Maquillaje Para Reinas Rebeldes: An Interview with Regina Merson
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You can find an written version of this interview that has been edited for readability below. The unedited transcript can be found here.
Welcome to Accession. Today, I'm very excited to present something new for the show, our first ever interview. I got a chance to sit down with Regina Merson, founder and creator of the makeup company Reina Rebelde, to talk about starting a business, the art of makeup, Frida Kahlo, and the intersection of makeup and Latinx culture. But I would be remiss if I didn't give you a piece of art to sit in front of while you listen. So...
Today, we're at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts. Head to the American wing, past the Chihuly sculpture and up to the third floor- not quite all the way up to visit Venus on the fourth. Head to your left until you find the room with the painting that's not usually where you expect to see a painting. Rather than on the wall, this painting is on a pedestal, so you can read the inscription on the back. And it's here that I think you'll get the most out of my conversation with Regina Merson- in front of MFA accession number 2015.3130, Dos Mujeres (Salvadora y Herminia), the first painting Frida Kahlo ever sold.
T.H. Ponders: I'd like to start by talking about you and the makeup company that you created. But before that you got your start in law, is that right?
Regina Merson: Yes, I was a lawyer for over six years. I actually graduated from law school before the 2008 financial crisis. So I walked into my first job at a big firm, based out of New York, but I was working in their Dallas office, as a real estate attorney for Lehman Brothers. And a year later, I got moved to the bankruptcy department, because our firm represented Lehman in the bankruptcy.
TP: And so then from there, you then at some point made the jump to makeup. What was the what was the inspiration to to leave law behind?
RM: So the inspiration was really actually rather personal. Makeup had always figured very prominently in my life. You'd be hard pressed to find a Latina that isn't surrounded with notions of femininity, beauty, makeup as power, how it's a tool that we use to reveal and express parts of ourselves to the world at large. That is on display in so many different things that you'll see in Mexican culture. But you see makeup in everything, from during the Mexican Revolutionary War with the adelitas who were the women that were helping during that time and wore makeup and did their hair in braids, all the way to telenovelas, the soap operas that took took a stronghold in the 80’s when I was growing up in Mexico. You witnessed a lot of how feminine power and your notion of yourself as a woman was very closely correlated to this ritual that you watch all women around you engage in every single day. Makeup in a lot of Latina cultures, and in particularly in Mexico, is not quite optional. It's considered sort of an art form and part of who we are and part of putting yourself together.
That had always been part of my narrative. Despite immigrating to the U.S. and going to college where no one really wore makeup, it was very much always present, as a story line in my life. Even given multiple opportunities in my life and in my educational career, I never abandoned it. So I showed up to law class with makeup every day. And it wasn't something that a lot of other women adopted, but it didn't seem to matter how far I moved from home it was it was there.
When I became a lawyer, it took on a different meaning, in the sense that it was more personal. At that point, it became a little bit of a loaded choice. There was a lot of perception at times it felt like not always but at times that you know, you are going to be a smart, capable attorney you couldn't be vain. You had to look nice, but understated. So there was, there was I'll never forget the first day I came to work at the law firm and I was wearing bright red lipstick, and the reaction I sort of got was, "Whoa, that was a very bold choice." At one point, as a lawyer, I felt I had sort of left women behind in a way and left my community behind in a way because I was so wrapped up in what I was doing. And it wasn't creative enough- which was something I didn't realize till I had been out of school for a long time where I was forced to do creative things as part of my curriculum. And once I was in such a focused area of law, I realized it kind of made me leave a lot of things behind that I really enjoyed and needed to feel a well balanced life.
I started observing sort of how makeup had become the creative outlet that I had on a daily basis as a way to reclaim that moment or that experience. And with it, kind of slowly, the whole business idea started coming about. I just started really reflecting and paying attention to the thing I was naturally drawn to, which was makeup; how much makeup I was buying; how much time I spent watching YouTube videos of people doing makeup techniques; how fascinated I was by the art form of it; how empowering I found it when you could execute something really, really well, and the skill sets that are frankly that it requires.
Then it was realizing my personal frustration with the fact that a lot of the makeup brands out there weren't speaking to me authentically. This was either just a transactional item to get you out the door, or it was a brand that didn't resonate with me, or I had to kind of create a hodgepodge of different makeup brands to come up with a you know a collection that really spoke to all like the different facets of my personality that I was trying to express through my beauty rituals.
