Spotlight: Looks Perfect by Jessica Siskin

What comes between a fashion icon’s perfect image and her genuine self? The perfect stranger—in a sharp and witty novel about identity, performance, and what it takes to make a true connection.

One million people follow Stella Lerner’s every move. And now the buzzy fashion designer is fulfilling her lifelong dream and taking her indie clothing brand global with the help of the industry’s biggest investor. Sounds perfect. Except offline, the optics aren’t so great.

Her relationship with her boyfriend, Alex, is crumbling just as the pressure to curate her image online only builds. Feeling trapped between the picture-perfect life she’s promised her followers and the messy reality she’s facing, Stella anonymously joins a new dating app. Blindr promises deep, private conversations, free from the burden of anyone’s expectations, especially her own. That’s when Stella connects with a stranger called Pineapple who’s intuitive, honest, and empathetic. Stella may be watched by millions, but this man, who’s never even laid eyes on her, makes her feel seen.

What starts as a diversion becomes a journey of radical transformation. As Stella’s search for authenticity intensifies, every chat with Pineapple takes her further down a path she never could’ve imagined.

Excerpt

EXCERPT from LOOKS PERFECT by Jessica Siskin, Text copyright © 2026 by Jessica Siskin, Published by Little A

Eight

Before Alex, I didn’t have a boyfriend for almost six years, and it was starting to feel like I never would. When I was a kid, I never really believed I would get married. My Barbie got married to Ken, and Aunt Becky got married to Uncle Jesse, and so did Princess Ariel (after abandoning her entire family, the only world she’d ever known, her lower body, and her literal voice for a guy she’d never even spoken to—but I’ll be the first to admit that Prince Eric turned out to be a catch and probably the second-hottest animated leading man after Dmitri in Anastasia). I knew that I was supposed to believe that getting married and having a family was what was going to happen to me. I had a nursery full of Cabbage Patch babies in my bedroom closet, three heart-shaped Polly Pocket–branded microcosms of domesticity, and a set of Quints dolls, palm-size baby quintuplets that were to be fed in tandem from five tiny, connected bottles, like a shotski. I knew I was meant to think it was inevitable I’d get married and have babies, but I just didn’t buy that I could ever be so lucky. I couldn’t even be satisfied with the stifling narrative I was being sold.

The first time I ever had a real boyfriend (after a beautiful backyard wedding to my neighbor Ricky Shapiro in kindergarten) was senior year of high school. His name was Brett Wertheimer, he was the president of Model Congress and the captain of the tennis team, and the whole time we were together, it felt like a fluke, like the universe had made a mistake by issuing me a relationship and I’d have to do everything in my power to hold on to him, my one and only chance at love in this lifetime.

While most couples in our class were breaking up before leaving for college, I convinced him we should stay together. We’d only be a couple of hours apart, me at NYU and him at UPenn in Philadelphia; an hour and a half on Amtrak barely qualified as long distance.

When he broke up with me roughly six weeks into the first semester of college while visiting over fall break, I literally could not compute what was happening.

“No,” I said, sitting next to him on the twin bed in my dorm room. “I do not consent.”

We’d had our life planned out: We’d move to the suburbs and be cool parents. I’d drive a Range Rover and never be late for school pickup; he’d work in finance in the city. Our kids, a boy and a girl (three years apart), would somehow look just like both of us and share only our good qualities. When he dumped me, the fully formed vision I had for my entire life disintegrated like that raccoon’s cotton candy once dipped in water in that viral video. It still hits way too close to home. I couldn’t understand how someone else could make such a pivotal, defining choice about my life.

He left me crying beneath my poster of Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, and Christie Turlington clutching one another in the nude.

“It’s what’s best for both of us,” he managed, and then, “I’m sorry,” as he walked slowly backward out of my room, as if retreating respectfully from the Western Wall in Jerusalem. That’s when I learned that you don’t get to just create your life however you want; you can only do what you can with what’s available to you. I thought I had it all figured out, the car was driving on autopilot, destination: perfection. I just forgot that another person had access to the brakes.

