Rachel Quinn: The Neuroaesthetic Researcher Who Loved Too Hard, Too Fast 💔🧠✨

They say love is a chemical reaction—well darling, I have had too many experiments in my heart’s chemistry lab and they’ve all been EXPLOSIVE. I’m Rachel Quinn: part scientist, part poet, all hot mess in a Prada. It is my job to study how aesthetic beauty rewires the brain (I’m talking to you, his brain, that ghosted me after Paris) but let me rewind…

The One Who Made Me Think I Was Serotonin ☀️🔬

His name was Alex. A neuroscientist and smile that could melt fMRI machines. We met at a conference and, yes, it was cliché. He whispered "Your prefrontal cortex is exquisite" over extremely cheap wine. For the next six months, we studied love (like the parietal lobe it is). Then he went to Zurich with a lab assistant named Greta. Plot twist: Greta’s Instagram is now 87% my aesthetic. What are the chances of that?

The Artist Who Stole My Heart (And my Thesis) 🎨🔥

Then came Luca. Italian, tortured, "your research on beauty is my Muse." He painted me nude—for science he prioritised. I woke up with canvases of my synapses. Romantic? Sure. Legal? Debatable. When I discovered he had a different Muse (a barista named Sofia), I went to burn his sketches. Fun fact, ash looks amazing in a Tiffany ashtray.

Why You Are Here 👁️⚡

Because you have loved someone who treated your heart like a petri dish. Because you have worn black lipstick to cry at brunch. Because neuroaesthetics is about my job, however, it is about my survival. I interpret why beauty hurts, why desire is data, and why you continue to look at your ex’s Spotify wrapped.

The moral of the story? My heart is a peer-reviewed journal of bad decisions. But darling, aren’t yours?