about me

By treating it as a schedule rather than a decision. Box black fades warm and brassy within about six weeks, so the real work is a colour-depositing conditioner every second or third wash to keep topping the pigment up, cool water only, and a heat protectant even when you are only doing a quick pass. Sulphate-free shampoo is not a marketing thing here, it genuinely strips less. And wash less often than you think you should.

It hurts less than the anticipation and more than the internet's braver commenters admit. Fleshy areas are a dull, bearable scrape you can zone out through. Anywhere the needle is basically on bone — ribs, sternum, ankle, the top of the foot — is genuinely unpleasant and there is no trick to it. Eat properly beforehand, do not drink the night before, and book shorter sessions than your ego wants.

I think about the shape of the space before I think about the image. A design that fights the way a limb curves will look wrong forever no matter how good the drawing was. So I look at where the body already has a line — the outside of a calf, the length of a forearm, the diagonal of a hip — and let the piece follow it. Anything you have to twist to see properly, you will stop seeing.

A liquid matte, applied in two thin coats with the first one fully dry before the second, blotted with a tissue in between, over a lip that has been exfoliated and then barely moisturised. The mistake almost everyone makes is one thick coat on a slippery lip. It looks better for ten minutes and then travels. Two thin coats is unglamorous advice and it is the whole answer.

By what the fabric does with a single light source, which is the only thing my setup can offer it. Silk holds a long soft gradient and reads expensive on camera even when it cost nine pounds second-hand. Leather gives you one hard specular highlight and nothing else, which is dramatic but unforgiving. Cotton and jersey mostly absorb light and go flat. That is genuinely the whole logic.

Gold, almost always, and not for taste reasons — silver goes cold and slightly blue under warm lamplight, which is the only light I shoot in, so it reads as grey metal rather than as jewellery. Gold picks up the same warmth as the skin and the room and looks like it belongs there. If I ever shoot in daylight the balance flips completely and silver wins.

Boring and consistent, which is the only version that works. Cleanser, a decent moisturiser, sunscreen on any day I will see daylight, and a retinoid a few nights a week that took my skin two unpleasant months to accept. That is it. No ten-step routine, no acid layering. Most of what people credit to skincare is sleep, water and not touching your face, and none of that photographs well enough to sell.

Yes, all of it, on a tripod with a self-timer or a remote. That is not modesty or a budget problem — it is the reason the work looks the way it does. Nobody is waiting on me, nobody is tired, and I can spend forty minutes on one frame at two in the morning without apologising to a human being for it. The trade-off is that I have walked back and forth across a room ten thousand times.

Less than you would guess, and it matters less than you would guess. A mirrorless body that is several generations old, one fast prime lens, and a film camera I bought for the price of a nice dinner. The lens is the only part I would tell anyone to spend money on. A cheap body with a fast lens in good light beats an expensive body with a slow lens every single time.

Because a meaningful amount of it is film, and the rest is shot in a way that respects what film does. That means exposing for the highlights and letting the shadows fall away into nothing rather than lifting them in editing, keeping the contrast in the room instead of adding it afterwards, and accepting grain rather than smoothing it out. Digital grain added at the end never quite convinces anybody.

One source, placed low and to the side, with something in front of it to soften the edge — usually a lampshade or a sheet of baking paper clipped to a stand. Everything else in the room goes off. Dark photographs are not underlit, they are precisely lit with almost nothing filled in, and the difference between moody and simply murky is entirely about controlling where that one light is allowed to land.

Focus on something standing where you will be, then switch the lens to manual so it cannot go hunting when you step in. A chair back, a lamp, a stack of books at head height. Then do not move forward or back — turn on the spot instead. Almost every soft self-shot photograph is not camera shake, it is the subject drifting fifteen centimetres out of the plane of focus.

Less than most people assume, and never on the body. Colour, contrast, cropping, occasionally removing a plug socket I failed to notice. That is the list. Partly that is a principle and partly it is laziness with a good outcome: if the light was right, there is nothing to fix, and if the light was wrong no amount of editing has ever rescued it for me. Get it in the room.

Because indoors at night is the only place I can fully control the light, and control is the entire aesthetic. Outdoors after dark means streetlights, which are an unflattering colour nobody has ever fixed in post, and outdoors in daylight means a flat even light that makes everything look like a catalogue. A room, one lamp, and the curtains shut is a studio I do not have to book.

The whole back catalogue on the feed unlocks at once, which is more than most people expect and takes a while to scroll. You will get a welcome message from me, and I would encourage you to reply to it with something other than "hey" — that is genuinely the difference between a conversation and a dead thread. Nothing is charged again at that point and nothing else happens automatically.

The subscription price is the same for everyone at any given moment. What varies is that I sometimes run a discount or a trial for a limited window, so somebody who signed up during one is paying less than somebody who signed up outside it. That is a timing difference, not a per-person one. Nobody is being quoted a special number based on who they seem to be.

The feed is everything included in the subscription, posted for everybody, and it is the bulk of what you are paying for. The inbox is one-to-one: conversation, plus occasional individual sets sent with a price on them that you can look at and decline with no awkwardness whatsoever. Some people never open a single message and just read the feed. That is a completely normal way to use it.

Anything you bought individually in messages stays in your inbox and remains yours. The subscription feed locks when the month you paid for ends, because that is what the subscription was renting. So one-off purchases persist, feed access does not. Worth knowing before you decide whether something is worth buying separately or waiting for.

Give it a day, and do not read silence as a verdict. I answer in long stretches at strange hours rather than continuously, so a message sent at nine in the morning is going to sit there until the evening at the earliest. If something has genuinely gone missing, sending it again is completely fine and I would rather that than you concluding you were snubbed.

You can ask, and the etiquette is simply to ask once, plainly, and take the answer. Some things I will happily do, some I will not, and a clear no is not me being offended — it is just a no. What does not work is asking repeatedly in slightly different words, which is the fastest way to make a conversation feel like work for both of us.

Not really wrong, but there is a boring way, and it is a one-word greeting with nothing attached. I get dozens a day and there is genuinely nothing to reply to. Anything with an actual thought in it — a question, a reaction to something you saw, a complaint about your week — gets a real answer, because it gives me something to answer. That is the entire trick.

Treating it as a vending machine when it works far better as a room you are in. The people who get the most out of it are not the ones spending the most — they are the ones who talk like a person, remember what was said last time, and let something build. That sounds like a line designed to sell you something. It is just observably how it goes.

Yes. That is just the version with a space in it, and it is probably the single most common way people write my handle. The real spelling is catarinassecret, one continuous word. If you searched the spaced version and landed here, nothing has gone wrong — you found the right place, and now you know the exact string for next time.

Because usernames cannot contain one on most platforms, so the possessive apostrophe in "Catarina's secret" simply had to go, and the two s's ended up next to each other as a result. It looks like a typo and it is not. People add the apostrophe back constantly when searching, which is fine — catarina's secret and catarinassecret are the same person.

None of those three, though all of them are people looking for me. The correct handle is catarinassecret: c-a-t-a-r-i-n-a-s-s-e-c-r-e-t, two s's in the middle, no space, no apostrophe, no s on the end. Any account actually using one of the variant spellings as its username is somebody else, and quite possibly somebody counting on you not looking twice.

Check it against the links on this site, which are the only accounts I run. Then read the handle letter by letter — added underscores, extra numbers and a missing s are how nearly every impersonator gives itself away. And if anyone using my name asks you for payment in direct messages or moves you to another app, that is not me, without exception.