"Five More Minutes" : The comfort beauty podcast for girls who think too much, by @daralevitan and @carlyrivlin.

Five More Minutes is what happens when two best friends and beauty experts turn getting ready into the juiciest form of therapy. Think a hybrid between a high school sleepover and sitting on the bathroom counter while your funniest friends unpack their entire worldview in real time, surrounded by lip glosses, emotional baggage and at least one mildly concerning opinion.

Hosted by Dara Levitan and Carly Rivlin, the internet’s newest beauty-coded comfort podcast covers product recommendations and makeup tips as thoroughly as it does dating spirals, identity crises, female friendship, trichotillomania and OCD. Which is precisely why the internet can’t enough.

Makeup is spilling out of the vanity drawers. One girl is oversharing. The other is ranting. Nobody is pretending to have life fully figured out. But during it all, Dara is still explaining the correct way to shade match concealer and Carly is breaking down the basics of a double cleanse.

The hook is beauty. The actual subject is modern girlhood.

Dara, a professionally trained makeup artist turned internet personality (and now Summer House S10 cast member), built her TikTok audience by making beauty feel less like performance art and more like emotional support from day one. Carly, an unapologetically honest beauty guru known for her layered lip care wisdom, brings the energy equal to that of the friend whose recommendations immediately override your own free will.

Together, the dynamic is explosive. Neither of them sound trained for the camera, but both sound like girls who still send each other seven-minute voice notes and occasionally enable each other’s bad decisions.

Five More Minutes understands that “girlhood” isn’t one fixed aesthetic or personality type. It’s contradictory. Sometimes deeply intelligent, sometimes irrational, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes emotionally avoidant, sometimes aspirational, sometimes embarrassing. The girls discuss all of it with the kind of honesty and vulnerability usually reserved for a 1am phone call post-menty b.

At a time when Gen-Z is exhausted by over-polished aspirational content and podcast hosts performing emotional intelligence like a brand strategy, Five More Minutes feels refreshingly un-curated.

Instead, the podcast leans closer to the emotional chaos of a real bathroom conversation between best friends who know each other too well to fake anything.

Which makes sense, considering the podcast’s origin story. Dara and Carly approached Five More Minutes more like building a world than simply launching content. Every detail – from the cinematic set design to the conversational tone to the way products are physically integrated into the episodes themselves – reflects a level of intentionality that sits much closer to television than traditional podcasting.

So naturally, we asked Dara and Carly to spend an unfiltered five more minutes with Fluent – which quickly turned into significantly more than five, because, duh, we’re just girls.

We sat down with Dara and Carly to unpack building a business with someone who has witnessed every version of your frontal lobe development, friendship politics, internet-induced psychosis, emotional support makeup products and literally everything in between.

#FluentExclusive

What's harder: dating without your best friend's approval or building a business with them?

CARLY: Dating without your best friend's approval, because men are terrible. There's an extra factor that's unpredictable and largely nefarious.

DARA: With Five More Minutes, we all share the same brain. We have the same goals and outlook. No men involved.

CARLY: Agree.

What's more intimate: building a business together or dating someone?

DARA: How do you define intimacy? It depends where you're at in the dating process. Both involve giving trust to another. Both involve merging finances, if you get married.

CARLY: Also, I just feel like if you're building a business together, it's so hard to lie to a best friend. (I'm just kidding. Don't put that in.)

What's a fight that only happens between female co-founders?

DARA: All I can think of is really detail-oriented things, like dying on the hill of a creative, detail-oriented choice.

CARLY: Or in a podcast sense, if you guys both have the same good side. Or who's wearing what in which episode, especially because our closets are so similar. We're lucky because our coloring is similar, but imagine if you couldn't decide on a color palette.

Why do you think girls are craving comfort content right now instead of aspirational perfection?

DARA: I think it's indicative of the way the relationship with influencers has evolved. People are seeking more friendship, relatability. Creators are just their online friends, as opposed to people they aspire to be. Which is why we wanted the pod to just feel like you're sitting with your girls, chatting, getting ready, girlhood-y things. With a bit of aspirational content thrown in.

CARLY: Any time I get a warm, fuzzy feeling, it's never looking at a girl who I'm comparing myself to and thinking I can never be that way. The most connective, substantial moments that happen through social media are the dismantling of “my life is perfect… I'm perfect… I always look good.” That's not real life.

DARA: I always say I don't know if my career would look this way if TikTok wasn't a thing, because I never connected with the perfectionism that existed on Instagram and never found my groove chasing that. Even when I try to come off perfect, it's such a f*cking lie. It would just never land.