And then of course, like a good lawyer, I started doing business research, and the statistics were alarming. It turns out, I wasn't the only one that was frustrated. There were a lot of people out there that were frustrated. Latinas buy more cosmetics than every other woman in the country, and nobody was really taking the time to understand or speak to them. I remember being marketed to in a lot of different ways by different brands or people at makeup counters and when they realized that I was Mexican, the response and the attitude was just so tone deaf, and so clueless, and it felt so insulting. And when I realized that there was tremendous economic power that was being brought to the table by Latinas in the beauty industry, it sort of set off like a perfect chain of events of, "Wait a minute. Everyone's frustrated by this. We're being talked down to. It's very patronizing. No one really understands why we buy so much makeup, but it turns out we are a major source of revenue for all these companies. How come no one's doing this authentically and from the inside?" So that was that was a the genesis of the whole idea.
TP: I want to circle back and continue the narrative but I do have a quick question because it just occurred to me- why did you decide to start doing law? What what was the drive to do law in the beginning?
RM: The drive to do law really stemmed from my need for order in the world. I was an immigrant to this country. It was a very wonderful experience in some regards and incredibly scarring in others. I was around 10 years old. I didn't speak the language fluently. I was very frustrated by the two or so years it took me to really understand and get my feet wet about the American educational system, which is very different from the Mexican educational system. The Mexican educational system is more European in many regards. And I really felt the limitations that everyone around me was already projecting my way even as a young child because I was an immigrant and because I didn't speak English that well. And I was really frustrated and I think kind of out to prove that it was all surmountable and that was within my control. So I really just became a very school focused person and with that ended up in debate and loved the sense of order of things and loved the command of language that you needed in order to be a lawyer. And so when I was very young, I decided I was going to be a lawyer.
TP: So I guess then you've started this company. And I have a question that's kind of an odd question, but I want to ask it anyway. The Frida Kahlo painting that we have at the MFA here in Boston is the first painting that she ever sold. She sold it to an engineer from the United States. And on the back of it, it she signed it, "This is the memory of a wonderful night when I sold my first painting." What was the first moment that that you felt like you were successful, or you felt you felt like you had brought this dream into some sort of realization?
RM: Gosh, you know, there there have been several. I think when I first received the finished product in my hand, and it arrived at my office, and I had seen all the decisions and the three, four years prior that went into the creation of this one lipstick as an example, it was very surreal, because at that moment, I had taken an idea and turned it into something actually physical. The amount of background work and the thousands of little decisions that have to be made to get a product to market is mind boggling. And I think that there were times when I thought it was never going to happen. Holding that lipstick in my hand after seeing prototypes and different things and seeing how everything came together was really surreal, because whether or not it ever sold at that point, or whether it was a success or a failure, I had managed to take an idea from from my own brain and create it into something tangible. So that was very surreal.
Then after we launched obviously the first five orders we got were people I knew. So that was never, you know, that was not that surreal for me. But I think the first order we received on our website from a complete stranger was surreal. It was like "Okay, somebody else besides everybody in my network knows about this."
TP: Yes, as a podcaster, I've had that exact moment before too. I had someone come up to me and say that they loved the show who I had no idea who they were, and it It blew my mind.
RM: Exactly! Because there's so much energy imbued in anything you put out there. And it's very nerve wracking. I had never put anything creative out there. And I'd made a lot of somewhat controversial decisions about my packaging. I was given guidelines, you know, “Tradition states, you do it this way, in this way, in this way, and you can do it this way, but breaking all these rules...” There were a lot of those moments leading up to the launch of the line that I had to make some hard calls. And I did them without having any insight into whether it was the stupidest thing I was ever going to do or the smartest thing that I was ever going to do. In many ways, I still don't know, but to see that and say, "Okay, here are all the risks and the right decisions and the wrong decisions you made and they are right here," was pretty surreal.
TP: Can I ask for a specific of a time that you went against the grain of from what everybody told you to do?
RM: Oh, sure.Packaging design for beauty is very specific because of the amount of disclosure and regulation around it. And also, I never imagined my product was going to be sold at the store. So when I launched I had this idea that it was going to be completely online. So, I was very resolute about the fact that when I looked at our logo, it's actually an ambigram. It's a form of artwork that you can read one way and then flip it around and it reads the same the other way. And that was really because I wanted every touch point of the entire brand experience to speak to what my message was, and my message was about dualities.
