probably get little bags of different Asian chips, rare forms of Pocky, and various gelatinized snack objects. Like those candy hamburgers? The little kits of Asian candies that look like other foods? I love food that looks like other food. Honestly, I really shouldn’t be catering anything. I'd just do stoner diets. They’d be like this is not natural food for humans, and I’m like “Yeah, you’re welcome.”
RM: And then your 19th-century faves would fall over.
AS: I’d probably cause a heart attack, but it’s fine. Anything for the ‘Gram.
RM: You’re the super villain, in the Fast & Furious space opera of your dreams. What’s your key accessory, and do you want a redemption arc? To go out in a blaze of glory saving the good guys? Or wicked to the absolute end?
AS: I don’t want a redemption arc. Fuck a redemption. I used to be really into the idea of redemption, and then I remembered that I’m Buddhist, and you can’t take that shit with you. So you just have to try to be good when you can. But for the story, I would probably just wanna sow chaos. [Cackles]
RM: [Cackles]
AS: I would be good for five seconds, find it incredibly boring, and not worth it, and then do whatever I wanted. I'm ripping a hole in the universe and going there instead and leaving them all to implode, that’s cool right?
RM: With some combo of vintage CDG suited for space.
AS: And Charlize’s character would fall in love with me and we’d rip a hole in the universe and ride there in an incredible vintage car that I don’t have the name of right now because I’m not the car person, I just like shiny things and exploding objects.
RM: Last thing, what’s your favorite unforeseen use for a beauty product?
AS: I'm pretty sure that at my old apartment, I used a makeup brush as a level to hang my curtains, and I used a grinder as a hammer. So femmes can do anything. Take what you can, use what you need.
CORRECTION: The passage in A Primer For Forgetting references a talk between John Cage the musician and Philip Guston the painter: "When you start working, everybody is in your studio– the past, your friends, enemies, the art world, and above all, your own ideas– all are there. But as you continue painting, they start leaving, one by one and you are left completely alone. Then, if you're lucky, even you leave."
⤏ RHIANNON MCGAVIN (SHE/HER) HAS FAILED THE DRIVER’S LICENSE TEST THREE TIMES. SHE HAS PERFORMED EVERYWHERE FROM THE HOLLYWOOD BOWL TO THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, AS WELL AS ON NPR. HER WORK HAS BEEN PUBLISHED BY TIA CHUCHA PRESS, CURA, TEEN VOGUE, AND THE BELIEVER. RHIANNON WAS THE YOUTH POET LAUREATE OF LOS ANGELES IN 2016. SHE IS THE AUTHOR OF BRANCHES AND GROCERY LIST POEMS.