The dark brown leather couch was lovingly passed down to me from my parents when I decided to move out. This couch was special to me because some of my best childhood memories were made when we simply perched on it.

Back in the day, my parents’ home was lively, with people flocking in… My uncle and aunt would spend Sunday afternoons playing UNO, with my brother coaxing us to play by house rules, or my mother putting a +4 card on the same one, and we would cry in unison. My family and I often made major decisions, like whether to get a new chandelier or invest in a Dyson vacuum cleaner, or simply talked about life on a Sunday evening.

But as I got a new job and my brother left for a different city to pursue his graduation… the couch lost its semblance.

It gathered dust because our conversations ended on our family group chat, and mainly because we had different routines. My parents would sleep by 9:30 p.m., and I would come back after working longer hours.

The days no longer ended with us spending quality time on the couch; one of us would just sit there, catching up with the others over FaceTime and memes. But I still wanted the sofa to have a place in our lives. And subconsciously, it did. I’d find myself drying towels on it every time the weather turned.

Slowly, the luxury of spending hours together on that couch disappeared.

But now I see the resurgence of that same couch, not just in my life but in the world of furniture too.

The brown couch is now where my friends and I come together more than anywhere else. We binge-watch, unwind, and spend hours doing very little, but with intention.

The depth feels just right because we end up reclining and staying longer than we planned. It just feels easy on us, like good posture you don’t have to think about. And I think that is why I am emotionally attached to it. Not only does it remind me of my fond memories with my parents, but I also get to spend time similarly with my friends.

Every Saturday is movie trivia night. We come to the couch, packed with snacks and our water bottles, and decide not to move for the next three hours.

Literally and figuratively.

The couch has these wooden grooves, which make it equal parts chic and comfortable, and every time I sink into it, it feels like I am getting a bear hug, which, I believe, is the perfect medicine after a long, tiring day.

It Didn’t Just Come Back for the Aesthetic

The giant conversation pit in the film The Fantastic Four: First Steps [2025] [Photograph: Marvel]

But when I look back at what brought our society to this boring-a** sofa, I am taken back to when we had something known as the conversation pit—a seating area literally built into the floor, lined with low, continuous sofas—for everyone to gather and chit-chat. It peaked in the 1970s, and then disappeared.

But now, as we try to build a space in our tiny, rented apartments, the sunken sofa has entered the chat. Thankfully, it is no longer found only in architecture journals but also on our Instagram feeds, Pinterest saves, and the group chat where someone drops a reference image and everyone responds with a single word: want.

There’s No Need to Optimise Our Living Room

A view of the living area from the terrace of the Miller House in Columbus, Indiana, built between 1953 and 1957 [Photograph: Wikimedia Commons]

The sunken sofa arrives in the middle of a larger shift away from the kind of home that was simply optimised for flexibility. The move now is towards pieces that resonate with us on a soul level and spaces that are our own.

The conversation pit fits because, above everything else, it’s a commitment. You cannot rearrange it on a Sunday afternoon because you’re bored. That’s not a flaw. That’s exactly the point we are looking for.

For us, building a home was never about making sure everything fits. It was about having a space that holds us and defines who we are as individuals.

… And also, to just enjoy our rent a bit more.

Pin It Anyway

But we get it: to build a conversation pit, we’d have to call a contractor and break down a wall. And, boy, doing that in a rented apartment in today’s economy is a far-fetched dream, let alone a realistic possibility.

But you know what? We can still have our own chit-chat corner with a sunken couch arranged inward, a deep rug or a throw, and floor cushions to hold our moods just fine.

As I write this, I realise I’d love to make my space richer with a buttercup-yellow sofa bean bag from Couchette. I think it would go so well with my existing brown baby. I’d want to, of course, add a bunch of colours. For instance, these reversible cushions in purple and green from The Purple Pony would add to the vibe of the place.

Buttercup yellow sofa bean bag, Couchette

Think Artment’s Corduroy Cloud Sofa Seat paired with IKEA’s bright blue cushion with tigers on it. You could also add Vaaree’s Fluffscape Cotton Floor Cushions to make a sweet corner. They come in a host of colours, and I think they would look so amazing with a pair of striped cushions from H&M Home.

Corduroy Cloud Sofa Seat, Artment

Natthäger Cushion, IKEA

Fluffscape Solid Cotton Floor Cushion, Vaaree

OH.MY.GOD, but I think my heart is set on Uber Decor’s Helsinki 2-Seater Striped Sofa. Every cell in my body resonates with this one.