Latina women today live in this like chaos of dualities, right? They're speaking Spanish at home and they speak English out in the workplace. They have friends from all over really stepping into a lot of heritage type traditions and trying to keep those alive. They're very much influenced by their families. And yet when you're out in the world and United States, it's certainly a very complicated difference in values at times. You kind of have to make your own way and decide who you're going to be in spite of that chaos and everyone along the way is trying to pigeonhole you. "Oh, you're Latina. Oh, you're not Latina. Oh you're Latina, but you don't want to be Latina." And it's just not that clean.
A lot of the messaging behind the brand, the ethos, and one of our values is to be really unapologetic about these dualities. Makeup happens to be a tool that really allows you to show off different sides of your personality and your history. Because- a lot of Latinas will relate to this- you will walk out some days and have the craziest kind of makeup execution that's really fun. And then you'll do something totally different the next day. Whereas non Latino women tend to, you know, be informed about what looks right on them, and they will execute that look faithfully for eternity. The ambigram really resonated for me when the packaging designer returned to me with mockups, and this ambigram basically is the ethos of brand, which is you're always a reina, you're always a queen, and you're always a rebelde. Both coexist in you- the light and the dark- and a lot of the packaging is about those dualities, and those contrasts and how they coexist within you all the time and how that's actually like a source of power and pride.
But if you don't know what it is you can't quite read it because it's not in, you know, Times New Roman, 12 point font. And when we did end up launching at Target, this became, "But I can't read it.” Then you get into the customer journey of how hard do they want to work to understand parts of your brand. Having said that, I stick by it because I think our brand is really- the packaging of our brand reeks of symbols. There's a different symbol in every category of product. There are symbols on the outside of the carton, there are symbols on the inside of the carton. And that's what the brand is about and the ambigram is a symbol. And it's meant to be something that's internally owned, not something where we own the customer, but rather where they own the brand. And I think when you have something that's a little bit more symbolic versus completely legible and written out, it presents its own challenges, but it also works at the same time.
TP: There's such a cool narrative going on here, talking about your need for order and now the chaos of duality, and also your love of language, and in the ambigram, you've sort of harnessed all of those things together- in the chaos of duality, finding order through the power of language. It's just a really cool- it all seems to resonate together so well.
RM: Yeah, yes, I think it does. And you know, it does always speak to me because everything isn't always as it seems. And I think when you launch a business, you realize that some people are going to love your brand and some people are not gonna like it at all, and that's okay. I remember someone at some point saying, but people will have to work too hard for it. And I say this is a group of people, my primary audience, is a group of people that spend hours perfecting a winged eyeliner to go to the grocery store. They want to work hard for things. They don't want the easy way out. They want to work hard for it. It is it's about the technical skill, it's about understanding. And, you know, you do at some point have to have a leap of faith in, in taking a moment to understand. Project who you think your ultimate consumer is going to be and try to cater to their inner resources as opposed to catering to this understanding of the lowest common denominator and what makes things easy. And I've always been a person that wants to work for things. And maybe that's not everyone's experience, and maybe that makes me very inefficient. But I enjoy that more because I feel like I participate in something versus it being spoon fed to me.
TP: I have this question written down, and I think you've kind of already answered it. But where do you stand on the debate of whether or not makeup constitutes a form of visual art?
RM: It absolutely is a form of visual art and as prolific as my makeup skills are at times, or I think they are, I've been around professionals who do things on another level. Some of these makeup artists are so incredibly talented and self taught, which I think is usually really important. There certainly are a lot of people that are professionally trained, but the majority of the makeup artists we work with are self taught. And I think that that says a lot about the art form. It is driven by inner creativity and it is driven by being an art form that you wear every single day. There's room in everyone's life for the get out the door, but when you really want to create something that has creative expression, it requires a skill set that not everybody has. It requires a steadiness of hand, it requires an understanding of how colors work together, how products layer on top of each other. It's no different in many regards, and understanding how different types of paint and paint brushes affect a canvas, and whether you're drawing on paper versus painting on cotton canvas or wood. And all of those elements are in play as a makeup artist when you're doing makeup on somebody's face because you're contending with 100 different variables from facial structure to skin type to colors and an eye color and all these sorts of things. So yeah, I think you know where I stand on that. It's definitely an art form.
TP: So then I guess my follow up question to that- and the reason I asked that question- is to lead into the question of celebrating makeup as an art. In the rest of the visual art world, we have things like museums or gallery spaces or public art, as ways of like celebrating and giving art appreciators a way to view and celebrate the form. What do you think are the best ways for art appreciators to view and celebrate the art of makeup?
