I Never Made It Back to Amsterdam

We took a school trip to Amsterdam once—smoked ourselves into near-oblivion behind some student bar near the canal—and then three Dutch girls materialized out of nowhere. Emma, Sophie, Madelief. Tall, blonde, each of them exhaling smoke in a way that made conversation impossible. I was too intimidated to say a single word, but I’ve been a little in love with the Netherlands ever since.

Tiffany van Roest is 23, from Soest, and she shot for Playboy’s April 2019 issue. She works in a stable for aging horses and has two of her own that she looks after every day. The shoot apparently went well from the start—she relaxed almost immediately, which doesn’t surprise me once you know she goes to saunas regularly and is just generally someone who is comfortable without clothes on. She and the photographer had a genuinely good time, by her own account. When she saw the pictures, she was satisfied. No drama about it.

What she says she finds attractive in a man: dark hair, brown eyes, stubble, and someone who laughs while he flirts. She wears almost no makeup, which tracks with someone who spends most of her days outdoors with animals. Her big dream is a house with land—enough space for her horses, enough space to breathe. She’s single and specific about what she wants. She just hasn’t found it yet.

There’s a kind of person who poses for Playboy out of vanity, and a kind who does it out of a genuine ease with their body. Tiffany reads like the second type. The stable, the saunas, the barely-there makeup, the clear-eyed statement that she knows exactly what she wants from a partner—none of that sounds like performance. It sounds like someone who happens to be very attractive and doesn’t make a project of it.

I still haven’t been back to Amsterdam.