Today we’re talking about: The Jeff Koons-ian packaging of the new Marc Jacobs Beauty products [2:00], lip balm for boys inspired by AK-47s [9:27], conjoined twin-core [14:15], accessorizing with teeth [23:30], fake tans vs. suntans [35:00], the final word on James Charles [41:00], a bizarre literary/skincare crossover [1:10:00], a Met Gala recap (Bad Bunny’s aging prosthetics! The Kardashians’ simulated nipples! Eileen Gu’s bubbles!) [1:19:55], the Queen of Cannes [2:05:27], and a dramatic reading of Rosie O’Donnell’s facelift reveal poem [2:08:40]. Plus more!

Media we mentioned: “Meet The Lipsdick: A Dick-Shaped Lipstick” [FLESH WORLD], “MJ Corey Will Make You Love The Kardashians” [Interview], Someday Perfect [Kat Schneider], Yesteryear [Caro Claire Burke], “Meet The Man Who Gave Bad Bunny Jowls” [Interview]

Also: We’re on YouTube now, for those who prefer to watch their podcasts!

About the podcast: Mess World is a podcast by Jessica DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick that takes a critical look at the dregs of pop culture. Jessica is the writer behind FLESH WORLD, which has been called the newsletter “the beauty industry fears,” and Emily is the creator of I <3 Mess, a weekly roundup of the best of the worst celebrity fashion. Together, they dissect the biggest and dumbest celebrity happenings every month and give their unfiltered opinion on everything going on in the world of fashion and beauty.

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About the theme music: The Mess World theme song is “Hot Mess” by Carly Lind. Find more about Carly here and listen to her music here.

Enter: The FleshMatrix, an attempt at mapping what the word “beauty” meant this month — status signaling? political posturing? cosmetic coping? — via a fun little perceptual map plotted across four quadrants:

• COSMETICS (products, physical appearance)

• HEALTH (physical and psychological wellbeing, hygiene)

• DESIRE (sex, attractiveness)

• POWER (class, wealth, status, politics)

Where do “spray tans for mental health” fall? What about naked nails? Is Rosie O’Donnell’s post-facelift poetry feminist or fatphobic? Well…

Read more

Hi Ugly,

My nine-year-old daughter has become aware that she has a moustache. (I’m a hairy Italian, this is her birthright.) It’s more noticeable than anything her friends have, and visible in pictures.

When she first mentioned it last year, my instinct was to deny its existence, but I realized I’d be lying. So I said, “That’s OK, I have it too. Lots of girls do.” She brought it up again recently, in a more pointed and negative way.

Do I tell her that we can do something about it if it bothers her? Is that spitting in the face of body positivity, or giving her agency? I could make her wait until she is a certain age – nine is so young, although I had my own arms waxed at 10 – but why impose an age limit on her comfort?

– Hairy Italian Mom

Contrary to popular belief, women are human beings. Homo sapiens. Fur-covered mammals! Two things separate us from our animal sistren on this front: the cultural imperative to annihilate the fur that covers our flesh, and access to waxing salons.

You can certainly deny your daughter the latter for now, but she probably can’t avoid the former forever.

While some of us inherit more facial hair than others – fellow Italian American here, with the hirsute upper lip to prove it! – nearly all of us inherit a social script that tells us female facial hair is a problem in need of fixing. One electrolysis studio refers to it as “an epidemic” – a diabolically convenient way for a hair removal company to say “universal trait”, no?

Systems of stratification have refined and reinforced this script over centuries. Sexism positioned moustaches as masculine. (In 1575, Spanish physician Juan Huarte claimed facial hair was a sign of “intelligent but disagreeable and argumentative, muscular, ugly” women.) Racism positioned them as inferior, even inhuman. Ableism associated the female moustache with circus freaks. Capitalism encouraged its obliteration via perpetual product use.

Gradually, these overlapping messages pathologized the norm and normalized deviation. Some surveys suggest more women today remove (76%) and worry (88%) about their facial hair than actually have visible facial hair. (While almost all women have a layer of light vellus hair, or peach fuzz, on their faces, about half develop darker hairs in the same area.)

Researchers from the University of York say “the work of hair removal” is now “a significant facet of the production of a socially acceptable femininity” – a project that, to some, feels more important than life itself. “When X-ray hair removal was banned because the radiation was so harmful, many women continued to seek it out because the stigma of facial hair seemed worse than the threat of cancer,” Rebecca Herzig, author of Plucked: A History of Hair Removal, told Bates College in 2015.

Your daughter may be young, but she is attuned to the world around her. She’s picking up what society is putting down! I love that you told her lots of girls have moustaches, because it’s honest.

Continue Reading On The Guardian

The rest of my answer includes:

• how to talk to a child about beauty standards (and maybe encourage rebellion?)

• a psychologist-approved script to follow for kids curious about facial hair

• a thought: if we did live in a world where women felt as free to be hairy as any given man … wouldn’t hair removal still be on the table? Don’t dudes shave their mustaches all the time, for reasons other than shame?

• and more!

Click through to the Guardian to read the full article (and if you decide to share it with friends or on social media or whatever, please share it via the Guardian link).

Read On The Guardian

Have a question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please!

The project of disentangling these gazes feels particularly relevant right now, even for the non-religious: Not only do they converge in that zeitgeist-y figure of the tradwife and conservative politics more broadly, but they’re omnipresent in contemporary beauty culture, where, over the past decade or so, a secularized “divine gaze” seems to have displaced the male gaze.