And then came years and years of watching my friends date and get married. Sure, I dated people, but nothing felt meaningful. And everything was fine until, as if overnight, the music stopped in the communal game of musical chairs I didn’t know every Jewish young professional in Manhattan was playing, and everyone started to pair off until there was seemingly no one left. I was out.

Before all their engagements, I had a social life that all of my friends participated in, whether they were dating someone or not. Once everything changed, my coupled friends stopped going out as much, and my social calendar filled up with engagement parties and bridal showers and bachelorette weekends. My attitude around being single changed too—it went from being totally normal, almost the default in our mid-twenties, to feeling kind of sad and pitiable as we all approached thirty and I found myself picking at overcooked salmon at more singles tables than I could count.

Work was going so well, Stellar was blowing up, and I’d created this illusion on my Instagram that I didn’t need anything or anyone, but I was lonely, and the single-girl-in-the-city thing was getting old. So I got on the dating apps, and before long I was getting messages from guys who said they’d shown their matches to their sister or their best girlfriend or their coworker and they’re obsessed with me, which maybe should’ve felt good but made me feel pathetic, like I didn’t belong there. But there was nowhere else to go. After college and those early days in the city when everyone reconvenes, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to meet someone in real life. I read an article that said that 10 percent of couples meet at work, but I rarely came across straight men in my line of work.

The apps were a nightmare unless you’d never been on one, in which case they seemed like So Much Fun. My friends who were already coupled before apps ruined regular dating thought they were like DoorDash but for someone to eventually adopt a rescue dog and curate a wedding playlist with. But while the delivery service bestows overpriced sushi stuffed like jewels in their neat custom-cardboard boxes from SUGARFISH thirty to forty-five minutes after you press Order, dating apps aren’t built to deliver with efficiency. As a matter of fact, their entire business hinges on keeping people swiping for as long as possible.

And I get why apps seem so appealing to people who’ve never had to use them. I love to shop online. It’s getting easier and easier to find what I need when I need it. Just last week I was wearing my beige Nili Lotan boilersuit when it occurred to me that I’d love one in leopard print for the fall. It took about six minutes of focused googling, combining and replacing search terms like Chef René Redzepi selecting bespoke fungi and obscure seaweeds in his culinary lab in Copenhagen until I finally found something close enough to what I wanted. Though the background of the leopard print was tan and not cream, like I’d envisioned, and the spots were a little less graphic and more realistic than I’d hoped, I managed to cart the last size 2 on Farfetch.

That was the thing about dating: I’d curated my life in such a way that I could access pretty much anything I wanted whenever I wanted it. I summoned vegan bento boxes and chopped salads and kale collagen smoothies on Postmates or Caviar or UberEats, and if I wanted fresh stone crabs from Joe’s in Miami, they’d FedEx them to me on ice, or I could just hop down to South Beach for the weekend. Celeste was over for a contour spray tan whenever I felt less than glowy, and Caleb always squeezed me in for hair color if I felt like I needed a change, even if it was, like, two in the morning before the Michael Kors show and I decided I wanted to show up bleached blond (a mistake, but everyone posting about my hair nightmare pushed me over five hundred thousand, and I was back to my signature auburn by Monday). If I wanted to meet with a brand or I wanted a table at Carbone, Ace could drop my name or call in a favor and make that happen. I was at the point where I could access pretty much anything I wanted by sending a text. So you can imagine how frustrating it was that I couldn’t find someone to love who loved me back.

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About the Author

Jessica Siskin earned her MFA from the New School. She is the founder of Misterkrisp, a  popular Instagram-based food art business specializing in custom Rice Krispies Treats and social  media content. She is the author of Treat Yourself!, a cookbook featuring her inventive food art  and edible creations. Jessica lives in New York City.