From Gaza To Girlhood

Today, a look back at 2024 in The Review of Beauty — with nary a beauty product review in sight. Here are your 10 most-read articles of the year:

On Gen Alpha’s obsession with skincare products.

Because what is girlhood? To defend girlhood we must first define it; as in, how is it different from childhood? Kids mimic the behavior of the adults around them. That’s a normal and healthy part of childhood for children of all genders. Girlhood differs (mostly) in its social conditioning — what behaviors to mimic, and why. Manipulating your own physical appearance to meet an often unattainable, often inhuman ideal is not an interest inherent to tween and teen girls! It’s one that’s indoctrinated. (Perhaps this is partly why the same demographic is experiencing record rates of loneliness, anxiety, depression. They aren’t learning to understand themselves as human beings, but to perform themselves as girls.)

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Books will not save you from beauty culture.

This Lolita — the independent woman-child, the fiction of a fiction — has informed decades of beauty industry offerings. Revlon’s “Young Blush” promised “innocent color” in 1970. Love’s Baby Soft claimed “innocence is sexier than you think” in 1974 and Maybelline marketed its Kissing Slicks as “not as innocent as they seem” in 1979. Lines can be drawn between these and more modern iterations of youth-as-beauty-as-sex-appeal-as-empowerment: a makeup line for children called Petite ‘N’ Pretty, an Into The Gloss how-to column for adult women who want to “look like a Disney star in their prime”, Maybelline Baby Lips Lip Balm in Pink Lolita, Jessica Simpson Dessert Treats cosmetics, Marc Jacobs Oh, Lola! perfume, Kat Von D Lolita Red Lipstick, Kat Von D Underage Red Lipstick, Lana-core, doe eyes, doll skin, faux-freckles, all of it — or some of all of it, at least — traced back to a book.

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Would Audre Lorde recognize “self-care” today? Would we recognize her?

The post-2016 obsession with conventional beauty isn’t a coincidence. It’s a cultural reaction to far right politics, and one that conveniently furthers the movement’s goals. Think of it as the aesthetic arm of trad-wifery² — a promise that women can find peace, ease, and fulfillment by retreating not into the traditional roles of wife and mother, but into the traditional role of object.³ It’s effective across the political spectrum because “object” does not have a single, easily identifiable “look” (natural or glam, classic or alternative, catering to the male gaze or seemingly rejecting it). The point isn’t the adoption of a particular cosmetic trend; the point is the labor involved in the adoption of any particular cosmetic trend⁴. The no-makeup makeup and OSEA skincare beloved by Ballerina Farm and the fake lashes and full lips of “bimbo feminists” both demand women invest a not-insignificant portion of their personal power (time, money, energy, headspace) into the impossible, unending, and often compulsory pursuit of standardized beauty. With the recent reelection of President Trump, 2016 is here again. The political chaos will probably play out the same way — strategically for beauty brands, if innocently enough for consumers. (As one Gen Z woman told the Telegraph, she spent big at the Sephora sale “to cope with the election.”)

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Will you (anonymously) answer some questions for me?

“You have to love the hair in order to love the vagina,” Eve Ensler writes in The Vagina Monologues. “You can’t pick the parts you want.” But enough about love. We do pick the parts. We shape, shave, sugar, wax, laser the hair. We surgically slice and snip the labia. We tighten one hole, brighten the other.

Read the results of the poll on The Guardian.

The Don’t Buy List: Issue #79

Lots of people are talking about celebrities dissolving their fillers (Kylie Jenner, Paige Lorenze, Olivia Culpo); not a lot of people are connecting that to a recent press release from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery:

AAFPRS notes that “a growing body of evidence and reports in the popular press suggest that the use of certain fillers may complicate future facelifts.” Personally, I don’t think The Great Dissolve has anything to do with acceptance, pushing back against beauty standards, etc. It likely has more to do with growing knowledge about filler complications and the fact that face lifts are surging in popularity while “the average age of facelift patients has gone down.” Those with the means are opting (or will opt) for more extreme anti-aging measures.

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The Don’t Buy List: Issue #77

The Great Skinfantilization is here. E.l.f. Cosmetics is now marketing on Roblox, a gaming platform where “42.3 percent of users are under 13 years old.” Starface just launched its new Star Balm product by collaborating with North West (11 years old) and Kim Kardashian (43); it’s also made putting stickers on your face an ageless style statement, reports the Washington Post. Not unrelated: expectant mother Hailey Bieber is trying to make “baby cheek flush” blush happen — like “the flush a baby gets after a really good nap.”

