Darian Symoné Harvin

I started to use cannabis for self-care once I got to LA. Living in a state where it’s legal is going to influence your life. Cannabis used to always be a social thing for me while living in New York and really wherever I lived. But coming here and particularly over the pandemic is when cannabis became something for me that helped to decrease my stress. But it’s also a time to make that concerted effort, to do something for myself, and not feel bad it.

Cannabis is more about relaxation for me. It’s very easy to use cannabis as a crutch. It’s very easy to use cannabis as a coping mechanism. I have had to figure out with cannabis the mode and the function for it and the intentionality behind why I’m doing it. All of those things have helped to empower me and make me feel really good about who I am and why I use it. I like to use it to wind down and in social settings too. I like to smoke at the end of the night, but I also like to smoke when I’m with friends, having a good conversation.

I feel that so much of how I approach beauty has also been a case study in and of itself for myself. It’s been the ultimate test of what my values are, what I truly care about, and how I want to serve my community. My community in the sense of people who follow me, people who read my work, people who live in LA, and also people who live in different parts of the world. That has been a guiding light.

I’ve tried to take the approach that the beauty products are the byproduct. My true passion is people. My true passion is interviewing, and having conversations. So beauty is the medium and the mode in which I approach it because our practices within beauty say a lot about us.

A lot of my job is pulling in stories, whether they are on a beauty site or intersect with beauty, but it may not be apparent initially. For instance, The Crown Act, which is around making race-based hair discrimination illegal. It has to do with Naomi Osaka deciding what she does and doesn’t want to do at a press conference or Simone Biles deciding that she’s not in a state where she wants to compete. I define beauty as being about choice and agency, taking care of yourself and also thinking about where you decide to show up and how you decide to show up.

That happens to me all the time, especially if I’m talking about us as people and knowing that we have more power than capitalism, big brands, and marketing. There has been so much emphasis on how to sell things. We obviously live in a capitalist society and I get very passionate when I see possibilities for us to speak out on. There is so much bravery when people decide to show up as themselves. Again, the makeup is the medium. It’s really about who they are. And so I definitely get emotional if I talk about it or if I cover it because I want other people to feel it too.

People know me as a writer. I’m a reporter. I’m a journalist. I’m all those things. I’m a culture writer. I have packaged myself in a way that is initially very digestible to people in the sense of, okay, you get that Darian covers beauty, X, Y, Z. But I am so expansive. What I want to do is so beyond just writing for digital publications. There’s so many different ways to communicate, to foster community, and to gather other people for conversation.

I’m looking to move into a place in my life where yes I am a writer and those are where my skills are and that’s what I’ll always do. But also, people can see me as more than that. More of an artist and a creative where again, the writing is the medium, beauty is the topic of conversation, but I can show up in a variety of ways and it still makes sense. So that’s what I’m striving for right now.