Why Clean Beauty Still Feels Relevant: Oh My Cream

There’s something reassuring about walking into a clean beauty space that feels curated rather than chaotic, and Oh My Cream's Islington shop is a good case in point. I was reminded of why clean beauty still has such a hold on the cultural imagination: not because it promises perfection, but because it offers a more considered way of caring for the self.

https://piakan.com/2026/04/29/clean-beauty-oh-my-cream-islington/

A Body Made of Lineage: Nigerian Modernism at Tate

Some exhibitions feel less like a viewing and more like a reckoning. Nigerian Modernism at Tate Modern is one of those spaces where art does not sit politely behind glass, but breathes with the force of history. Spanning the years surrounding Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the exhibition traces how artists responded to colonial disruption, political transition, and the task of cultural self-definition.

https://piakan.com/2026/04/27/nigerian-modernism-tate-diaspora-identity/

The Drama of Sublimation: Ugly Truths, Radicalised Youth and the Crisis of Connection

Kristoffer Borgli’s The Drama arrives like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into the wedding-industrial complex. Zendaya’s Emma and Robert Pattinson’s Charlie are the sort of couple neoliberal culture sells us as aspirational: cultured, attractive, ostensibly secure in Boston’s creative class. He’s a museum curator; she’s a literary editor. Their meet-cute is awkward-cute, their engagement…

https://piakan.com/2026/04/07/the-drama-review-sublimation-capitalism/

The Vitamin D Protocol I Wish I’d Started Sooner 

If you live in the UK and especially if you have dark skin, you're probably vitamin D deficient from October to March. Here's the protocol that fixed mine.

https://piakan.com/2026/03/12/vitamin-d-protocol-uk-melanated-skin/

The Soft-Life Guide To Burnout: 7 Red Flags You’re Not “Just Tired”

Burnout rarely looks like a dramatic collapse. It looks like you, at your laptop, telling yourself you’re “just tired” for the fourth month in a row. It’s the Sunday dread you joke about in memes but secretly can’t shake. It’s the way your jaw aches, your patience evaporates, and your life slowly shrinks to work, errands and scrolling on the sofa.

https://piakan.com/2026/03/10/burnout-signs-recovery-what-helped/

My Dry Eye Journey: From Screen Fatigue to Real Relief

Dry eye syndrome is more than just a passing irritation; it's a pervasive condition affecting so many worldwide, in which the eyes either fail to produce enough quality tears or the tears evaporate too rapidly, leaving people with persistent burning, itching, redness, and those irritating sensations. The condition often stems from meibomian gland dysfunction (MGD), where the tiny oil-producing glands nestled in our…

https://piakan.com/2026/03/01/dry-eye-journey-screen-fatigue-relief/

Paradise: Surveillance, Service, and The Architecture of Complicity 

Paradise isn't subtle about its premise. What makes it worth watching is how precisely it maps the mechanisms of containment — and who the story trusts with complexity.

https://piakan.com/2026/02/28/paradise-hulu-review-surveillance-power/

Why Rest Is The Best Performance Hack

The voice has been with me for as long as I can remember. You'll probably know it. The one that runs its commentary during downtime: you haven't done enough to justify this procrastination. Other people are further along. You should be building something. What are you doing just lying there. For years, I treated this voice as a signal — as the useful internal pressure that kept me moving forward.

https://piakan.com/2026/02/27/rest-not-laziness-performance-recovery/

Invisible Architecture: The Hidden Cost of ‘Making It’ for Young Black Britons

We celebrate the ones who 'make it'. But we don't interrogate the architecture that determines who gets to try, what 'making it' costs, and who's left holding the structural damage when the cameras move on.

https://piakan.com/2026/02/26/young-black-britons-invisible-architecture-making-it/

Stop Doomscrolling: One Simple Rule That Saved My Sanity

I spent a long time believing the problem was the news itself. That the solution was abstinence. That if I could just stop reading — stop opening the apps, stop following the feeds, stop caring about the state of a world that seemed determined to exhaust me with its ongoing emergencies — I'd feel better. I tried. Twice. Both times, the relief lasted about four days before something else moved in: a low-grade,…

https://piakan.com/2026/02/25/stop-doomscrolling-news-consumption-rule/