“If ‘sex sells’ was the unofficial advertising mantra of the Mad Men era, then ‘spirituality sells’ is the slogan for post-2016,” Tara Isabella Burton writes in Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. Orgasm Blush, Better Than Sex Mascara, and the yes! yes! yes! Herbal Essences ads of the early 2000s gave way to Divine Skin Essence, Deliverance Serum, and the ritualized “soul care” routines of today — a shift that feels less progressive than regressive. (What is the God gaze if not the genesis of the male gaze? How is the quasi-religious pressure to appear pure, disciplined, good better than the patriarchal pressure to appeal to men?)

As beauty begins to matter more in society, and as marketers continue to position it as a moral duty and a path to meaning-making, “the beauty ideal is transforming into an ethical ideal,” argues philosopher Heather Widdows. She expands on this in her book Perfect Me:

“[The beauty ideal] provides a shared value framework against which individuals judge themselves morally good or bad. It is constitutive of identity and provides meaning and structure individually and collectively. Praise, blame, and reward are apportioned in accordance with it. Finally, engagement is virtuous, and failure is a moral vice.”

Maybe we could call the widespread (and still spreading) belief that one’s outer beauty reflects their inner goodness — see: Anne Hathaway aged well because she’s unproblematic, Karoline Leavitt didn’t because she’s evil, Amy Schumer gained weight because she’s a Zionist, Prince William went bald because he’s an asshole — the internalized God gaze.

Schneider’s Someday Perfect takes this vast, complicated concept and zooms in on one young girl’s early exposure to it. The main character, Meg, is the 15-year-old daughter of a Pentecostal pastor spending her summer at church camp — a sort of tradwife training ground that encourages modest clothing and weight management, and discourages makeup and tampons (because future husbands deserve unpenetrated vaginas). Meg grapples with “the rigid expectations of her faith” and the expectations of teenage boys as she falls for Danny, a fellow camper. Eventually, she questions which of these expectations are “God’s standards,” which are “man-made standards,” and which — maybe all? — are bullshit.

On the tradwife note: Though Someday Perfect is a graphic novel for young adults, I think the story’s specific, Pentecostal Christian POV makes it an excellent companion piece to the tradwife influencer thriller Yesteryear, the buzziest book of 2026. (May I suggest a mother-daughter/parent-child reading challenge?)

Ahead, Schneider and I discuss the male gaze and the divine gaze as intertwined systems of judgment, God as ground zero for contemporary surveillance culture, a leg-shaving loophole in Leviticus, Maybelline Great Lash-ing to high heavens, and more.

Order "Someday Perfect"

DEFINO: You’ve said that Someday Perfect is about “being a teenage girl and living under both the male gaze and the gaze of a higher being.” I’ve never thought about it that way, but it’s such a good framework. The two often intersect, and then they often don’t. How conscious were you of this dual-gaze problem — being judged by God and by boys — when you started writing the book? Was that intentionally part the story, or did it come to you as you were writing?

SCHNEIDER: When I was writing, I was definitely not intentional with it. I was pulling things from my own childhood and teenage years, and putting them into an order I hoped made sense. When I stepped back from the outline of my story, I realized how intertwined my thought process was when it came to the all-encompassing religion that I grew up with, and just my regular teenage thoughts [about boys]. Growing up as a Pentecostal Christian, it was just a constant in my brain: God was watching.

DEFINO: It’s interesting to think about it through the lens of surveillance culture, which is such a normal thing now with social media. We’re surveilling ourselves and everyone else, and we’re putting ourselves out there to be surveilled. I grew up Catholic, and reading your book made me realize how the idea that God is watching you is sort of the original surveillance culture.

SCHNEIDER: Do you think that made it easier for you to put yourself out there on the internet later? I think about that sometimes.

DEFINO: Definitely. There’s an element of performance baked into religion, and performance was also a major aspect of a lot of my hobbies as a kid. I was doing beauty pageants, community theater — everything I did was a performance, and because everything was a performance, I never really thought about, like, “Who am I?” It was always, “Who should I be in this situation? Who should I play today?” So there are similarities there with growing up in a religious community; there’s such a focus on what you should do and who you should be rather than who you are.

SCHNEIDER: Yeah, there is. I’m sure all kids who grew up in the church feel that way. But also being a pastor’s kid — no shade to my dad — we did have to present ourselves a certain way.

DEFINO: Right, like the gaze of a higher power, the “Heavenly Father,” was mediated through your actual father, who was also your pastor. As a kid, what did you internalize about what a “good” girl should look like?

SCHNEIDER: I do remember begging to get my ears pierced, and I wasn’t allowed to until I graduated eighth grade. [My parents] knew a lot of people in the church would think that was wrong.

DEFINO: Because it’s drawing attention to the yourself? Or was it literally like, poking a hole in your ear is wrong?

SCHNEIDER: I’ll have to look it up, but there’s a specific Bible verse about not piercing any part of your body, and same for tattoos — it all gets wrapped up in a single verse.

DEFINO: Googling now… Leviticus 19:28? “You shall not make any cuts on your body for the dead or tattoo yourselves: I am the Lord”?

SCHNEIDER: Yes, something like that. And even earlier than that, I remember I wasn’t allowed to wear nail polish. It was seen as being vain, adorning your body in a certain way. Oh, and I remember certain bathing suits — bikinis — I couldn’t wear. My mom would tell me, “Oh, you’re not allowed to show your belly button.”

DEFINO: Your evil, evil belly button! No one can see that hole!

SCHNEIDER: Yeah, modesty in general — everything had to be a certain length, not too tight.

