We don't need this
Is beauty culture just the diet culture of our faces?
I used to be a card carrying member of the beauty industry. I loved makeup — it was the only form of painting I ever felt good at. It was a satisfying transformation, a creative and colorful display of my proficiency of highlighting “desirable” features and contouring the rest away into the shadows. It was fun. I used to spend a literal hour or more ceremoniously navigating brushes and choosing powders and sponging liquids in the mirror, dusting and sculpting and blending and blurring, moving slowly and precisely, transforming my canvas from the unfortunate bore of human skin into a polished painting. Though I never did it professionally, I was asked to do the makeup of several brides on their wedding day. I watched tutorials on YouTube. I made tutorials on YouTube. I truly enjoyed it.
But this application of full-on Hot Girl Drag (to borrow the words of Jessie Kneeland) was an occurrence that only happened every so often: a dinner out, an event, a photo shoot. And in the meantime, when I wasn’t playing with makeup, I was collecting skincare products.
My bathroom cabinets overflowed with vials and bottles and lotions and potions, serums and masks and oils: blemish erasing, wrinkle smoothing, tone evening, brightening, tightening, moisturizing, all promising to transform the unfortunate bore of human skin into a polished painting, no makeup required.
As I was espousing the tenets of body liberation and helping my students unlearn the harmful false equivalency of thinness/fitness and health/wellbeing, it somehow entirely seemed to evade me just how much diet culture shares with beauty culture. While I was never quite ashamed of my skin (in the way I was once ashamed of my body), and I never, ever considered skincare or other superficial practices or marketable consumer goods as “self care” (eye roll), the fact was that I was missing the forest for the trees: oblivious to the incessant messaging from the beauty industry selling perfection and eternal youth (?), instead focusing on the “fun” products I liked to collect and apply.