Photography SAM DAMESHEK Model SADIE REY Graphic Design SARAH SAVIOR At SOAP STUDIOS, LOS ANGELES

Photography SAM DAMESHEK Styling DAZ MERCHANT Model KELLY GALE from MAGNOLIA ENTERTAINMENT Graphic Design SARAH SMITH At PETIT ERMITAGE'S TOPANGA CANYON Wearing DOLCE AND GABBANA, BALENCIAGA, YVES SAINT LAURENT You know when someone says they’re a f***ing introvert but they’re five minutes into a story with no signs of stopping? That’s Kelly. She says she only likes ten people, max—but when she talks, she’s open, present, and funny without trying. We talked about finding her anger, navigating fear, moving from modeling into acting, and building a beauty brand that actually works. No fluff. No filters. She’s not trying to sell you anything—she just made something real. DAMESHEK: You called yourself a f***ing introvert, but you haven’t stopped talking for five minutes. GALE: I know. Everyone says that. But it’s true. I barely like ten people. DAMESHEK: Do I make the list? GALE: You flaked on the barbecue. So… no. DAMESHEK: I had no car. Malibu is far. GALE: Excuses. DAMESHEK: Every model says they want to act. When did it stop being talk for you? GALE: I actually started in theater. Acting was always the goal. Modeling came later—kind of as a f*** you. I got bullied for being ugly, so I thought, if I become a model, no one can say that anymore. But I never loved it. DAMESHEK: And acting gave you something back? GALE: Yeah. Modeling teaches you to shut down. No one cares about your opinion. Acting forces you to feel everything. You bring your life into it. DAMESHEK: You said at one point you couldn’t even feel anger. GALE: I couldn’t. People would do something awful and I’d feel sad, but never angry. I hadn’t raised my voice since I was a kid. DAMESHEK: But now? GALE: Now I get pissed and let people know. I have access to all my emotions again. Modeling doesn’t love that version of me, but that’s fine. DAMESHEK: Would you say acting helped you find that? GALE: 100%. You have to use your real emotions. And the prep can be intense. Like before a scene I’ll scream or punch a pillow to get where I need to be. I learned a lot of it from Joel. He’s coached me a lot. DAMESHEK: Do you journal as your characters? GALE: Yeah, and I use AI sometimes. I type in what I know about the character and ask it to give me a hundred questions I can answer to go deeper. I write backstories, diaries—I go all in. DAMESHEK: What kind of role do you want most? GALE: Relationship drama with amazing writing. Something like Marriage Story. Everyone wants to cast me in sci-fi because of how I look, but I want raw dialogue, just two people in a room. DAMESHEK: Let’s talk about fear. You said you’re scared all the time but still do the things that scare you. GALE: I made a list one New Year’s of my top three fears. I faced all of them in three months. Jumped out of a plane. Swam with sharks. Not sharing the third. DAMESHEK: Fair. Let’s talk about Chandra Beauti. When I came to your place, it wasn’t some influencer setup. You were actually using the stuff. GALE: I’ve been making this stuff since I was three. At 13, I overheard a client say they needed to retouch my cellulite. So I started researching. Gotu Kola, coffee, cypress—I was making scrubs in my mom’s kitchen. That’s what became Chandra. DAMESHEK: And you really use it. GALE: Every day. No perfume, no filler. I tell people—copy-paste the ingredients into ChatGPT and look them up. There’s no hidden b*. If it doesn’t resonate with people, that’s fine. But it’s real. SAM: How do you balance being the face of something with not wanting to feel like you’re selling? KELLY: I don’t think about it like that. I just do things with good intentions. That’s what matters to me. SAM: What makes you feel seen? KELLY: People who don’t assume. People who ask the right questions and actually listen. That’s everything. SAM: You just described what I want soap to be. KELLY: Then keep going. It matters.

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"The Painter with the Biggest Balls" VAHID SHARIFIAN interviewed by KIMBERLY HUNT January 2026 WANT TO SEE MORE? I asked him directly the question that often hovers unspoken around artists who provoke discomfort. Do you care what people think of you? It’s a question that usually invites hedging. A moment to calibrate. A chance to soften the answer just enough to sound reasonable. When I asked Vahid Sharifian, none of that happened. “No,” he said. “I don’t care what they think.” There was no heat in it. No defensiveness. Just certainty. The kind that comes from someone who has already spent years testing the alternative and found it unnecessary.