DEFINO: I didn’t have the modesty stuff pushed on me growing up, but hair was a very big deal to my father and his side of the family — I had to have long, beautiful, feminine hair. I’m thinking of that in contrast to not drawing attention to yourself. Because there is a certain amount of polish and attention to detail and feminine performance that’s encouraged, even amidst modesty culture, right? And there are certain practices, like maintaining and brushing and styling long hair, that aren’t seen as “adornment” in the same way as, say, nail polish, even though they are. Like, you weren’t allowed to reject adornment so much that you became a messy tomboy…

SCHNEIDER: Definitely. In my family, I could cut my hair, but dyeing it? No way. But being polished and feminine was important, which might have to do with old rules around wearing dresses to the church, stuff like that.

DEFINO: What about shaving? There’s a part in the book about shaving your legs — was that considered feminine and therefore good under the divine gaze? What makes shaving different than piercings, then?

SCHNEIDER: That’s a good point. It was never directly addressed, besides [body hair] being met with obvious disgust from other people — men and women, my friends, my dad. Doesn’t matter. It was like, Ew. And it’s still like that. It’s something I still have a problem with; I still feel self-conscious when I have prickly legs.

DEFINO: I know, me too.

SCHNEIDER: And I’m like, This is so ridiculous.

DEFINO: It’s the one beauty thing I really wish I could get over. It would save me so much time, money, anxiety. There’s a line in the book — a friend says to Meg, “You missed a spot shaving, ya hairy beast.” And it’s a joke, but it’s serious, and the idea of being a “hairy beast” is still so internalized for me. That phrase — is there a biblical reference there?

SCHNEIDER: I actually don’t know where that came from.

DEFINO: I love how in that scene, the judgment is coming from another young woman. It’s such a good example of how we internalize beauty ideals and then go on to police other people, almost as a way of helping them learn the rules. When women say they care about what other women think about their appearance more than they care what men think, I wonder if that’s what’s behind it. Like, beauty standards may cater to the male gaze, but men aren’t socialized to learn the rules of performing beauty the same way that women are — so favorable judgment from someone who knows the ins and outs of that performance means more, almost? I also want to talk about uniforms. In the beginning of the book, the girls are in their modest camp uniforms, and one says, “No boy will even look twice at us.” What were the conflicting messages you go about what God would want to see on you versus what a boy would like to see on you?

SCHNEIDER: The messages were extremely conflicting — you’re told that God wants you to be modest and cover up your body, but in order to, you know, keep the boys guessing!

DEFINO: It’s almost kinky.

SCHNEIDER: Yes! Like, Let them imagine, or at least, Leave it to the imagination. But then you’re still aware, as especially as a teen, that you should look feminine, and feminine means, you know, having an hourglass figure, and letting people know that you have a good figure, but modestly. It’s such a weird in-between, because you can’t wear a paper bag either, right? Then you’re seen as frumpy.

DEFINO: That makes me think of the scene where the teenage camp counselor girls serve lunch to the campers in the cafeteria, and their own lunch is what’s left over, but there’s barely any food left. An adult woman working at the camp brushes it off saying, “Well, anyway, we wouldn’t want to ruin your girlish figures, now, would we?” Was this pulled from your real life?

SCHNEIDER: Yeah.

DEFINO: How did you feel when that was happening? Did it strike you as odd?

SCHNEIDER: At the time, I didn’t really think about it. That was just how it always was.

DEFINO: Has that affected your relationship to your body over time?

SCHNEIDER: It’s interesting, because I always very thin growing up, and I’m still thin now, but I always knew that was a privilege. Now I enjoy working out and eating healthy, but in the back of my mind, I do wonder if that’s tied to the things I was told when I was younger.

DEFINO: The good/bad binary with food is so prevalent that we don’t even think of it as moral or religious, but of course it is.

SCHNEIDER: I had a lot of friends [in the church] who really struggled with their appearance and food.

DEFINO: It sounds like there were really mixed messages, too. Like the hourglass shape thing that you mentioned: you’re supposed to be thin in some areas and curvy in others, and you can’t show it off but you still have to have it, because even if the boys can’t see, God can.

SCHNEIDER: And let’s say you did have an hourglass I figure — there was a lot of emphasis on, Oh, your husband is really gonna love that when you get married. Lucky, lucky husband.

DEFINO: Again, it feels kinky to me! And, you know, objectifying. Because there is so much emphasis the body and sex in purity culture, but only insofar as how your body is going to please other people.

SCHNEIDER: They would divide us and speak to the girls and guys separately, but for the girls, there was a lot of emphasis on waiting until marriage to have sex, but also how good it’s gonna be: Don’t do it now, because it’s evil. But when you’re married, it’s what God wants, and you have to do it whenever your husband wants you to do it.

DEFINO: There’s so much overlap with these concepts of the male gaze and the divine gaze — even just the religious language used in the beauty space. “Holy Grail product” or “miracle moisturizer,” “skin savior” or “Deliverance Serum.” And the point of most of those products is to appeal to the male gaze in one way or another, and it’s marketed as, like, divine decree: Thou shalt be youthful and poreless or whatever. Your book made me think about the God gaze as the original male gaze, and they’re still so enmeshed today, even in seemingly secular cultural products.

SCHNEIDER: I really only started noticing it when I started reading your Substack. You think I would’ve noticed after having grown up seeing this language everywhere. Like, why are they calling it Holy Grail? That’s kind of weird.

DEFINO: Which makes it even more confusing when a church elder asks Meg if she cares more about her appearance “or what God says in His Word.” You’re told it’s wrong to care about your appearance more than God, but also that you have to care about your appearance if you’re going to please God.

SCHNEIDER: Is it’s extremely confusing. I don’t think it makes sense, pulling back from it. I don’t think anybody really had a straight view of things; they’d twist the Bible to fit their own agendas, as far as that goes. I’d never noticed how bizarre the two ways of thinking were. I think I would end up blaming myself for not being able to understand.

