Alliandra’s Favorites: The Ultimate Guide to the Things She Loves Most

There’s something magnetic about discovering someone’s favorite things. Whether it’s a book that changed their perspective, a skincare routine they swear by, or a hidden gem of a restaurant they’d drive an hour to visit, favorites carry a kind of intimacy that ordinary recommendations don’t. That’s exactly what makes Alliandra’s favorites so worth exploring. If you’ve been curious about the products, places, habits, and passions that define her world, you’ve come to the right place. This is a deep dive into everything Alliandra loves — the kind of list you’ll want to bookmark, share, and return to again and again.

Who Is Alliandra, and Why Do Her Favorites Matter?

Before diving into the list itself, it helps to understand what makes a “favorites” roundup feel authentic rather than generic. Alliandra isn’t someone who recommends things lightly. She takes her time with the things she loves, living with them, testing them, and observing how they hold up over days, weeks, and months. Her recommendations come from a place of genuine enthusiasm, not sponsored obligation. When something earns a spot on her favorites list, it’s because it genuinely made her life better, more joyful, or more interesting in some meaningful way.

That’s the spirit behind this post. Everything here represents something Alliandra has spent real time with and genuinely stands behind. Whether you’re a longtime follower looking to understand her world a little better, or a newcomer who stumbled onto this corner of the internet for the first time, there’s something in this list for you.

Alliandra’s Favorite Books

Few things reveal a person’s inner world more clearly than the books on their nightstand. Alliandra is an avid reader who gravitates toward stories that feel emotionally honest and intellectually alive. She tends to love books that balance beautiful prose with propulsive storytelling — she doesn’t want to work too hard to stay engaged, but she also wants to feel like she’s being taken somewhere real.

Among her all-time favorites is Educated by Tara Westover, a memoir that she describes as one of the most gripping and emotionally complex books she’s ever read. She appreciates how Westover writes about family, identity, and self-determination without ever becoming sentimental or simplistic. It’s a book that challenges readers to think deeply while still being completely impossible to put down.

On the fiction side, Alliandra has long loved The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón. She discovered it during a summer when she was looking for something to get lost in, and she found exactly that — a lush, labyrinthine story set in post-war Barcelona that reads like a love letter to books themselves. If you’re the kind of person who believes that reading a great novel is one of life’s most underrated pleasures, this one is for you.

She also keeps returning to When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi, a book she says she’ll recommend until the day she dies. It’s short, devastating, and profoundly beautiful — a meditation on mortality and meaning written by a neurosurgeon facing his own death. Alliandra says she reads certain passages from it whenever she needs to be reminded of what actually matters.

Alliandra’s Favorite Skincare and Beauty Products

Alliandra has a philosophy when it comes to beauty: less is more, consistency wins, and the basics done well will always outperform the complicated. She spent years chasing elaborate multi-step routines before stripping things back and realizing that her skin was happiest with a few deeply effective products used faithfully every day.

Her all-time favorite cleanser is a gentle, fragrance-free gel formula that she’s been using for years. She’s tried expensive alternatives, trendy foaming cleansers, and micellar waters, but she always comes back to this one because it removes everything without stripping her skin of its natural moisture.

Sunscreen is non-negotiable for Alliandra, and she’s very particular about it. She loves a lightweight mineral SPF that sits invisibly on her skin and layers perfectly under makeup. She talks about sun protection with an almost evangelical enthusiasm, crediting it as the single most important thing she does for her skin every single day.

For moisturizer, Alliandra swears by a ceramide-rich cream that she applies both morning and night. She says she noticed a difference in her skin’s texture within about two weeks of making it a consistent habit. It’s not flashy or luxurious-feeling, but it works, and that’s what matters to her.

She also has strong feelings about lip care, which she considers chronically underrated in the skincare conversation. Her current favorite is a simple, non-sticky balm that she keeps in every bag and on every surface in her home. Lip hydration, she insists, is a small thing that makes an outsized difference in how you feel day to day.

Alliandra’s Favorite Foods and Recipes

Food is one of Alliandra’s deepest joys. She approaches cooking with curiosity and flexibility — she loves following a recipe the first time to understand its logic, then riffing on it in subsequent rounds to make it her own. Her kitchen is well-used and slightly chaotic, which she considers a sign of a home that takes food seriously.

Her absolute favorite meal to cook is a slow-roasted chicken with herbs and lemon. She describes it as the dish she returns to when she wants to feel grounded and nourished — the kind of cooking that fills a home with warmth and smell and the quiet satisfaction of doing something simple extraordinarily well. She serves it with roasted vegetables and crusty bread, and she says no restaurant meal has ever made her feel quite as satisfied as this one does.

For weeknight cooking, Alliandra is devoted to a shakshuka recipe she developed over about a year of tweaking. She makes it with crushed tomatoes, harissa, roasted red peppers, and a generous hand with the cumin and smoked paprika. Eggs poached directly in the sauce, fresh herbs scattered on top, and thick slices of sourdough on the side. She says it’s the perfect meal for any time of day and any mood, and it comes together in under thirty minutes.

When it comes to sweets, Alliandra’s heart belongs to anything involving dark chocolate and sea salt. Her go-to baking project is a brown butter chocolate chip cookie that she says took about fifteen attempts to get exactly right. The brown butter adds a nutty depth, the dark chocolate chips provide intensity, and the flaky salt finish ties everything together. She bakes a batch whenever she has guests and they always disappear within hours.