RM: You know, with the advent of amazing photo editing software, it's really hard to appreciate some photos because you know that they've been edited in some way. I think video watching, like a YouTuber or an expert on a video, and watching them work is probably the best way to do it. We obviously are inundated with YouTubers who do make up videos and show you their techniques in different ways. I think because it's very engaging. I don't know why they're so addicting but I know a lot of people that don't even wear makeup that love watching them. And I think the reason why is that it shows you how ephemeral, the whole processes is as well. Unlike a piece of art that will maybe last forever on a museum wall, no matter how amazing your makeup is, you're going to wipe it off at the end of the day. And you're going to start over. And so I think watching video, through social media in particular, is the most interesting way to watch people work.
TP: Do you think there's room for video of people applying makeup in art museums?
RM: Yeah, I do think there is. And there are a lot of people that I've met through this company who, I think if they had been channeled like three degrees to the left, would be painting paintings. But somehow, at some point in their life, they were channeled this other direction and became makeup artists. And I think there are a lot of similarities and I never actually thought about having something like that in a museum. But it is kind of like graffiti art in a way. Right? There are a lot of people that know how to do it that are not elevated at times to this super artist level, because they're not classical the way we maybe understand them to be. But yeah, I think it would be fascinating to have, you know, a present day pop art exhibition where you watch people through videos, doing makeup.
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TP: How has the art of Frida Kahlo affected your understanding of what beauty means, your understanding of femininity and also like your understanding of Mexican culture?
RM: She is a national treasure in Mexico, and she was when she was alive. For the people involved in that world, she experienced commercial success while she was alive. This is not a woman who many years later, everybody decided she was great. The world may have woken up to that. But while she was alive, people realized who she was. And I think it's it's a very fascinating thing, because she represents so much of what is so Mexican. And part of what is so Mexican is exhibiting your range of emotions in a way that I think a lot of other cultures find to be too much. Here's a woman who was crippled, she had polio, she was in a terrible bus accident, she spends her time in bed and so much physical pain, and she channels all of this and decides that she's going to share it with the world. And in many ways, she painted the first selfie, right? Like there had been self portraits prior to that, certainly, but not self portraits of people in anguish. And I think that is so Mexican. There is something about the cultural consciousness of Mexico that you show your pain the way you show your joy,and that range of emotion is something to be celebrated. You know, we just finished Day of the Dead, and it's such a powerful holiday in Mexico because it is a celebration of life, even if it is a very sad thing and you do it very publicly.
I think she always represented the ultimate, unapologetic woman who was who she was. She embraced who she was in a very, very profoundly real way. And a lot of it wasn't pretty. And that she wasn't a traditional beauty didn't diminish anything from her being a woman. She had all these issues, and all of these notions of femininity at the time, she kind of turned on their head and said, “But I still am forcing you to see me as I really am, even if it's not what I wanted to see.”
TP: Do you think she is seen that way in in modern American culture? Do you think that people see that side of pain that she was trying to express in her art?
RM: No, no. I think she's become an icon because she was so empowered by her unconventional female looks right? Like, she wore lipstick. She was really into makeup. And she had a mustache. And she had a unibrow. And there were a lot of things about her that were not conventional. And I think that really resonates to a lot of women who are tired of being boxed into this notion of what they're supposed to look like. You know, “you're supposed to look like a supermodel; you're supposed to have this figure; you're supposed to have this type and color or hair” and women are exhausted by it. And that's not a new topic. But I think a lot of women have really gravitated to this woman who said, "I'm still going to wear makeup and I'm going to dress up and I'm going to do things that bring attention to me, even though I don't satisfy traditional notions of beauty" even for Frida in her time. And it is very liberating and it is very empowered, and that's what I think people have really clung onto.
In my experience there's a less profound understanding of her art. There's a very confused understanding, in my opinion too, about her political affiliations. And, you know, she has become this icon, and a lot of people want to own her. And that's a very sensitive thing. If you tell people that they have to understand Frida as a whole in a very academic way, and you have you have to understand her paintings in order to put her up on a pedestal, well, that doesn't work either. But she was so much more than a painter, right? Her life itself is fascinating. And I think that's okay. Maybe over time, people will understand more of where she comes from and where her her art really tells a lot of her story.
TP: Is there a different perception of Frida Kahlo today in Mexico?
