✍️ “You can be an emotional writer but you can’t thrive as an emotionally driven business person.”
Beauty theorist, founder of the Museum of Nails, and author of The House of Beauty on strategy, obsession, and why endurance matters more than talent.
📚 Editor’s Note: Meet Arabelle Sicardi
If you’re looking for proof that writers can build a multi-hyphenate career on their own terms, let me introduce you to
.They’re a beauty theorist, yes — but also a strategist, community builder, perfumery obsessive, Substacker (her publication You’ve Got Lipstick on Your Chin is a must-read!), and founder of the Museum of Nails Foundation. Their new book The House of Beauty (pre-order now!) has been nearly a decade in the making, and their approach to longform work is both methodical and defiant. This is a writer who has printed, cut, and quilted their drafts by hand.
In this interview, Arabelle doesn’t romanticize the business of writing — they dissect it. They talk about the admin-heavy reality of making creative work possible, the way obsession shapes a body of work, and the hard-won insight that changed how they approach clients: not all of them are worth it.
You’ll find wisdom here that’s practical, generous, and unusually clear-eyed — from Baldwin quotes to couch-crashing to get a reporting trip funded. Whether you’re building a body of work or still trying to get your arms around one big idea, Arabelle’s approach to devotion, strategy, and sustainable ambition is a masterclass in itself.
–Amy
Editor & Curator of GuestStack
✍️ From the Desk of Arabelle Sicardi
Where’s your desk these days — and what does it look like?
Right now I’m on my couch in New York, but I split my time between New York and Los Angeles. As for how I write, I usually write on a Remarkable Tablet and do administrative work on my laptop. I avoid my laptop as much as possible. I only work on it as long as it’s charged and once it’s dead I do something else. Forced concentration!
What does “making writing your job” look like in your world right now?
I have multiple streams of income. Substack is an anchor, but I don’t have so many paid subscribers to the extent it is my only job. (Please subscribe! Hahaha.) I also run an event series called Perfumed Pages, which involves workshops, hybrid and in person events around fragrance and creativity. Right now we’re wrapping up a Nose Training Cohort where people from around the world learn fragrance materials together alongside perfumers. This summer we’re doing a salon series that is a mixture of workshops and in-person beauty field trips, too. I freelance for clients across industries as a writer and a consultant on development, forecasting, and strategy. Most of those clients are luxury beauty, fashion, or tech. And the bylines for magazines, sure.
All of this is to support the ability to do longform projects. The House of Beauty, the non-fiction beauty book I have been working on for 7, 8 years - comes out this October. I am always working on at least two projects, but they are big projects. I have a lot of books in me.
This year, outside of bringing out The House of Beauty, I want to raise money for the beauty nonprofit I founded, The Museum of Nails Foundation. We are trying to fundraise at least $35K to build out an augmented reality nail art museum and fund some other projects around archiving beauty labor. We just put up a nail art history timeline in the NYC MTA, on the platform of the L train station on Third Ave.
Right now a vast majority of my writing life is administrative. Writing plans around how to make the things I want happen, explaining it to other people to join me in building it, etc. Grants and applications and marketing. When these pay off, I am then able to actually write.
What’s one lesson you wish someone had told you earlier about the business of writing?
You can be an emotional writer but you can’t thrive as an emotionally driven business person. I am not emotional about negotiating contracts and seek out resources on how to be a better entrepreneur. I also seek out people who have worked with new clients before to see if it’s worth my time. Not all clients are good ones. I would rather have a stable of reliable work relationships than one high maintenance one I have to treat like my personal god.
What’s your writing routine like — or do you even have one?
Technically, I write by hand on my tablet or in my paper journals (a different one for every major project). Then I move to the computer and restructure or elaborate in Scrivener. I print out and manually cut and restructure like a quilt on the wall or the floor. Index cards for topline structural concerns. I type up the changes, print it out again. This is reserved for longform stuff that changes over years. These kinds of projects take up boxes and boxes but they are dated and organized chronologically. I find it comforting to be able to revisit draft 3 of something to see what I removed, because I can use it again in draft 45 of something else. Nothing is wasted. And because I have many backups of things either on my tablet or on the Cloud, etc, I can switch through projects at the pace of my attention. I ping through multiple projects every day.
I get the most useful writing done, the writing closest to the bone, at night when everyone is asleep. When I am deep in a project, the structure is its own space I walk into. A big idea is architecture.
Was there a moment you realized, “Wait… I can actually do this”?