Helsinki 2-Seater Striped Sofa, Uber Decor

Add colours or, perhaps, eye-catching vases like Claymen’s Blob set in Lemon Yellow with fresh flowers on the side for a cosy vibe. The sunken sofa, in its 2026 form, is as much a configuration as a construction of the erstwhile conversation pit. Furniture ultimately isn’t just logs of wood put together to cater to our basic needs; it is feelings today.

The original conversation pit was a mid-century design feature — a sunken section of the living room, built to gather people and keep them there. You stepped down into it, which meant you had to actively choose to leave. The architecture was meant to make you socialise whether you liked it or not.

The sunken sofa is the conversation pit’s grandchild. It comes with the same logic but less drama. There’s no stepping down, no room within a room. It’s just a sofa that sits lower, wraps around you more, and makes getting up feel like more effort than it’s worth.

It has the same intention but is just quieter about it.

The post The Sunken Sofa Is Everywhere Now, Mine Never Left appeared first on Voicey World.

No polish, no extensions, nothing. Just short, groomed, buffed.

And apparently, his manicurist was told to cut them down five minutes before the show started. 

Five minutes. 

Which means this wasn’t a mood board decision or a last-minute oversight. Someone actively chose to undo the nails right before showtime. That’s a statement.

As someone who writes about beauty, my feed is filled with videos of hand transformations with glitzy, cat-eye nails or bejewelled 3D nail art, polish recommendations that dry up in 10 seconds, and more. But the other side of the Internet tells a different story. 

There is a rabbit hole on Instagram featuring high-taste accounts and old-money aesthetic creators. 

 

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Let me catch you up. There is a quiet but very visible conversation happening about women, specifically the kind of women who set the visual tone for everyone else. 

The women who have this visible, effortless-looking affluence who propagate the soft life philosophy.

The ones who have all-white interiors with gold-leafed ceilings, a grand piano kept in the fag end of the living room. They carry a Birkin for their matcha catch-up post-Pilates in a fancy Porsche. One scroll through their account and you’ll see they have been raised in homes that have a walk-in closet the size of a studio apartment

We were all, in some way, trying to be a version of Kylie Jenner. The nails were a massive part of that contract. But, now they are all stepping back from the whole perfect-nails thing. Unbooking appointments. Not replacing them. 

Well, they have just… stopped getting nail appointments altogether.

Okay, here’s a concept I want you to sit with for a second, because it explains a lot of what’s happening in culture right now, not just with nails.

Counter-signalling is when people who are already at the top of a social hierarchy deliberately stop doing the thing that signals status, precisely because they don’t need to signal anymore. 

The term comes from economics and game theory, but the Internet ran with it, and honestly, it tracks perfectly once you see it.

Think about it this way. When logo-maxed out outfits first became a thing, wearing them loudly was the point. It said: I can afford this. Then, at some point, the people who had always been able to afford it started going quiet. No logos. Just really, well-tailored plain white shirts, muted colours, crisp tailoring.

Basically, quiet luxury. Because they had nothing to prove and everyone who needed to know already knew. My friend, that’s counter-signalling. 

It’s the rich guy who shows up to the party in a plain white T-shirt while everyone else is dressed up. It’s the CEO who drives a ten-year-old car. 

It’s giving Marc Jacobs cutting his models’ nails five minutes before a show.

We saw it with loud bags. We saw it with obvious logo-maxed luxury. And now, we are watching it happen in real time with the perfect gel set.

Accessibility Did What It Always Does

 

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Here’s the uncomfortable truth about status symbols. They stop working the moment everyone has them. 

Gel nails went from being aspirational to a Tuesday errand so fast that the appointment itself became unremarkable. 

Your building’s receptionist gets them done now. 

And the moment something becomes that accessible, the charm honestly fades away. 

The people who set taste quietly move on, without making an announcement about it.

Remember when we became really big on Labubus? Yeah, I spotted one as a keychain at Lajpat Nagar Market just yesterday. 

And slowly, science arrived too. Right on cue, to give everyone else a reason.

The EU recently banned a chemical found in gel polish, classifying it as a reproductive toxin. The UV lamps used to cure your gel have been linked to long-term skin damage with repeated exposure. 

So, while fashion opted out on instinct first. Science handed the rest of us a permission slip. 

And honestly, both things happening at the same time is rarely a coincidence.

I Did It Twice, and I Knew Immediately

 

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I want to be honest here because the story demands it.