DEFINO: I love the slides where Meg daydreams about wearing makeup. The church elders are calling her a harlot and a clown, but there’s this romantic Mr. Darcy figure telling her, “You’re so beautiful.” Did you wear makeup at church camp at all?

SCHNEIDER: I wore mascara, and that was ok.

DEFINO: Was it secret?

SCHNEIDER: Oh, yeah. I have dark eyelashes, so no one could ever tell. It looked natural.

DEFINO: Why did that appeal to you, then? This is a huge question in the beauty space today, too. There’s a real emphasis on “undetectable” cosmetic work — but if no one can tell, what’s the draw? What felt good about it to you, at the time? Breaking the rules, putting the effort in?

SCHNEIDER: I personally was always terrified of breaking rules, but the general consensus in the world is that wearing makeup will make you prettier and more appealing to men. That was always in the back of my mind. Knowing that these people at camp wouldn’t be able to tell, I knew I could get away with it, but I still felt like I looked better and more appealing.

DEFINO: It’s funny, the difference between beauty standards versus beauty products. In the church, or even in academia, the beauty standard is that you shouldn’t wear makeup. In those environments, using beauty products can end up feeling rebellious or empowering or like you’re taking a stand — but then it’s like, the stand is just conforming to another, more conventional standard of beauty. My favorite line in Someday Perfect is, “I know none of us can ever truly be perfect, but is that God’s standard or a man-made standard?” In some ways, that’s the central question of beauty culture, too. We’re told all these beauty standards are objectively good — even things like facial “harmony” and the Golden Ratio, they’re imbued with both spiritual and mathematical significance. When did you start questioning the difference between a man-made standard and a divine standard?

SCHNEIDER: It was a very slow process. Like my character in the book, it definitely started in high school when I was first introduced to people who didn’t go to church. But I still wasn’t putting too much thought into it, it was just in the back of my mind. I would say in my 20s, especially in college, I was more of an adult and able to take a little bit of a step back at that point. I was going to a different church, I wasn’t going to my dad’s church anymore, and I realized I could form my own thoughts about things. But it’s still this very slow process.

DEFINO: Especially, I’m thinking, in regards to purity culture. Because so much of that has influenced the wider world — there’s so much purity culture in beauty and wellness, right, in terms of “clean” beauty and the “clean” girl look and just the performance of hygiene overall. And we have to talk about the tampon scene! Did the church see tampons as promiscuous?

SCHNEIDER: Not for my family specifically, but yeah. Talking to a lot of girls in the church, their moms wouldn’t let them use tampons — it was like, nothing should enter your vagina until you get married.

DEFINO: But would they go to the gynecologist?

SCHNEIDER: No!

DEFINO: What?

SCHNEIDER: To this day, I’ve not talked to my mom about going to a gynecologist. I had to figure that out by myself. A lot of it was just shameful to even talk about in a family context.

DEFINO: Who’s your ideal audience for this book? Who do you want to read it?

SCHNEIDER: I think ideally, teenage kids who grew up the same way that I grew up, or who grew up in an environment where they’re not allowed to think for themselves. In my book, I’m never trying to lead people on one way or another. I think everybody should come to their own decisions, but it would be cool if a kid picked up my book and was like, Oh, wait. Let me step outside of my comfort zone, step outside of the box that I grew up in.

DEFINO: I will say it also felt very cathartic to read as a 36-year-old woman. I hadn’t really thought about how my religious upbringing informed my beauty beliefs before this, and I wouldn’t have thought about the male gaze and the divine gaze in this way had I not read the book.

SCHNEIDER: Thank you for reading it!

DEFINO: Of course, thank you for writing it!

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For more from , subscribe to her newsletter . Order Someday Perfect here.

More than a decade later, it seems the whole world has been similarly reconstructed in the Kardashians’ image: our direct-to-camera TikToks echo Keeping Up with the Kardashians-style confessionals; our lips, tits, and asses expand and contract in accordance with theirs. In the recently released, exhaustively researched book Dekonstructing the Kardashians: A New Media Manifesto, writer and psychotherapist — known to tens of thousands as @kardashian_kolloquium — argues that the family functions as a psychoanalytic mirror for society. Using postmodern theorists like Baudrillard, Boorstin, and McLuhan, she asks: Why are they like this? Why are we like this? And what does our enmeshment say about media and meaning in the Internet age?

For Interview Magazine, I met up with Corey at the SKIMS store in New York City to talk about Kim as a messianic figure, Kylie as a Foucauldian manifestation, and the Kardashians as a vessel for collective catharsis.

Continue Reading via Interview Magazine

———

THURSDAY, 10:03 AM, APRIL 30, 2026 THE SKIMS NYC FLAGSHIP STORE

———

JESSICA DEFINO: Thank you for meeting me here. Have you been to the store before?

MJ COREY: No, I don’t own a piece of SKIMS.

DEFINO: It’s my first time too. It’s got a smell to it. Like a very Kardashian…

COREY: Full sensory experience, yeah. This store is actually exactly what I imagined—statues, mannequins, disembodied body parts.

DEFINO: It’s very reminiscent of an assembly line, like the making of the mannequin form.

COREY: …And [a statue] of Kim’s butt. I actually wrote about this, I described Kim’s butt as her Mickey Mouse ears.

DEFINO: I was blown away by that comparison. The softness, the roundness, no hard angles. You quote a Disney associate as saying, “Circles never cause anybody trouble,” but people have “bad experiences with sharp points.”

COREY: The maternal, the fertility. Neal Gabler was kind of a god to me during the writing of the book. I loved his work [on Mickey Mouse], so that was really revelatory.