RM: No, I think everybody realizes she's become incredibly commercialized. You can't go to a Mexican market and not find a Frida fill in the blank- I mean, key chain, tote bag, etc. And I think that's okay, and there's, like everything in Mexico, always an intersection between how national treasures- whether it's weavers or the way tequila is made or mezcal- and these very traditional embedded heritage practices with artists and so forth,and then there's the commercialization of it. There is the way in which the community and a lot of the population will take those things, put their own kind of quick spin on it, and the two have always coexisted. Because most people there that are very much interested in, for example, her art, these commercializations are not the only thing that they have access to. They understand where they can go see her art, they understand that there are institutions devoted to studying her art, and they seek those things out. And that's that is a little bit about the way Mexico is- things can be really sacred, but there's room for iterations beyond that, that are accessible to the rest of the population. Because the rest of the population doesn't have access to the Frida Kahlo Museum necessarily, and people understand that.
TP: As a businesswoman, as somebody who sells a brow paint called Frida, who participated in the in the Frida Fest, where do you for your company, and I guess for yourself personally, draw a line between celebrating Kahlo, understanding Kahlo as an artist and understanding the pain and the joy she's communicating, but also using Kahlo's image for marketing and using Kahlo to evoke that in the audience that you're selling makeup to?
RM: The product we have is called Frida, and it's definitely a nod to her eyebrow. The use of her image is part and parcel of the larger ethos of our brand, where we are trying to make sure that the community continues to be exposed to amazing women that we call reina rebeldes among us. Not just in today's world, not just among our contemporaries, but the women of our past and all our different countries that were part of the heritage that has allowed Latinas today to feel kind of this fierce ability to push forward. And when you have women from your past to look to it is a very powerful experience.
So many young women today in the United States, which is one of the things I learned, who are Latina, but weren't necessarily immigrants the way I was, are several generations removed from their heritage. Millennial women in particular are very encouraged by and very curious about reclaiming things such as the Spanish language and learning to be more proficient in it. And really reclaiming a lot of their culture. And the reason why is, a few generations back immigrants to this country in many areas were told, basically, you need to leave your culture behind. If you're ever going to integrate or assimilate, you need not teach your children Spanish, you need to adopt as many American cultural norms as possible. And so when you're a little bit more removed, a lot of things have gotten diluted. Young women today are trying to change the tide on that and reclaim things that they're sad have been unexpressed in their own homes and their own ancestral,stories. In that, I think that people do really look up to a lot of these women. It's everyone from Frida Kahlo, to Rita Moreno, to Eva Perone, to so so many different Latina women among us that have done really, really incredible things. The brand is meant to, and has from day one, been celebrating that woman, and that woman is part of our collective heritage. So we also spotlight women who are alive in the flesh today, who are making moves and breaking boundaries. And we do that all the time.
I think Frida is a little bit touchier right now, because of how she's been commercialized, and I think that makes a lot of sense. I think the community is incredibly tired of being told by everybody else who has never really appreciated the community, what they should wear, how they should wear it, who they should idolize, and how to do it. And that point of inauthenticity is the biggest inflection point in the entire thing. When it comes from an authentic source and the brand is authentic, it has a very different meaning, because it comes from a place of understanding. "You and I share our love for this woman for all of these reasons. And it comes from a very genuine and authentic place. And celebrating her is something we can do together." When somebody from outside the community, like "Oh, by the way, did you know about this famous artists? Like we're going to go slap her face on everything and sell it to you?" it feels insulting.
TP: I have to say I've followed your Instagram and one of my absolute favorite things about the Instagram is that you have pictures of Selena and pictures of Frida Kahlo and also pictures of modern people and makeup. I think just today or the other day, there was a picture of a mother with her child with really great makeup and to see those two things balanced together- there is this sort of hyperpresentation of these gorgeous photographs of historical figures, next to photos taken on cell phones today. And they don't they don't seem discontinuous, they seem to be part of the same story that you're trying to tell.
RM: Yeah, and I sometimes think of makeup for Latinas as a type of war paint in a weird way. And I think that's why a lot of the historical figures resonate so much with the community and our customers in particular. Because it is empowering and you hear the stories of women 20, 40, 50 and beyond years ago that we're really making waves. And, and you see the intersection of how they presented themselves. Frida is a perfect example of that right? She was a member of the Communist Party. She was painting about these very surrealist, painful subject matters that were incredibly personal- but she wore Revlon lipstick. She cared about her eyebrows. The intersection of, you could be fierce and profound and have so much to say and share, a lot of which is dark, but also be a woman that wears lipstick and makeup- which I think for a lot of people feels really shallow at times and it feels very vain. In many cultures of the two don't intersect. In Latina culture they intersect beautifully. And that's a lot of what Reina Rebelbe is about. You can be a queen and you can be a rebel. And we like to call them our historical reina rebeldes, and Frida was a very perfect example of that. She was an androgynous dresser, she wore men's clothes, and I think things like that also really speak to where as a as a community we are today and all the changes that are happening and people's ability to feel more unapologetic about where they are even if it's defies explanation.