What is the most chronically online female experience nobody talks about enough?

CARLY: I think both of our sense of humor is very online, and we stim out all the time. I think that's a part of our female, chronically online character traits or whatever.

DARA: Maybe what isn't talked about enough is just that it's an extension of compare and despair, but constantly feeling like you need the next new thing.

What beauty product genuinely changed your life?

DARA: Spray milky toners changed my life. Genuinely, there's no product I use more. The convenience, the immediate result. It allows me to continue using skincare throughout the day. And I feel like that's why my skin looks healthy, because I'm constantly giving it hydration.

CARLY: So, not necessarily a product, but a treatment…facials have changed my life. I can't live without facials. If you were to say you can only do one thing to your face and body for the rest of your life, it would be a facial.

DARA: Hair powder with my trich. The anxiety that I feel if I forgot that somewhere on a trip or something... I'll just use eyeshadow instead, because it's my number one insecurity at this point. That little Divi stick.

CARLY: I think also maybe it's a bit New York City specific, but a filtered shower head has changed my life.

What beauty product is pure marketing propaganda?

CARLY: I think it's less about the product and more the terms that have become so normalized in marketing. Like medical-grade skincare and the clean beauty movement – it's just marketing words that people have attached to products and then created exclusivity around. A medical-grade product isn't necessarily better than a non-medical-grade product. They're all thoroughly tested before they're put on the market.

What's something women pretend not to care about, but absolutely do?

DARA: What men have to say.

What's a bad habit you secretly think makes people more interesting?

DARA: It’s not a bad habit, but people who rewatch the same movies and shows over and over and over again and don't ever watch anything new. That could be seen as a bad habit, but it probably means they're neurodivergent, and therefore, extra interesting.

CARLY: Also, anxiety. Well, that’s not a bad habit, just reality. Or, I love people who have obsessions with odd foods.

What's one thing the internet ruined for women?

DARA: I feel like the wedding industry, and like the timelessness of weddings and the pressure of bachelorettes. With so many cooks in the kitchen and really unrealistic expectations, you almost have to (if you're gonna do anything) go against the grain.

CARLY: Similar to that, I think that the internet has ruined women's ability to just exist without criticism. The wedding industry is a good example of timelessness versus not, and how someone should wear their hair on their wedding day. I don't have an opinion about the way that somebody else decides to spend one of the best days of their lives.

What's the female friendship equivalent of a breakup?

DARA & CARLY: A friendship breakup IS a breakup. It’s the same. Period.

What's your most irrational beauty or life belief that you'll defend forever?

CARLY: I actually reject this question, because everything that we believe in and we'll defend to death is rational, because we believe it. We rationalize anything.

DARA: That I do actually need every single pinky brown lip liner that the market has to offer. And having however many blushes. They are all different and all necessary.

CARLY: And there's no such thing as having too much makeup. I will die on that hill.

DARA: An irrational life belief... your birthday lasts an entire month. Calories don't count on your period. And your animals are your children.

CARLY: My most irrational life take is that I gave birth to my dog, yeah, vaginally, without an epidural. Winston Bean is my firstborn son.

DARA: Also, you're allowed to lie on a first date if you already know you hate them.

What's a "cool girl" behavior you think women should retire?

DARA: Pretending to be chill for a man is probably the number one thing.

CARLY: And the notion of a try-hard. What's so embarrassing about trying? Trying means that you care.

DARA: Amen. And lying about injectables, like “oh, I'm just natural.” If you are, let me bask in the glow of your flawlessness. But if you're not, let us discuss.

CARLY: I also think we need to retire the “not like other girls” discourse. I will say verbatim what I said on the pod – I am the amalgamation of every woman who I've ever met in my life, and I think that's to be celebrated, not shunned.

What's been the most meaningful thing about starting a podcast with your best friend?

DARA & CARLY: It’s a love letter to our communities and re-claiming a deeper version of ourselves that we can’t show in a short and sweet TikTok video.

DARA: For me, it feels like I can rest comfortably in a more unfiltered format. And that's what I want most of all, beyond all of the makeup, just to show more of myself. As just sort of a declaration to my community that “I love you guys and I trust you guys.” And let's get even closer and cozier.

CARLY: Sometimes we joke that “I’m just a girl.” I think we also talk a lot about how girlhood is a spectrum, and there are so many layers to being a woman in modern society. There's only so far you can get with short-form video content.

DARA: And no matter what comes as a result of it, at the end of the day, this is for ourselves, for each other and for our community. And there's an ease and joy to that, knowing I don't care what anyone else thinks.