Three announcements from the editorial side of our headquarters on Vallejo:

Our new wine and spirits writer, aka The Drinker, is Jordan Mackay. A regular New York Times contributor, Mackay is also author of last year’s Passion for Pinot and coauthor (with big-name sommelier Rajat Parr, of RN74) of an upcoming book about the sommelier life. It’s hard to see how he ever stops thinking about drinking: He works as a bartender at Cantina for fun, and he’s married to one of San Francisco’s top som­meliers, Christie Dufault. I like that he writes so calmly about how wine and cocktails taste, as if he were actually experiencing the sensations rather than exclaiming about them.

Now handling California coverage for us, starting with their zinger brief on the state’s gubernatorial race in The Talk (“Who Wants to Captain the Titanic?”), is the reporting team of Jerry Roberts and Phil Trounstine. Their names are familiar to political junkies: Roberts used to run the Chronicle’s newsroom and penned a bio of Di-Fi, while Trounstine did stints as the Mercury’s political editor and as Gray Davis’s press guy. Then, last year, they successfully reinvented themselves for the digital age by creating Calbuzz, a fearless website on state government with hilariously tabloidesque headlines—in which Meg Whitman is known as eMeg and Jerry Brown as Crusty—and the brainiest analysis around.

Finally, the news about San Francisco’s style director, Elizabeth Varnell, is no news at all: Any reader who pays close attention to the trendspotting she orchestrates in our pages is the most clued-in person at the party. This month, for “Saving Our Skin,” Varnell asked contributing writer Joanne Furio to investigate the booming local skincare industry.

Who knew the Bay Area was a beauty hub? Varnell did, once she snooped out that Bryan Meehan, founder of the influential global skincare line Nude, was quietly looking to relocate from the U.K. to the Bay Area. Then she began counting how many (almost 30) noteworthy companies making natural and organic skincare products were already headquartered here. Varnell also understood why you would care about this trend. This is a local movement of inventive founders—more akin to chefs than to chemists—who stress the use of natural ingredients in their products and sound like consumer-safety advocates when they explain how toxins have infiltrated our medicine cabinets.

For more-than-skin-deep locals, this new niche of products is catnip: They can have their high-quality moisturizer and eat it, too. “Women used to say, ‘OK, I’ll try it, but I don’t like how it feels, it smells weird, the packaging is ugly, and it probably won’t work,’ ” Varnell says of the former generation of natural products on store shelves. “But now there are so many great options. The natural face oils are better than the creams on the market, and the sunscreens and moisturizers have caught up, too.”

Varnell believes it’s only a matter of time before the editors of Vogue and the like zero in on this trend as well. “If you’re into the beauty world, you don’t say, ‘I’m going to give up my Chanel eye cream.’ You just don’t. But most of the ingredients in these new products are actually recognizable—there’s a much lower incidence of red dye no. 2 or phenyl-propyl-whatever. And they work. So people will figure it out eventually.”