Every year, around the third week of August, I do the same thing.
I clear a Saturday. I go through my wardrobe and pull out everything that belongs to summer, the linens, the boho dresses, the pieces that only make sense when the light is warm and the evenings run long. I try them on, one by one, not to decide what to keep but to decide how I want to spend what is left of the season. Then I book my appointments.
Skin first. Wardrobe second. That is the order it goes. This is the part I save the season for, not the big weeks, but the quiet ones that follow. The city at its most itself.
This year, the ritual arrived later than usual, and felt more necessary than ever. Vancouver spent the first half of summer hosting the world. BC Place was full, the Fan Festival at Hastings Park ran for weeks, and the city moved at a pitch that was genuinely thrilling and genuinely exhausting in equal measure. Canada played two home matches here. Strangers became friends in the lineups outside stadiums. The streets had an energy that most cities only dream of.
And then, the way it always does, it passed. The crowds thinned. The flags came down. August arrived the way it always does in Vancouver, quietly, golden, slightly melancholy, and more beautiful for it.
That is the moment I had been waiting for. Not the spectacle, but the exhale after it.
The Wardrobe Half
There is a particular kind of dressing that belongs to Vancouver in late summer. Not resort wear. Not streetwear. Something in between, loose enough for an afternoon on Kits Beach, considered enough for a patio dinner in Gastown, easy enough that you are not thinking about it at all by the time you arrive.
A good boho dress gets this exactly right. It moves with you. It works across the whole range of what a warm Vancouver evening might ask of you. And after a summer of watching the city dress up for the World Cup, the jerseys, the face paint, the wonderful chaos of fifty nations arriving at once, there is something deeply appealing about returning to something effortless.
I have learned to invest in a few pieces that genuinely earn their place in those last warm weeks rather than a wardrobe full of things that are almost right. The dress I kept reaching for this summer was long and slightly sheer at the hem, the kind of thing that catches the last of the evening light and moves when you walk. Effortless in the way that only works when someone has thought carefully about the cut.
The Skin Half
The appointment I book every late summer is different from the facials and peels I might do throughout the year. Those are maintenance. This one is a reset.
For the past two years, that has meant a facial laser session at a facial studio in Vancouver.
I want to be careful about how I describe this, because I know that “laser treatment” still carries associations with downtime, with looking overdone, with a kind of clinical aggression that does not match how I want to take care of myself. A summer like this one had left its evidence on my skin. Uneven tone along my cheekbones. Redness that flared when I was tired. A dullness that my usual routine was no longer touching.
What originally convinced me to book was a study out of Stanford, published in the Journal of Investigative Dermatology, showing that repeated BBL therapy can shift the gene expression of aging skin cells toward patterns more consistent with younger skin. Not a surface improvement. An actual change at the cellular level. The protocol I follow is called Forever Young, a series of sessions targeting pigment, visible vessels, and collagen production in a single pass, spaced about four weeks apart. The session itself takes around five minutes for a full face. I am pink for a few hours afterward. I avoid direct sun for a week. That is the full extent of it.
Two weeks out, my skin looks like a version of itself that got more sleep and has been quietly, consistently cared for. After the summer this city just had, that felt like exactly the right antidote.
Why the Order Matters
There is something about doing both resets in the same window that compounds the effect of each.
When my skin looks genuinely good, not made-up good, not filtered good, but actually even and clear and healthy, I wear things differently. The dress I love anyway becomes something I want to be seen in. I take the long route home along the water. I say yes to the last-minute dinner invitation instead of talking myself out of it.
And when I am wearing something that feels exactly right, the right weight, the right ease, the right amount of nothing, I notice my skin less, in the best possible way. I am just there.
Vancouver’s late summer has always had its own particular mood. Unhurried. A little nostalgic. Aware of its own finitude. This year, after months of the city being everyone’s destination, that quieter version of Vancouver feels like something worth savouring.
The World Cup was extraordinary. But this, the Seawall at golden hour, a good dress, skin that finally feels like itself again, this is the part I had been saving the season for.