DEFINO: In the book, you argue that the Kardashians have become American icons on the scale of Disney, Las Vegas, and WWE. Why is this relevant now when—in the iconic words of Kourtney— “there’s people that are dying”?

COREY: I think the book is coming at an even better time than I could have imagined because the Kardashians are embedded in the establishment now, and we have a little bit more distance to look at them critically. That’s always been my whole thing, I want to analyze the Kardashians with the closest approximation of hindsight.

DEFINO: Yeah. It feels like the hype around them is waning, but they’re still almost omnipresent.

COREY: Their centrality is fracturing because media itself is fracturing. They were so dominant during the Instagram era, it felt like they were everywhere. I think we’re going to feel their influence in more embedded ways now, in subtextual and subliminal ways.

DEFINO: The subtitle of your book is “A New Media Manifesto,” and you say their ascent is inextricable from the ascent of new forms of media, like Instagram. How have they been able to dominate these platforms?

COREY: The Kardashians, because there are so many of them and they’re so archetypal, are able to be in a lot of different places all at once. In addition to that, Kim has made herself this amalgamation of different women, historical moments, and cultural tensions. And that’s why I do think they’ll find ways to overcome whatever changes happen in media, from TikTok to AI. And because they’re hanging out with the technocrats. They’re so good at getting onto new mediums and embracing change, which is also quite Disney-esque. Walt Disney was in cinema and then, unlike a lot of other people that were in the movies, he was unafraid of the advent of TV. They have those sensibilities that other great American icons have. I’ve looked at the patterns in my research for the book, and we can see that what the Kardashians embrace and anticipate, that it might be what’s next. … The whole thing about the Kardashians — the resistance they’ve kind of induced in people — is that it doesn’t feel consensual. You absorb information about them whether you want to or not.

DEFINO: The book references a lot of existing theory, some of which has been around for almost 100 years. Walter Benjamin’s work on aura and replication, Marshall McLuhan and “the medium is the message.” Your point is that the Kardashians embody, and essentially prove, these theories. So could this have happened with other people?

COREY: That’s why I’m such a fangirl for the theorists. It’s amazing to me how prophetic they were. They were writing at times when media was changing, and they were fascinated with it, and they were thinking a lot about the implications of it and anticipating the impact, and it’s come true. The Kardashians, I think, are natural outcomes of those legacies. But I don’t see anyone else doing it quite the way the Kardashians have. It required the embodiment of everything that those guys anticipated to evoke this feeling of them being everywhere all at once through the 2010s.

“The medium is the message” really is the best way to look at the Kardashians, because they made their bodies the mediums. And when they hit the scene, they actually were doing a lot of sex work and sexuality appropriations, like Playboy and Girls Gone Wild. They had an adult entertainer babysitting the Jenner sisters. That kind of thing. And then, as the culture kind of shifted to identity politics and concerns around racial appropriation, that’s when it started to really kick up. Kim was with Kanye, they were producing a lot of imagery, they were changing their bodies in even more caricatured ways. Then in the 2020s, at a time when class consciousness was at an all time high, Kim says, “People don’t want to work anymore” and they’re engaging in even more conspicuous consumption and leaning into the Marie Antoinette comparisons. They kind of do whatever reflects the moment.

Read the rest via Interview Magzine

Buy 'Dekonstructing The Kardashians'

After you’ve read the full published interview over at Interview, come back for seconds! Behind the paywall are the questions and answers that didn’t make the final cut — about Kourtney as a proto-MAHA mama, the racial implications of Kim’s (alleged) rhinoplasties, Corey’s writing and research methods, and so much more.

Read more

Today we’re talking about: April Fool’s Day beauty products and the death of parody [1:30], even more fowl-inspired fashion [8:13], the return of the joutfit [17:00], diet-culture-beauty-culture mashups (Fat Oil Body Oil!) [24:30], inflatable attire [32:40], the machine behind the Swan Beauty mirror [41:10], Sianne Ngai’s theory of cuteness [58:00], Bieberchella x Hailey Bieber’s Rhode pimple patches and the reign of the digital doppelganger [1:16:00], Kris Jenner’s quest for tautness [1:35:52], and Euphoria makeup madness [1:48:40]. Plus more!

Media we mentioned: “The rise and rise of ‘dewy dumpling skin’” [Sunday Times], “The Estée Lauder Companies is investing in skin-care technology to fight sugar’s impact on skin” [Glossy], Our Aesthetic Categories [Sianne Ngai], Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World [Naomi Klein], “My Strange Dysphoria” [The Cut], “Inside Kris Jenner’s Facelift-gate” [Puck], The Lowbrow Book Club

Also: We’re on YouTube now, for those who prefer to watch their podcasts!

About the podcast: Mess World is a podcast by Jessica DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick that takes a critical look at the dregs of pop culture. Jessica is the writer behind FLESH WORLD, which has been called the newsletter “the beauty industry fears,” and Emily is the creator of I <3 Mess, a weekly roundup of the best of the worst celebrity fashion. Together, they dissect the biggest and dumbest celebrity happenings every month and give their unfiltered opinion on everything going on in the world of fashion and beauty.

Subscribe to I <3 Mess

About the theme music: The Mess World theme song is “Hot Mess” by Carly Lind. Find more about Carly here and listen to her music here.