Alliandra’s Favorite Places to Visit

Travel shapes Alliandra in profound ways. She’s not drawn to bucket-list destinations for their own sake — she wants to go somewhere and feel genuinely changed by it. Her favorite trips have been the ones where she showed up with minimal agenda and left with an entirely new relationship to a place or a culture.

Her single favorite destination is Lisbon, Portugal. She went for the first time on a solo trip that she almost cancelled, and she describes the city as one of the most emotionally alive places she’s ever been. The light is extraordinary, the food is extraordinary, the music is extraordinary, and the pace of life feels like a kind of permission slip to be more present and less hurried. She’s been back twice and would go again tomorrow.

She also has a profound fondness for the Japanese countryside, particularly the Noto Peninsula in Ishikawa Prefecture. It’s a place that most international visitors overlook entirely, which is precisely why she loves it. She spent a week there staying in a traditional ryokan, eating seafood that had been caught that morning, and walking along coastlines where she barely saw another person for hours. It reset something in her that she hadn’t even known was out of alignment.

Closer to home, Alliandra treasures a small coastal town that she visits every summer and refuses to disclose the name of, partly because she loves it too much to risk it becoming crowded. She’ll say only that it has the best fried clams she’s ever eaten, a used bookstore that she could spend entire days inside, and an evening light that makes everything look like a painting.

Alliandra’s Favorite Podcasts and Shows

Alliandra is deliberate about her media consumption. She’s not someone who has the television on as background noise — when she watches something, she’s watching it with full attention, and she only sticks with shows that feel like they’re earning that attention.

Her favorite podcast right now is one that sits at the intersection of science, philosophy, and human meaning. She loves it for the depth of its conversations and the generosity with which the host approaches complicated ideas, never dumbing things down but also never making listeners feel inadequate for not already knowing everything.

For television, Alliandra’s list of all-time favorites includes Fleabag at the very top. She says there’s nothing she can say about it that hasn’t already been said, but that it manages to be simultaneously one of the funniest and most heartbreaking pieces of storytelling she’s encountered in any medium. She’s watched the full series three times and suspects she’ll watch it several more.

She also loves The Bear for its relentless intensity and its surprisingly tender heart, and she thinks it’s one of the most accurate portraits of creative obsession she’s ever seen depicted on screen. The anxiety it generates in viewers is intentional and effective, and she admires how the show trusts its audience to stay with the discomfort rather than offering easy release.

Alliandra’s Favorite Wellness Habits

Wellness is a word Alliandra uses carefully because she’s seen how easily it tips into something performative or punishing. For her, wellness means practices that genuinely make her feel better — not more productive, not more disciplined, but more alive and more at ease in her own body and mind.

The habit she credits most with changing her quality of life is a consistent morning walk taken without her phone. She walks for thirty to forty minutes most mornings, without headphones, without podcasts, without anything to look at except the world around her. She says this practice did more for her mental clarity and emotional regulation than almost anything else she’s tried, and she describes it as the foundation everything else is built on.

She also maintains a loose journaling practice that she approaches without pressure. Some mornings she writes for twenty minutes; some weeks she barely opens the notebook. She says the goal is never output — it’s just creating a habit of checking in with herself and being honest about how she actually feels rather than how she thinks she should feel.

Sleep is something Alliandra is religious about in a way she says took her years to fully embrace. She’s deeply protective of her sleep schedule, keeps her bedroom cold and dark, avoids screens for the last hour before bed, and has a consistent wind-down routine that she says she guards as carefully as any other appointment in her calendar.

Alliandra’s Favorite Things to Do on a Sunday

If you want to understand what someone truly values, look at how they spend their slow days. Alliandra’s ideal Sunday is not particularly glamorous, and she loves that about it.

It begins with that unhurried morning walk, followed by an extended coffee ritual — she grinds her beans fresh, uses a pour-over setup, and gives the whole process more time and attention than it technically requires. She’s not in a rush. That’s the whole point.

Sundays are when she does her most leisurely reading. Not the kind of reading she does on weeknights, sneaking twenty pages before she falls asleep, but several uninterrupted hours in a comfortable chair where she actually loses track of time. She calls this one of the purest pleasures available to her, and she’s serious about protecting it.

Late Sunday afternoons are often spent cooking something that takes time — a braise, a homemade pasta, something that fills the apartment with smell and requires just enough attention to feel meditative. She finds that cooking without time pressure, purely for the pleasure of the process, is one of the most reliably restorative things she does.

Sundays end early. By nine o’clock she’s usually winding down, and she considers this a form of self-respect rather than a limitation.

Final Thoughts: What Alliandra’s Favorites Reveal

Looking at this list as a whole, a certain portrait emerges. Alliandra’s favorites are not defined by trendiness, exclusivity, or luxury for its own sake. What connects them is a consistent preference for things that are genuinely good — things that hold up over time, that reward sustained attention, that make ordinary life feel a little richer and more meaningful.

There’s also something notable about the quietness of this list. The pleasures here are mostly slow ones: books, long walks, food cooked with care, travel that asks something of you, sleep that you actually protect. In a world that constantly pushes speed, novelty, and optimization, Alliandra’s favorites represent a gentle counter-argument — that the best things in life are usually the ones you have to slow down enough to actually experience.

That’s the kind of list worth making, and worth reading.