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The Don’t Buy List: Issue #68

It’s Women’s History Month and plastic surgeons are celebrating by introducing a brand new specialty: revisional labiaplasty. The technique was developed to fix botched labiaplasties, of which there are apparently many, since so many women want them and so few doctors are properly trained to perform them yet perform them anyway. The PR angle on the email I received about this was “vaginal wellness,” but it all sounds pretty sick to me!!

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No, Bella Baxter would not wear Pillow Talk Big Lip Plumpgasm Lip Gloss.

Viewers meet Bella (Emma Stone) in Victorian-era London. She’s a female version of Frankenstein’s monster, assembled and animated by a scientist named God, formally known as Godwin Baxter (Willem Dafoe). Much has been made of this character name — oh, God creating his ideal woman, how trite, how misogynistic, etc. — but God is named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, who inspired the character of Victor Frankenstein, and Poor Things is based on the 1992 Alasdair Gray book Poor Things, which is itself inspired by Frankenstein.

Traces of Shelley’s mother, women’s rights activist Mary Wollstonecraft, show up in all three works as well. “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” Wollstonecraft once wrote. She wasn’t talking about capital-B Beauty — poetic beauty — but a specific kind of physical beauty: obedient beauty, beauty that communicates an understanding of and submission to the rules of womanhood, beauty as the literal application of the rules of womanhood to the body. Beauty as the aesthetic of polite society.

And what if women weren’t taught to keep up appearances “from infancy”?

This is the question at the center of Poor Things, one it attempts to answer by putting an infant’s brain in Bella’s adult body¹ and sending her out into the world, uncaged, without the gendered lessons of girlhood to guide her. As her mind matures — from that of a toddler, to an adolescent discovering masturbation (with an apple! origin of all sin!), to a horny teen fucking (“Why do people not just do this all the time?”) and reading philosophy (“Emerson speaks about the improvement of men … Perhaps he does not know any women”), to, finally, an embodied adult — her behavior highlights how social norms sever us from instinct, curiosity, common sense, caring.

Bella asks us to see the absurdity of normalcy.

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An interview on the Botox Paradox with Laura Pitcher for Dazed.

We do have a lot of studies on how neuromodulators like Botox and Xeomin or Dysport actually can affect the way we both process other people’s emotions and express our own emotions. They change the way we connect and communicate with others — even reducing our capacity to feel empathy — by freezing our muscles and eliminating our ability to make microexpressions and mirror other people’s expressions.

Microexpressions and mirroring are forms of unconscious, nonverbal communication. They happen in a fraction of a second, outside of our control. This is just part of our ability to communicate with people. Everyone can recognize and mirror microexpressions, regardless of what language you’re speaking, so it’s sort of this universal language that plays an evolutionary role in connecting us — in helping us feel for others, and understand what other people are feeling, and even understand what we’re feeling ourselves. And so I do have to wonder if there’s a link between the rising rates of Botox use, the fact that people are getting neuromodulator injections younger and younger, and the same demographics experiencing feelings of loneliness and disconnection, as well as romantic and sexual frustration.

Culturally, we do not prioritize deep feeling, or a full experience of life. We prioritize status and aestheticizing our lives, and we’re rewarded for that. The paradox of Botox is that so many of us get it because we think it will enhance our lives. What we’re actually doing is 1) perpetuating the standard that made us feel bad in the first place and 2) limiting our potential to connect and communicate and empathize with others — which, I might argue, are the only things that make our lives meaningful.

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On beauty products, local politics, and Palestine.

Being so immersed in the beauty space, there is one image from Gaza I can’t get out of my head. Pictures have surfaced of Israeli soldiers looting civilian homes in Palestine. They hold up lingerie that belonged to women who were forced out of their houses at best or killed at worst, and they smile for the camera. The soldiers sometimes bring the spoils back to their wives. One of them posted a snapshot of her stolen presents to social media, including a plastic bag overflowing with makeup — eyeshadow, eyeliner, blush, foundation, lipstick. She called the products “gifts from Gaza.”

It made me think of a scene from The Zone of Interest, a recent film about the Holocaust centered on Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his family. In the film, the commandant’s wife applies red lipstick looted from a Jewish home, admires herself in the mirror, smacks her lips. She later asks her husband to bring her more “goodies” from the Jewish women now living, and soon dying, in the concentration camps.

The movie asks us to consider the mundanity that masks the terror around us.

But the makeup from Gaza is not a prop in a movie, and it is not mundane. It is beyond defense. It is dehumanization — reducing a person to a product to a trophy. It is the obliteration of the Palestinian people — stealing not only their lives, but the tools they used to craft and care for and adorn those lives; killing not only their bodies, but the spirit infused in all the things that touched those bodies — like lipstick that once pressed against a mouth that breathed and ate and spoke and kissed and prayed and screamed.

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Thanks for supporting the newsletter this year.

-Jessica