As a first-year seminary student, I was inspired by covered Muslim women. They said the hijab made them free. I designed an experiment: for nine months, I covered my hair, arms and legs and stopped wearing makeup. The result changed the way I viewed beauty, power, and faith.

The Beauty Suit is about my nine month modesty experiment, but it's also about the limits of Kardashian-esque hotness as "empowerment" (hint: it's just capitalism, coopting feminism). I look at the other end of the ideological spectrum-- the three Abrahamic traditions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam-- in an effort to find a counter-narrative.

Find it on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and IndieBound.

I summarized the Modesty Experiment in an article and, much to my delight, it was accepted to Salon. I was not prepared for the blowback, like the articles on Jezebel and XOJane. However others, like Yahoo, dug the whole thing. Other appearances:

Other articles by me

• Salon, Dressing Modestly, for Feminism and Faith
• Feminist Current, The Internet, Self-Objectification, and Untimely Beginnings

• The New York Times, Piling on Clothes to Lay Herself Bare
• Beacon Broadside, My Closet Tried to Hold Me Hostage But We’re Cool Now: What Lauren Shields’ “The Beauty Suit” Taught Me About Different Kinds of ‘Modesty’, 
• Brown Girl Magazine, ‘I Cover My Hair—and I’m a Feminist’: An Interview with Author Lauren Shields

• "Sunday Morning: 'Lauren Shields: A Nine-Month Experiment in Modesty,'" a great live interview with RNZ (Radio New Zealand)'s Jim Mora
• The Beauty Suit on MeaningofLife.tv, in which I talk about my project from a more religious perspective
• Voices, a podcast about progressive faith
• Makin It Through Comedy: A podcast from Stanford's KZSU 90.1FM, on what it's like to be a working comedian in the Bay Area

I'm an introvert, and when I feel strongly about something, writing helps me sort it out. Black Panther, #MeToo, and more.