Intro for March 26, 2025

Dear Gossips,   

I’ve been in Korea now for almost two weeks and, for the most part, as mentioned last week, I’ve been able to avoid spoilers and/or most online discourse from the west (like about The White Lotus and Severance) unless I straight up go looking for it. There is something, though, that’s been viral the last few days that has come up in my feed: the Ashton Hall morning routine. 

This was posted back in February and only gained traction recently. I’m still not sure if it’s sponcon for bottled water. But there are other distractions. 

Nearly a billion views later so of course he’s posted a follow-up and now every major outlet has covered it and copycats are all over it and there’s now debate about whether or not plunging your face in ice multiple times a day and banana peel skin treatments are effective. I’m still stuck on whether or not lemon juice in the ice plunge stings the eyes. 

Will all of this actually translate into sales for his brand? 

More importantly, I guess, how productive is he… really? Most people I know who are productive don’t have shareable routines. They just get up and get to work. For example, when Sarah is editing this site, she’ll have written or edited at least 3000 words by 8am ET. And I’m pretty sure she’s not smashing her face into a bowl of ice. I consider myself a pretty productive person when I’m not travelling which is managing this website, our Substack The Squawk, and my job as an entertainment reporter with ETALK. There’s no trick to it, at least in my experience. I just drag myself out of bed, focus on what I have to do, and militantly stick to my schedule. I set alarms for everything, even if they’re only 10 minutes apart, so I can be where I need to be or do what I need to do. 

Not sure what this man is talking about when he says that “sin arrives late at night”. If you’ve ever known anyone on a deadline but the only thing that maddeningly arrives late at night sometimes is what you’ve been trying to finish all day and it only comes to you at 2am – after you’ve procrastinated in daylight. 

As for the banana peel…

I just got salmon DNA injected into my skin yesterday. It’s definitely not as cheap as banana peel but I’ll keep you posted on the results. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey