Shutter Your Business, Millie Bobby Brown

Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! I’m fresh off of a fever-laced week of Covid — my third time and maybe the worst one yet — and my brain is still not fully functioning. I walked past someone wearing a lot of (pleasantly scented) perfume in the hallway of my apartment building this morning and considered complimenting them by saying, “Oh, you’re so smelly!”, the thought of which continues to make me laugh.

Anyway!

I’ve been working on a piece about The Substance and the Oscars that hasn’t quite come together yet, so in the meantime, today’s round-up of links/rants/posts is free for all.

IN THIS ISSUE: Milly Bobby Brown! Republican aesthetics! Synthetic braids! Product recalls! Retinol! Body hair! Blursh! Boom Boom! Lickable perfume! A size-exclusive remake of Hairspray! The state of feminism! Against purity! & more!

The latest issue of New York Magazine details the “boom boom” aesthetic, or the recent return of the “in-your-face glamour and visible hierarchy of the 1980s and early ’90s … Boom boom is looking like you’ve spent money for the sake of looking like you’ve spent money.” Two things. One: The heightened beauty standards of the 1980s materialized as part of a backlash to the feminist movements of the 1970s, as Naomi Wolf lays out in The Beauty Myth (RIP Wolf’s once-wonderful mind). Today’s resurgence, at least as applied to the body, is a backlash to the feminist movements of the 2010s. Two: Boom boom is just “the sale gaze” (more here, here, here) by another name.

Related: The Financial Times reports on “the sobering new state of feminism” and it’s not great. Thirty-six percent of women under 30 and 57% of men in the same age bracket believe the quest for gender equality has gone too far.

Skincare brand Futurewise is shutting down. Does this mean the people are finally over slugging??

P.E. Moskowitz takes on “Republican makeup” and “Mar-A-Lago face” in their newsletter :

“The reason Republican women have become excruciatingly rigid in their definitions of beauty, to the point that they look like caricatures of themselves, is because it gives them definitional power to say, ‘this is what gender is,’ and thus to say, ‘this is what everything in the world is. The world is what I say it is. Believe it. Or else.’ That is why they hate trans people so much—because they represent the revolutionary power of un-defining and redefining things.”

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Consumer Reports tested 10 synthetic braiding hair samples and found carcinogens in all of them.

A week later, L’Oreal recalled one lot of its La Roche-Posay Effaclar Duo due to trace contamination with carcinogenic benzene. The product features the popular acne-treating ingredient benzoyl peroxide which, under certain conditions, can break down and form benzene (and is not even very good for treating acne long-term).

I can’t stop thinking about the juxtaposition of Julia Fox’s “body hair” dress and the absence of body hair:

See also: Sarah Paulson’s “stomach fat” dress in the absence of stomach fat:

Speaking of which: Vogue recreated Hairspray by casting the very thin Gigi Hadid in place of the film’s iconic fat protagonist Tracy Turnblad. 10/10 advertisement for the Ozempic era. No notes!

Amorecco recently announced the launch of its Lickable Parfum in Late Night Gelato, which it calls “the world’s first lickable perfume.” This is Jessica Simpson Dessert Treats Body Mist erasure!! Jessica Simpson released her edible fragrances over 20 years ago, in 2004. (I wrote about them as a marker of the ephedra weight loss pill era back in 2022.)

Oh, Milly Bobby Brown. The actress is speaking out about being media-shamed for her beauty choices and asking for the widespread criticism of her conventionally good looks to stop. “Not just for me,” Brown said, “but for every young girl who deserves to grow up without fear of being torn apart for simply existing.” I feel for her. I do. However. Millie Bobby Brown helms a cosmetic company that generates $30 million a year by framing near-universal physical traits as problems to be solved — essentially, tearing young girls apart for “simply existing” (although the tone is of course upbeat and positive) and profiting from it.

The Florence By Mills site proclaims that uneven skin tone must be “corrected” and dull complexions “revitalized.” “Tired, puffy skin” must “wake up” so that “dark circles” can disappear, and acne must be “shielded” against, as if it were a weapon. As founder, she equates “glowing” with being “happier” and encourages customers to “discover instant glass skin” (a beauty standard that’s inadvisable from both physical and psychological standpoints). Be the change you wish to see in the world, Millie. Shutter your business!!!

Need a refresher on the horrifying history of retinol? Kim Kelly goes deep on the origins of the beauty industry’s most in-demand ingredient for Teen Vogue.

“Before Retin-A was approved by the FDA in 1971, it had been tested on hundreds of incarcerated people in Philadelphia as part of a long-running program led by dermatologist Albert Kligman. Between 1951 and 1974, Dr. Kligman and his team experimented on scores of vulnerable people, a majority of whom were Black and being held in the now-closed Holmesburg Prison. The goal was to produce pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and also chemical warfare agents. The male test subjects endured “patch tests,” in which untested creams and toxic chemicals were smeared on their backs, faces, and arms, as well as biopsies of their flesh and organs, mysterious injections, and a host of other medical procedures.”

The most chilling quote from the piece: “My daddy’s skin is in those jars,” said Adrianne Jones-Alston, whose father was one of Dr. Kligman’s incarcerated subjects, at a panel about restorative justice.

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A few weeks ago, I wrote about the rise of products that “blur.” (Tarte Shape Tape Blur Stick Concealer, Revolution Beauty Air Blur Lipstick, Tower28’s GetSet Blur + Set Matte Powder Blush, Danessa Myricks Beauty Yummy Skin Blurring Balm Powder.) Add Beauty Bay Blursh and Cocokind Ceramide Lip Blur Balm to the list! So why is blur booming right now? As paid subscribers already read, I think the answer lies in Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, Or The Style Of Too-Late Capitalism. If postmodernism was the style of late capitalism, immediacy is the style of today’s “too-late capitalism,” Kornbluh writes, and blur is one of immediacy’s defining characteristics. “The colloquial connotation of immediacy as ‘urgency’ underlines the temporal dimension of this style, a hurry-hurry that compresses time into a tingling present.” (In relation to beauty, this is most noticeable in the wrinkle-blurring technology of anti-aging products.) “Where postmodernism revels in mediation — intertextuality, irony, the meta — immediacy negates mediation to effect flow and indistinction,” she continues. “Where postmodernism aesthetically activates pastiche … immediacy precipitates blur, a demediated meld.” Demediated Meld Matte Powder doesn’t have quite the same ring to it, though.

More recommended reading:

• “How Balding Treatments Became the New Botox” by Bianca Bosker for The Cut

• “A lot of Oscar dresses looked a little too perfect” by Rachel Tashjian for The Washington Post

• “What Does It Take to Quit Shopping? Mute, Delete and Unsubscribe” by Jordyn Holman and Aimee Ortiz for The New York Times

• “Against A Politics Of Purity” by Kate Manne for

Finally, I’ll leave you with this pseudoscientific organization of “Types Of Aging” from a nurse practitioner on Instagram — concluding with what she calls the “Deformation Type” (!!!) which appears to mean “growing older while having a round face.” The medical gaze is a menace to society.

You’re Gonna Die Someday No Matter How Young You Look,

Jessica