TP: I think that sums it up perfectly. Are there any things that you wanted to talk about in this interview or points that you think you you might have missed somewhere along the line?
RM: I mean- I think for us, the challenge is always that there has to be a very positive balance between what I hear about a lot today, which is cultural appropriation and also being able to leave cultural elements that are so powerful and compelling for a lot of people outside of our community in a way that's accessible to them. I think it actually helps the narrative tremendously, in a divided country, when you have people that may not understand who I am as a Mexican immigrant, but understand Frida Kahlo. And maybe sometimes things like that are the starting point to really productive and healing conversations. And it's a tough balance right now because it has to be done delicately and respectfully, certainly, but it can't be so precious at times that we close off our really strong cultural elements such that we don't welcome people into them. And I think Frida and all the conversations around her as of late are very, very interesting example of that.
TP: I guess I do have one last question that I just kind of thought of that ties on to that but but I know I have a very diverse audience that listens to the show. My question is if someone just heard your story, and heard us talk about Frida Kahlo, and heard about makeup in maybe a way that they haven't heard about makeup before, what would you want them to do? What would you want them to do after they put put up their headphones and move on into the world having heard this conversation?
RM: I think it would be hopefully permission, if you weren't already curious about it, to give you a little nudge in curiosity and permission to go explore something different. I know a lot of women, for example, who have been told for many years that they can't wear this and they can't wear this color and they can't do this. And there are all these rules. And one of the things I love about when women who are not Latina find our brand, part of our ethos is that there kind of are no rules, right? And that's part of owning your power as a woman- is exploring different looks and trying different things on and feeling really liberated and unapologetic about it. So it is about stepping outside of your comfort zone. And whether that's, "I'm curious about makeup now in a way that I hadn't been" or "I never viewed it as a form of self expression", it may be another creative outlet that somebody has discovered that they may want to explore.
And then from the cultural side of it, we are so inclusive and we are so open, there's nothing that makes me happier than when I have a friend that comes to Mexico with me and goes home and adopts something that really resonated with her. I think that's how we all grow as people. I love that Frida Kahlo is so relevant right now because I think it makes people really curious about how other people in other countries emote, how a woman's journey really transforms so many generations thereafter. And she wasn't your typical woman. She didn't have children. She didn't have your traditional marriage. She wasn't, you know, she wasn't all these things that we've been told as women were supposed to be. She really bucked that and she still made her mark and it was still really relevant and people are still talking about it today. And I think that that's everybody's journey, is that the path is not really predetermined. You have to make your own rules. Makeup for me every day is a reminder of the fact that we we all have the right to make our own rules in many regards.
My huge thanks once again to Regina Merson, founder and CEO of Reina Rebelde for joining me on this very special episode of Accession. Remember, if you go to reinarebelde.com now through the end of the month, and use the offer code ACCESSION, you'll get 20% off your order. That link and code will be in the show notes and on our website at accessions.fm.
As well, I wanted to take a quick moment to mention our Patreon. If obsession has ever made you see the world differently or added some hope and joy into your life, consider supporting us over patreon.com/accessionfm. No matter what tier you support at, you get access to exclusive essays, bonus minisodes, and behind the scenes extras. This week, patrons get to hear a part of this interview that didn't quite make it into the show, where we talk about the Guinness world record for the most Fridas in one place, and the part that Reina Rebelde played in that record. It's a delightful part of the conversation that just didn't quite make the cut. Again, head over to patreon.com/accessionfm, and remember that you get access to all of the content that's there, no matter how much you pledge. Your single dollar every month is worth that much to us, and shows us how much you care about independent podcasting, art and making the world a better place. Again, that's patreon.com/accessionfm.
Our show art is by the incredible V Silverman. Our theme music was performed by Mike Harmon with recording editing and mixing from Casey Dawson, and additional music from Blue Dot Sessions. The show is produced, recorded, edited, and tucked into bed by me, T.H. Ponders.