I got my nails done for the first time in July 2022 as a birthday week treat to myself. It was a deep burgundy colour with oval-shaped nails. 

I honestly loved it for the first few days. It felt effortless; I felt pretty. I had to massage a pea-sized amount of hand cream, whereas, on the contrary, even if I dipped it in oil, my hands would look like they came out of a coal mine. 

So, I understood the appeal completely. 

Until I tried to type. Then I shampooed my hair and spent a full minute untangling strands from between the nail and the nail bed, which, if you have never experienced this, is exactly as irritating as it sounds. 

That was it for me. It wasn’t even a philosophical objection to the whole thing.

It was just: this is making my life actively worse, and I don’t know why I am doing it.

So I stopped, told myself I was simply not a nail person, and quietly filed it away under things that weren’t for me. I couldn’t survive my gorgeous, burgundy nails for even a week. It irritated me how my nail bed was peeking through around the cuticles as my nails grew longer. 

I quietly went to the nail bar and got them to file them down. 

Instead, now I opt for milky options, or get one of those bare nail kits. My favourites are particularly, the Chanel Le Vernis Longwear Nail Polish in Ballerina and the Opi Nail Envy Nail Strengthener in Bubble Bath.

It has this barely there finish that makes my hands look like I get a manicure every three days. 

Which is why, when a Valeria Lipovetsky reel crossed my feed- the one where she talks about quitting her manicures and realising she had only been going out of habit, that skipping appointments had freed up 90 minutes per visit and cleared actual space in her calendar- I felt something I can only describe as retroactive vindication. 

Not surprise. Relief, TBH.

The kind you feel when a trend finally catches up to what your gut already knew.

What We Were Actually Performing

 

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And here’s what I realised: it was never really about the nail appointment. Heck, it wasn’t even about the nails.

It was about the visible evidence of upkeep. The chip-free set, the regular booking, the time and money you spent maintaining it. 

These were signals that said: I am the kind of person who has herself together in ways that show up on her hands. So easily, and of course so effortlessly. 

All while making the digits look decorative.

What’s changing now is the direction of the signal. 

Effortlessness is the new proof of arrival. 

Now I have the time and money for this, but I have so little to prove that I cut them down five minutes before the show. 

That’s a much harder thing to fake, which is exactly why it works.

The question isn’t really whether nail appointments are over. It’s what it says about us that we spent so long performing something we weren’t even sure we wanted, just waiting for someone at the top to say we could stop.

The post Thank God, Getting Nails Is Outdated Because I Never Liked Them Anyways appeared first on Voicey World.

She would encourage every bit of it and let me sit near her dressing table, allowing me to fiddle with her array of blushes, perfumes, and lipsticks that were just strewn around her vintage mirror. 

It is the kind of comfortable chaos I enjoy even today, and I know nani dearly loved me because I was the only one who was allowed to test out every single product with the seriousness of conducting scientific research.

The first time I came across a perfume was hers. It was called Cobra by Jeanne Arthes.  I would apply it and roam around the house wearing her big heels and carrying a dupatta with a bag, channelling my little inner diva. 

And looking back, I think nani was teaching me something without meaning to… that you try things on before you decide if they’re yours.

I’ve been conducting the same research for the last seven years, with a byline attached. Writing about beauty means you get to try things out constantly. And honestly, a lot of it is blurry in my mind.

There is a new lip tint, a new sunscreen, or a blush launching every week. There were days when half my arm was filled with lipstick swatches, my wrist smelled like three different kinds of vanilla fragrance, and I was writing notes like ‘the pink one, not the other pink one’ because my brain had simply given up on keeping track.

And TBH, access sounds glamorous until you realise that too much of anything eventually becomes background noise. 

Finding My Signature Scent, the Dupe Way

Tom Ford Oud Minérale

But something stopped me in my tracks nearly a year ago. It was a mini tester of Tom Ford’s Oud Minérale. It was striking, to say the least. It made me feel sexy, confident, and just someone who is, well, unattainable.

“ I felt like a rich woman from the Hamptons.”

I had tried the tester out for a long night of dancing with my friends. This was in Delhi’s peak heat in May 2025. All together, dancing in an underground bar with *literally* no oxygen, smoke in the air, singing our lungs out to Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z. So you can imagine the way I’d be sweating, but this perfume stuck around even when my heels couldn’t. 

What I didn’t expect was the way it moved. How, over the course of a few hours of me dancing till the club turned on its glaring lights, it settled into something aquatic and cool, almost contradicting itself. I wore it until it faded, and then I thought about it for days.