Enter: The FleshMatrix, an attempt at mapping what the word “beauty” meant this month — class performance? political action? consumerism? attractiveness? a bit of everything? — via a fun little perceptual map plotted across four quadrants:

• COSMETICS (products, physical appearance)

• HEALTH (physical and psychological wellbeing, hygiene)

• DESIRE (sex, attractiveness)

• POWER (class, wealth, status, politics)

Where does Ulta Beauty World fall? What about Brittany Aldean’s MAGA-friendly fragrance brand? Is the reaction to Coco Gauff’s Miu Miu campaign about style or class? Well…

Quadrant 1 (Cosmetics / Desire)

• Fruit-flavored vaginal suppositories are here, courtesy of Juice

• Euphoria x Half Magic Beam Trap simulates “love-rage”

• Brides and grooms are turning to GLP-1s to lose weight pre-wedding

• Lushful Aesthetics offers HoleTox (butthole Botox) “to make receiving anal sex (bottoming) easier”

Quadrant 2 (Cosmetics / Power)

• Ulta Beauty World is like “Disney World, But for Beauty Products”

• Brittany Aldean turns a viral transphobic joke about gender essentialism into a “MAGA-friendly fragrance brand,” Vada

• A Democratic strategist “wants Democrats to get hot,” USA Today reports

• Coco Gauff’s Miu Miu campaign goes viral, with some calling her natural hair “undone” and “embarrassing”

Quadrant 3 (Health / Desire)

• Sense’s sexual wellness products are now available at Target

• Sakara markets fiber supplements to “make sh*t happen” with butt pics

Quadrant 4 (Health / Power)

• Early research about red light therapy came from the US Department of Defense

• Unapproved injectable peptides found to contain lead and endotoxins

• For Trans Day of Visibility, protestors of the rightwing attack on trans rights staged a public hormone injection on the steps of Tucson City Hall

• Dermatologists deny the existence of Topical Steroid Withdrawal

Middle

• Kylie Jenner launches K2O “advanced skin hydration” drink with electrolytes

Hi Ugly,

How do I respond to my friends when they criticize their bodies, faces, skin?

One friend frequently complains about her weight. It would feel preachy to tell her that she’s supporting the beauty industrial complex and reinforcing a status quo that keeps women fixated on their physical appearance. But saying, “You’re beautiful!” feels shallow. Another friend told me she needs to get more Botox soon because she hates the lines in her forehead. I told her (honestly) that I don’t see any lines, but she blew me off, saying it was the wrong lighting and I was being too generous.

How do I navigate these conversations?

- Conversationally Confused

The only thing contemporary beauty culture hates more than an ugly woman? A judgy woman – particularly if she has an opinion about other women’s beauty behaviors. These days, any criticism of cosmetics must conclude with the disclaimer: “No judgment, though!”

I personally think we would all benefit from harsher judgment of the oppressive standards sustaining the $427bn diet industry and $700bn beauty industry, but I also think you’re right. When a friend tells you she is worried about her weight, “you’re an agent of the patriarchy” isn’t a helpful response.

“You’re beautiful!” isn’t great, either – it reinforces the idea that individual beauty is the solution to the insecurity that beauty culture breeds in us all. Yes, your looks do determine your worth, you might as well say. But you look good, so it’s not your problem!

It has been a minute since I’ve had to navigate a situation like this myself. (When you’re a curmudgeonly industry critic, your community knows exactly where you stand on the subject of skin-plumping salmon sperm injections – works like a charm!) So I reached out to some colleagues to get their takes.

“These moments can feel like the perfect opening to challenge beauty standards,” says the beauty reporter . “But in reality, they’re rarely the right time for that kind of conversation and can go very wrong.” Instead, she says, “listen without judgment, and without overcompensating with compliments.”

Exchanges like these are signs to strike up more beauty-related discourse. “The key is to make conversations more frequent, so they don’t feel like an attack,” Mohamed says. Rather than pegging these chats to their (or your) perceived aesthetic shortcomings, “be more intentional about having [general] conversations around the beauty industry, the pressure we internalize and the standards we work so hard to meet and maintain.”

Invite a friend over to watch The Substance or American Psycho and break down the beauty themes over a bottle of wine after. Drop a critical book or podcast episode in the group chat. (“Unshrinking by blew my mind! Anyone want to read and discuss?”) Share this Tressie McMillan Cottom video about the “everyday eugenics” of GLP-1s to your Instagram story and see who responds.

Another option: connect and commiserate. “I don’t try to dissuade them from their perspective … because I will never be more persuasive than the critical voice that lives in their head,” beauty journalist shares. “But I tell them how I respond to my own occasional dissatisfaction with my appearance, which, for the most part, involves turning outward.”

How have you dealt with your dissatisfaction? Share it with the class! It can be as simple as, I know what you mean. I was so fixated on my crow’s feet on a Zoom call once that I had to disable the mirror video function and meditate for 20 minutes after work. It actually helped! Cheaper than a red light mask, anyway.

, writer of the body liberation newsletter Burnt Toast, recommends adopting a “hate the game, not the player” mentality. “I try to lean into responses like: ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if we didn’t have to devote so much time and money to all of this?’”

It’s also fine to not engage. “If the friend talks about these things in ways that you find triggering, I think it’s very valid to say: ‘Sorry, I love you but I’m just not the friend for Botox talk,’” Sole-Smith says. “Set that boundary.”

If your discussion partner seems down for debate, “try to move the conversation toward the politics behind it,” suggests Moshtari Hilal, author of Ugliness. (Another great read to drop in the group chat.) “Instead of reassuring friends that they’re beautiful, I ask why it matters so much to them,” she says. “‘Would you love or respect me less if my appearance changed? Do you deserve to be treated better for having youthful skin or a symmetrical face?”

No, these aren’t easy questions. Yes, they could lead to some tough talks. Most modern beauty standards have roots in white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, sexism and other destructive forces. But, as Hilal puts it, don’t you “expect a certain depth and integrity in [your] friendships?”

Continue Reading on the Guardian

The rest of my answer includes:

• how “appearance talk” affects mental and even physical health

• the benefits (and limits) of “consciousness-raising”

• if and when to take a step back from beauty-obsessed friends

• and more!