Photography SAM DAMESHEK Model SONYA STARZHYNSKA Graphic Design SARAH SMITH At CHATEAU MARMONT, LOS ANGELES

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"The Painter with the Biggest Balls" VAHID SHARIFIAN interviewed by KIMBERLY HUNT January 2026 I asked him directly the question that often hovers unspoken around artists who provoke discomfort. Do you care what people think of you? It’s a question that usually invites hedging. A moment to calibrate. A chance to soften the answer just enough to sound reasonable. When I asked Vahid Sharifian, none of that happened. “No,” he said. “I don’t care what they think.” There was no heat in it. No defensiveness. Just certainty. The kind that comes from someone who has already spent years testing the alternative and found it unnecessary. “No, I don’t care what they think. If they think what I make is vulgar, I don’t stir away from what I’m painting,” he continued. “I’ve been obsessed with the history of art, and I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s edgy, sure, but the aesthetic of women’s beauty is my absolute priority. I don’t give a damn if they call my work perverted. Being a little perverted has always been part of how desire shows up in art. You just have to know the line between creepy and beautifully perverse.” That line matters to him. He doesn’t talk about it theatrically. He talks about it like something you’re responsible for knowing. Sharifian’s work is widely loved, circulated online, and collected by individuals, yet still hesitated over by institutions that claim to champion risk but rarely practice it. His paintings are bold, erotic, and unembarrassed. They depict women not as symbols or metaphors but as presences. Flesh, light, attitude. The kind of work people respond to immediately. You feel it in your stomach before your brain catches up. A summer song , 2024, Acrylic on paper The Discovery of Fire, 2025, Acrylic on paper A Washed US Flag, 2025, Acrylic on paper A summer song , 2024, Acrylic on paper 1/5 Then he said something that stayed with me long after our call. “Ego is just something that stops you from being successful.” He makes a clear distinction between ego and confidence. Confidence is necessary. Confidence is clarity. Ego is noise. Ego is the thing that distracts artists into chasing approval instead of making work. In true Vahid fashion, he’s equally frank about success. “I’ve always been against the current,” he said. “I never fake myself. I’m lucky. Even without having contracts with galleries, I’m still selling better than many artists in my generation who do.” Vahid looks exactly like you would hope. A funk afro Hugh Hefner type, equal parts bohemian and self possessed, with the confidence of someone who has stopped asking for permission. He is a nomad by instinct, living and working between cities, chasing light, following women, painting wherever desire and circumstance intersect. We talked about his fascination with the female form, a subject that inevitably invites scrutiny. He traces it back further than most artists are willing to go. Back before he was even born. His mother wanted a girl when she was pregnant with him. He likes to think that desire mattered. That it shaped his sensitivity. His perspective. His devotion to femininity. When he paints surreal work, he allows imagination to roam. But when he paints women, he wants something else entirely. “When I paint women,” he said, “I want it pure. Real.” It’s a line that could sound naive in the wrong mouth. With him, it doesn’t. Purity is not modesty. It’s sincerity. It’s seeing without apology. He’s aware of the risk. “You are radioactive if you paint women and you’re a man,” he said. Only after spending time with the work does it make sense that Sharifian lives the way he does. He’s a nomad by instinct, moving between cities, painting wherever desire and circumstance intersect. Untitled, Ink on paper , 2023 Untitled, Ink on paper , 2022 Untitled, Ink on paper , 2023 Untitled, Ink on paper , 2023 1/3 Paris. Mexico City. New York. Los Angeles. Each place leaves a residue. The work absorbs it. When he spoke about Los Angeles, something shifted. “LA has an amazing light,” he said. “It’s melancholic. The light there comes from a different sun.” There was a sincerity in the way he described it that caught me off guard. It wasn’t romanticized. It was reverent. “You can’t imagine how beautiful that light is,” he added. “When you paint it, God.” It was one of those moments where you stop thinking about the next question and let the sentence sit. His muses come to him in different ways. Early on, he painted women he found online, always asking permission, careful and deliberate. Now he photographs them himself. The process is slower. More intimate. Built on trust. He’s attentive to boundaries even as the work itself presses against comfort. Throughout our conversation, one belief kept resurfacing. While we’re living in a hyperreal, neon, post-Rococo moment, the official art scene feels strangely anemic. “The official art scene is so pale,” he said. “What happened to the fire? The rebellion that makes the heartbeat?” A Mirror, 2025, Acrylic on paper Last Day of Summer, 2025, Acrylic on paper Farmers, 2021, Acrylic on Canvas A Mirror, 2025, Acrylic on paper 1/5 For Sharifian, that loss of fire mirrors something broader. A growing discomfort with closeness. With bodies. With proximity. Standing arm-in-arm now feels loaded. Touch is negotiated. Physical presence is something to manage rather than inhabit. Anything that genuinely brings people together complicates control. Shared space. Shared attention. Shared instinct. Distance, on the other hand, is easy to regulate. Fear creates space. Caution creates isolation. In that environment, rebellion is easier to package and easier to neutralize. “It’s all controlled now,” he said. “And control does not like beauty.” That sentence stayed with me long after meeting. For Sharifian, art loses its power the moment it’s assigned a purpose. When art is made to serve ideology, morality, or politics first, it stops being art and becomes instruction. Messaging. Propaganda. The impulse shifts from inspiration to agenda. What once felt like rebellion now feels rehearsed. Pre-approved. Safe. Maybe that’s what unsettles people about his work. It refuses control. It refuses restraint. It insists on beauty even when beauty feels dangerous and it takes big balls.