The Attar (other) Attempt

I put it to use again, but there was the tiniest smidge of perfume left in the tester, and my heart was breaking a li’l. I am just trying to be coy about it; I could have cried a river. I didn’t know I could get attached to a perfume. This much. 

But once you’re obsessed–there really is no going back.

The logical next step wasn’t to buy it. It was to go to my local attar guy.  Nani would have approved — try it on before you decide if it’s yours, remember?

If you’ve grown up in India, you probably know someone like him. He sits in a small shop, surrounded by rows of dark glass bottles, and he can replicate almost any designer fragrance in the form of attar. It is a concentrated, oil-based fragrance. And it doesn’t contain alcohol, which means it lasts beyond 8 hours. 

This is a whole economy we are talking about that exists quietly alongside the luxury fragrance world. 

And while they may be emerging as a new challenge for the fragrance industry, they appeal to all genders and demographics. In our dupe-maxxed culture, they’re likely here to stay.

 

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In fact, a simple scroll on Instagram and you’ll find there are endless reels and carousels on dupes for luxury perfumes. Over the last two years, there have been nearly 5 billion views on hashtag #dupe. The dupe culture, in many ways, is prompted by apps such as Fragrantica. 

While erstwhile designers and brand owners may be rolling in their graves, knowing that in 2026, their OGs would be getting copied left, right, and centre.

They don’t know the situation up here. Our feeds are flooded with lavish holidays and designer ensembles which stoke a desire for luxury that we cannot afford. Not at least in this economy [cries while spritzing attar bhaiya’s Miss Dior]. 

But, you know what. It makes sense why the world of fragrance is flooded with dupes… 

And well, why? The moment my tester got over, I went to the attar guy who sits in a scrawny, little shop in the main market of Lajpat Nagar. 

The attar shop in Lajpat Nagar

We are a price-sensitive generation; we want value for our buck. The 2008 recession, along with a pandemic and the current economic downturn, explains why. 

Nobody can come and tell this generation, ‘back in our time’, because have you seen what we went through in our own time?!

I described Tom Ford to him as best I could.  In fact, I showed him the notes of the perfume on Fragrantica too.  

Pro tip: if you are wondering how a perfume would really smell before you choose to buy it, visit Fragrantica. Consider it the Bible. It is a massive online encyclopedia and community dedicated to perfumes and fragrance.

Fragrantica breaking down the notes of Tom Ford’s Oud Minérale EDP [Photograph: Fragrantica]

How it opened heavy and resinous and then, over hours, did something I hadn’t smelled before, let alone experienced. The perfume turned aquatic. Cool and mineral, like the oud had dipped itself in seawater.

That contradiction and how it made me feel was the thing I was chasing.

He nodded, went into his bottles, and came back with something a few days later. I tried it on my wrist. It was close, and boy, was I genuinely impressed. 

And then he said, almost apologetically: “Madam, 19-20 ka fark hoga.”

Nineteen to twenty. Close, but not the same. And honestly, his statement at first didn’t affect me that much. 

I wore it anyway, for weeks. I loved it. But I knew exactly what the fark was, because I had felt the original settle on my skin. 

His version stayed warm. The oud in his attar was beautiful, but it never made that turn. It never went aquatic. It never gave me that strange, contradictory coolness that had stopped me on a sweaty May night in Delhi. 

That specific transformation — resinous to mineral, heavy to cool — was the thing I couldn’t stop thinking about. And now, wearing the dupe every day, I could feel its absence like a missing note. 

That’s when I spent ₹20,000. Not on impulse, though. 

The dupe economy is supposed to make luxury accessible, and it does. But in my case it did something else entirely. 

Something I hadn’t planned for.

I went into that small shop not knowing what I wanted, exactly. I came out knowing the precise thing I couldn’t live without. The dupe hadn’t failed me. It had done something more useful.

It gave me the language to understand my own nose. Wearing it every day for weeks meant that when I finally walked into the Tom Ford counter, I wasn’t guessing. I was confirming.

Twenty thousand rupees. No regrets. Because here’s the thing about a signature scent…

You don’t choose it so much as recognise it. And sometimes you need the almost-right version to show you exactly where the right one lives on your skin.

Nani taught me that at four. It took me twenty years, a sweaty night in Delhi, and one attar shop to really understand what she meant.

The post Thanks to the Dupe Economy I Found My Signature Scent appeared first on Voicey World.