Click through to the Guardian to read the full article (and if you decide to share it with friends or on social media or whatever, please share it via the Guardian link).

Read on the Guardian

Have a question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please!

Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! I spent most of April waiting for the weather to warm and the Prozac to kick in, and at least one of the two has improved my mood enough to round up this month’s beauty news without cackling maniacally and/or weeping! And so, onto the links…

IN THIS ISSUE: Wedding weight loss! Looksmaxxing as life-minning! Death plays a joke on Bryan Johnson! “Beef!” Commodifying the clouds! Cuteness & violence! Facelift slippage! Marilyn Monroe! Beauty as a source of power! Cosmetic class performance! The smell of MAGA! HoleTox! Flavored asswipes! Fruit-scented vaginal suppositories! Phallic lip gloss! Foreskin aesthetics! & more!

🎶 Here comes the semaglutide… 🎶 I spoke to Sara Radin at Vogue about “The Rise of GLP-1 Wedding Weight Loss.”

Wedding culture has historically centered on the bride’s appearance. Yet increasingly, grooms and partners of all genders are also participating in pre-wedding body modification—whether through weight loss, cosmetic treatments, or elaborate grooming routines. For DeFino, that shift says less about progress than about the expansion of the beauty economy. “The beauty industry’s version of equality over the past decade has often been equal pressure for everyone,” she says. “Instead of reducing the pressure on women, it has extended it to men.” The result is a kind of bleak parity: now everyone is subject to the same scrutiny.

Read the whole thing here.

Does looksmaxxing = life-minning? After declaring that he has “no regard for [his] own happiness” and cares only about the “work” of looksmaxxing — which, for him, includes doing meth to stay trim — influencer Clavicular overdosed while livestreaming on April 14. A 16-year-old aspiring looksmaxxer recently told CNN, “If I have a heart attack at 30, I have a heart attack” re: his illegal cattle steroid regimen. Not that this is anything new! It’s Debord’s Society of the Spectacle — “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” It’s “I’d rather die hot than live ugly” for men. It’s “the morbid lifelessness of modern beauty.” It’s the Morgue Gaze. (I wrote more about the pervasive conflation of beauty and life — and averageness/ugliness as “a kind of death-in-life” — for The Guardian a while back.)

On a more somber/less theoretical note, Danielle Crittenden’s Atlantic essay, “On Losing A Daughter,” destroyed me. The author’s eldest child, Miranda, was found dead after possibly skipping medication for a chronic health condition, in part due to its aesthetic side effects:

“Lately, Miranda had been fighting what she assumed was a stubborn cold. When she was ill, she was supposed to take more cortisol, the stress hormone that her body could no longer produce. But cortisol came with a price: It bloated her face, thickened her waist, and made her feel unlike herself. I knew she’d been playing with her dosage to minimize these side effects.”

It reminded me of the concept of “sororal death,” which I first learned about in Emmeline Clein’s book Dead Weight. Susan Sontag wrote about sororal death as “women dying for each other,” while Anne Boyer, “writing a theoretical framework for breast cancer, defines sororal death as dying of being a woman.” Clein expands on this to include “deaths from eating disorders,” “deaths from botched plastic surgeries,” and “dying of the demands of womanhood, the fascism of femininity.”

Andi Zeisler went long on necrocosmetics — i.e., fillers made from cadaver fat — for Salon, and included a tidbit I cannot believe I forgot to mention in my last Ask Ugly column:

Read more

Today we’re talking about: The Listerine Strip beauty boom [8:50]; poultry inspiration on the red carpet [14:15]; cadaver fat injectables as a form of cannibalism [21:30]; invisible and/or ephemeral shirting [25:39]; the Gen Z pout [44:44]; Chappell Roan, Timothée Chalamet, Lindy West, and discoursing celebrity to death [52:53]; blush for your butt and the aesthetics of spanking [1:11:03]; Kevin O’Leary’s $12.9 million necklace [1:24:14]; and beauty products for female humanoids [1:31:00]. Plus more!

Media we mentioned: “Can feathers ever be ethical? Stella McCartney is betting on it” [Vogue Business], “How organ and tissue donation companies worked their way into the county morgue” [LA Times], “Worried about how your body parts will be used? Here’s what you can do” [LA Times], “The cult of the dissociative pout” [i-D], “Everyone Is Botoxed & No One Is Horny” [FLESH WORLD], “A New Report Has Found That Chappell Roan Was The Target Of A Bot-Driven Online Attack” [Buzzfeed], “Lindy West’s How-Not-To Guide to Polyamory” [Slate], Women, Race & Class [Angela Davis], Metropolis [Fritz Lang]

Also: We’re on YouTube now, for those who prefer to watch their podcasts!

About the podcast: Mess World is a podcast by Jessica DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick that takes a critical look at the dregs of pop culture. Jessica is the writer behind FLESH WORLD, which has been called the newsletter “the beauty industry fears,” and Emily is the creator of I <3 Mess, a weekly roundup of the best of the worst celebrity fashion. Together, they dissect the biggest and dumbest celebrity happenings every month and give their unfiltered opinion on everything going on in the world of fashion and beauty.

Subscribe to I <3 Mess

About the theme music: The Mess World theme song is “Hot Mess” by Carly Lind. Find more about Carly here and listen to her music here.

Cute! Could not recommend less, though.

Anyway, onto the links…

IN THIS ISSUE: Death is trending! The Gen Z pout! Under-eye patches as status symbols! Lip filler accent! Work is making you ugly! Glossier is closing its stores! Antiperspirant! Alix Earle! Chloe Fineman! “Cosmeticorexia”! Beauty > food! Gavin Newsom <3s Patrick Bateman! & more!

