One more 2023 round-up for you — this time it’s my favorite products, listens, and digital discoveries! (If you’re looking for the books, head right this way.)
These are truly my most-worn, most-used, or most-visited discoveries from this year that have withstood lots of testing in my everyday life. No companies have asked me to talk about these products (though there are a few affiliate links below).
If you purchase through any affiliate links, I make a few cents of commission at no additional cost to you. Thanks for supporting my work here.
Anna’s Favorite Things of 2023
Clothing
Ebb to Street tank
At the beginning of the summer, I went on a quest to find a white tank top that was not a crew neck and would not be see-through. This was the winner. It has a built-in bra with adequate support for daily wear and no show-through, comfy ribbed fabric, and wearability for all kinds of conditions. It was an amazing piece to pack on our Norway trip, and I wore it at least once a week when we weren’t traveling. I wouldn’t exercise in it without additional support, but for travel and work-from-home, it was fantastic.
Correctly fitting Natori bras
My sister and I went to Nordstrom to get bra fittings for the first time since the pandemic this fall, and let me tell you, I had forgotten what a correctly fitting bra feels like. If you can’t understand why anyone would ever wear underwire, you’re probably wearing the wrong size. Get yourself to Nordstrom, get fitted, and marvel at your newfound comfort and support. I’m a big fan of Natori, but a sales associate can help you find the right style for you.
Online secondhand shopping on ThredUp and Ebay
Over the past year, I’ve been attempting to identify clothing and style elements that make me feel like myself rather than just following the item-of-the-day linked by influencers. And I’ve found a number of unique secondhand pieces that I LOVE on both ThredUp and Ebay. Think a teal leather blazer that has gotten me more compliments than any other item of clothing I own, a pink subtly shimmery Eileen Fisher jacket, and a plaid Pendelton blazer in the perfect colors. I did pay more than I would have at a thrift store, but I also didn’t have to leave the house. Feels like a fair trade to me.
If you’d like to try this out yourself, it helped me to identify specific gaps I was trying to fill in my closet, then either aggressively use filters (on ThredUp) or play with specific combos of search terms (on Ebay). “Cream ribbed cotton turtleneck size L,” for example, is going to reduce your scroll time more than “white sweater.” Knowing your measurements also helps prevent spending $$$ to ship back returns.
Health and Beauty
Nail concealer
This “nail concealer” is a nail polish that looks like a real-life filter for your nails – picture the your-nails-but-better base of a French manicure. If you’re bad at doing your own manis but you want your nails to give quiet luxury, this is your product. It also lasts a really long time and chips aren’t super obvious. While I still flirt with fun Olive and June shades, this in the shade Milky is my current default polish.
Floral Street Sunflower Pop perfume
This perfume makes me so happpppy. It’s fresh and fruity and the littlest bit floral but not cloying or too sweet. The scent also lasts nearly all day (usually a struggle on my dry skin), and the packaging is pure sunshine.
Electric toothbrush
This is 30, y’all. Getting excited about toothbrushes. But really, if you have any discretionary income and you don’t have an electric toothbrush, I’ll join your dentist in convincing you to make this very worthwhile purchase. My teeth feel way cleaner with this, and it’s been helpful for my problematic gums.
Bloody Buddy Period Cup
The name is hilariously awful, but the product is great. If you can get over any intimidation, period cups save so much cost and waste, plus they require changing much less often than other period products. As a first-timer, I found this one to have just a little bit of a learning curve, but testing it out at home for a few days before venturing out in public was all I needed to become a total convert.
Home
Ninja Foodie Toaster oven
My in-laws got this for us last Christmas, and we’ve used it at least once a day since. I use it to make toast, heat up sandwiches, reheat leftovers, and bake anything when I don’t want to wait for the oven to heat up. And my favorite part – it folds up and out of the way when you’re not using it. My best tips if you’re nabbing one of these yourself: read the directions and cooking suggestions when you’re just getting started to prevent burning anything, and get a quarter-sized sheet pan – I use this one – for anything sensitive. (The dark-coated pan that comes with it can make the bottoms of baked goods cook too fast.)
Apps
Paprika Recipe Manager
For years, I’ve used Trello to keep track of my recipes (as seen here), but my collection was getting a bit too unwieldy. Enter Paprika, an app specifically for housing recipes. IT IS THE BEST.
- No more scrolling through tons of preamble and ads on recipe blogs. When you enter a website url, Paprika identifies the recipe text and pulls them into a clean, annoyance-free interface.
- You can create categories to organize your recipes and then filter by those categories.
- When the app is open, it keeps your device screen from automatically closing down – no more contaminating your phone screen with chicken-juice hands because your recipe disappeared!
- For recipes on paper or in cookbooks, your phone’s text recognition can grab the text and you can copy it into the app – for me, this means I actually make a few of the recipes that were floating around on crumpled magazine pages.
There are even more features with timers and automated grocery lists that I’ve barely used, and I still think the cost is worth it.
Fair warning, you do have to purchase a version of this for each device separately. I tried it out first on my phone, then got the desktop version on Black Friday sale once I’d used it for a few months and knew I liked it. I still think it’s 100% worth it.
Teux Deux
I’m relatively new to this app, but so far, it’s been the best tool I’ve found for keeping track of all the tasks floating around in my brain. My task lists were scattered between post-its on my work desk, scraps of paper on my nightstand, a notebook, and my brain, and I felt like I was forgetting things all the time. Dawn from the Minimal Mom (a Youtube favorite runner-up) suggested this app to solve this exact problem, so I reluctantly tried converting my paper-based system to digital. It has admittedly been working well so far, enough so that I’m paying for this product and not complaining.
EDIT: Guys, a week after posting this, I discovered you can do basically the same thing with Google Tasks for FREE. If you’re already using Gmail or Google Calendar, setting up your Tasks list and integrating it with your email and calendar is the easiest thing. Click here for an explanation.
Youtube Channels
Natalie Bennett
Natalie is such a soothing, calm voice, and I love watching her channel if I’m tired or stressed out. The majority of her content centers around decluttering, home keeping, and family life, and her videos are like hanging out with a friend while she tidies her kitchen or putters in the garden. I look forward to these every week.
Hannah Louise Poston
HLP is kind of an icon. While her channel is primarily a beauty channel, I subscribed specifically for her in-depth fashion content. This girl has style, but she doesn’t usually recommend individual pieces — instead, she talks about style as a system that she can actually articulate to the rest of us without just telling us to buy a bunch of stuff. While I don’t have the exact same taste as Hannah, I’ve found this way she describes fashion concepts to be extremely enlightening – I have actually taken notes while watching her videos.
Ambience videos
If I ever need to slog through a monotonous workday task or if Adam and I are working on household admin tasks together, we’ll search for an ambience video on Youtube and let it run in the background. There are videos for just about everything, from autumn coffee shops to Hobbit Christmas to dark academia forests to medieval taverns.
Music
Taylor Swift
She took over the world and our household Spotify account.
Just Good Music playlist
This is a Spotify-created playlist that updates every few months. It aligns well with my taste and is basically the only way I discover new music right now.
Let’s Go Girls playlist
My favorite playlist I created this year. If you like girl-power pop and country, give it a listen.