I will say when I sold The House of Beauty I felt vindicated. I had spent the two years leading up to putting it up for auction writing the sample chapters with self-funded reporting trips. I didn’t have grant funding or writing awards to fund me; I got rejected from all of them. I would sublet my room in Bushwick out to strangers, pitch a story somewhere that would pay for a reporting trip somewhere I needed to go for research, and sleep on someone’s couch or bully my friend’s sugar daddies to pay for flight tickets and tell them they’re a patron of the arts because of it. I mean, they were! I did whatever I needed to do to get where I wanted to go for a story. If it didn’t sell, it would have felt like I gambled years of my life away for nothing. I would have become a villain, 100%.
What’s something you tried that didn’t work — and what did you learn from it?
I moved to Los Angeles pre-WGA strike in an effort to commit more to writing TV, after I had been a finalist for a WGA Fellowship and reps were lining up to chat. I had some meetings on a TV pilot I wrote with my friend. But Hollywood wants rehashed IP, not original work, and I was told by the execs that they already had their queer Asian protagonist shows slated for further development. You have to work on spec for even a chance - and I have too much to do to work at length for no guaranteed payout, so I refocused on other projects. I’m in a better position than a lot of other writers who moved to “make it”. TV is still floundering. Some of the TV writers I know are writing scripts for TIkTok Shows and having to churn out 80 pages a week by heavily relying on ChatGPT to fill in beats. Rejection, for me, was more of a confirmation that the timing and the market isn’t right for what I have to say. I have more security doing exactly what I want. I keep getting approached to do TV but the deals haven’t been worthwhile yet.
How do you find or create opportunities for yourself as a writer?
I root for people’s projects without asking for anything in return. I send thank you emails and notes to people involved in projects I’ve done and I try to be communicative when things get delayed, and I just generally build a casual rapport with other people so it’s not such a transactional situation. Partnerships come from community; if I’ve written about a brand, I keep in touch and we circle back to each other with regularity. Because of these connections, I don’t end up needing to pitch often. Most of my freelance assignments come from editor outreach, word of mouth that I am available and the right person for a job. Nurturing a community that speaks well of you when you aren’t in the room is incredibly important.
I am also used to the rituals of rejection and opportunity. I will ask for what I want and if I don’t get it it’s just information for the next opportunity. I strategize exactly out what I want to do and figure out ways to do it without someone’s blessing or permission. They can give it to me later or join me for the ride. Either way, it’s happening.
What’s the best investment you’ve made in your writing life (time, money, or energy)?
I invested in taking Seeda School in an early cohort and Ayana offered her own really great framework of process and deliberation. So much good came out of that! Ruminating on some of the assignments there led me to a decision. I created Perfumed Pages the same time I began building the Museum of Nails Foundation, and I did so as a kind of synchronized experiment. I wanted to do a beauty project through the non-profit landscape (very difficult!) and also create a beauty project centered around community, creativity, and play, that would help pay my bills and actually be a way to collectively research and gather. People really responded to it. I’m not doing an MLM promising professional bliss - I think lots of people just want a creative community in the beauty space, one that centers curiosity and what you already have. We share and swap resources a lot. What one person has, others can experience.
What’s a piece of writing advice you’ve heard a million times… but you actually believe in?
There’s advice from James Baldwin I consider a mantra:
Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
What’s something you’re currently obsessed with — and how is it influencing your writing?
Oh, lots of things. I’m obsessed with perfumery. Earlier this year I was at a convention and learned so much about the eras of perfume glassware and methods of archiving, acquisition, and authentication. And I’m in cosmetology school so I am learning how to do nails, which helps with organizing the Museum of Nails Foundation. I follow all my obsessions with total devotion and it inevitably shows up in my work, because it’s changing me. The things you are devoted to will change you when you’re present to them. You shouldn’t let your love of something decay because you’re afraid to commit to it. And by commitment I don’t mean professionalization or monetization. I mean you need to commit your attention. Everything else comes after that. Don’t be distracted. Dive into the thing you’re curious about, and start to swim.
👋 About Arabelle Sicardi, This Week’s Featured GuestStack Writer
Arabelle Sicardi is a writer that focuses on beauty as an art form, an act of care, and a tool of political possibility. Consider them a beauty worldbuilder. They run Perfumed Pages and the Museum of Nails Foundation and are the author of The House of Beauty, coming to a bookstore near you in October.
What a compelling and informative read! So encouraging and also specific. I love Arabella's gumption and bedrock confidence.
Great interview! I especially appreciated the advice about creating opportunities. Thx for the inspo.