THE MORGUE GAZE: I was on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute with Brittany Luse again last week to talk about “the morbid lifelessness of modern beauty.”

Today’s guest, Jessica DeFino - beauty reporter, critic, and author of the FLESH WORLD Substack - says contemporary glamorization of anti-aging products and long dead icons like Caroline Bessette Kennedy all fall within a macabre beauty trend, what she calls ‘the morgue gaze.’ Ageless, poreless, lifeless beauty inspiration keeps consumers coming back for more numb, frozen aesthetics - forever.

Listen here!

THE GEN Z POUT: In the episode, I mentioned Rayne Fisher-Quann’s 2022 theory of the “dissociative pout,” a pose that’s recently been rebranded as the “Gen Z pout” and described as “blank-eyed and puffy-lipped, like a koi fish on Ativan.” Something I’ve been thinking about since: The dissociative and/or Gen Z pout mimics the effect of Botox and filler. The face is emptied — eyes wide and blank; facial muscles slack; lips puffed out and parted; expression smoothed — to approximate (or exaggerate) injectable inanimation. Which makes sense! Humans are hard-wired to unconsciously mirror each others’ microexpressions; it just so happens that one of today’s dominant facial expressions is non-expression.

RELATED: I wanted to fit this quote from Byung-Chul Han’s Capitalism and the Death Drive in my Guardian article on cadaver fat fillers, but I couldn’t, so I’ll just leave it here:

“Capitalism is obsessed with death … Performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies: these are manifestations of undead life. The undead lack any vitality … Capitalism’s striving for life without death creates the necropolis — an antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds and smells. [ED NOTE: I would add textures to this list!] Life processes are transformed into mechanical processes. The total adaptation of human life to mere functionality is already a culture of death. As a consequence of the performance principle, the human being ever more closely approximates a machine, and becomes alienated from itself.”

LIP FILLER ACCENT: For Defector, Alex Sujong Laughlin went long on “Lip Filler Accent” — “a noticeable pursing of the lips that creates more open space between the teeth and lips, constraining the shapes vowels take and compressing the sound,” which is even affecting the speech patterns of people who don’t have filler “through memetic transfer.”

STUPID STATUS SYMBOLS: Did you catch me in the newsletter the other day? Our interview covered laser hair removal, overrated status symbols, my morning skincare routine, and more.

SELLEB: What’s something that you used to judge people for buying that you now totally get?

Jessica: Laser hair removal? Probably cheaper than buying razors for the rest of my life. (Ideally I wouldn’t care about body hair, but beauty culture conditioning persists.)

SELLEB: What’s the most overrated “status symbol” right now?

Jessica: Logoed under-eye patches. I’m disturbed by the way brands have turned our faces into free ad space.

Check out the full feature here!

UG-EMPLOYMENT: Office jobs are making women uglier, apparently.

Read more

• COSMETICS (products, physical appearance)

• HEALTH (physical and psychological wellbeing, hygiene)

• DESIRE (sex, attractiveness)

• POWER (class, wealth, status)

Where does Denise Richards’ facelift fall? What about Alix Earle’s “sexy” new line of acne products? Is Planned Parenthood’s embrace of Botox about healthcare or desirability? Well…

Quadrant 1 (Cosmetics / Desire)

• Denise Richards’ plastic surgeon gave her a lip lift she didn’t ask for “to make the mouth … sexier”

• MAC leans into male gaze marketing with shirtless Rob Rausch campaign

• The Bride x Heretic ‘Til Death Solid Perfume promises users “a slew of suitors”

• Alix Earle wants to make acne treatment “sexy and hot”

Quadrant 2 (Cosmetics / Power)

• The American Society of Plastic Surgeons “legitimizes and bolsters Trumpian anti-trans propaganda”

• Cadaver fat injectables meet convenience culture, making the 30-minute lunch break boob job possible

• Post-op status signaling (c/o prosthetics) takes over Fashion Month

• Planned Parenthood offers Botox (as the makers of Botox fund the politicians defunding Planned Parenthood)

• Carolyn Bessette Kennedy cosplayers sell out C.O. Bigelowe’s stock of 1.5-inch plastic headbands

Quadrant 3 (Health / Desire)

• Harry Styles’ beauty brand Pleasing restocks its vibrator and lube

Quadrant 4 (Health / Power)

• Remedy Place launches at-home NAD injection pens

• The FDA pulled a proposal that would ban minors from using tanning beds

• Oura Ring releases the “first female-focused LLM” for AI chatbots

• “Lead and carcinogens are found in hair extensions used by Black women,” CNN reports

• Layla Taylor seeks treatment for Ozempic-related eating disorder

Middle

• Kendall Jenner’s tequila brand, 818, collabs with Salt & Stone on deodorant

Hi Ugly,

I recently became aware of new cosmetic injectables derived from cadaver fat – as in, made of dead people. Apparently the fat is harvested from organ and tissue donors and used for procedures like Brazilian butt lifts and boob jobs.

What is this? How is it legal? Even if it is legal, how is it ethical?

– The Beauty Industry Is Killing Me

A half dozen dead, devastatingly gorgeous bodies float, naked, in 10ft-tall test tubes. They’re preserved. Perfect. Ready.

“Calling them donors is crass,” a plastic surgeon says. “I call them epidermis angels: beautiful people who left the earth far too soon, and who were so generous as to pass along their good fortune to others.”

Soon, the surgeon will harvest their parts – smooth skin, symmetrical faces, asses with just the right amount of fat – and transplant them onto the living. Beauty, he says, should never be “wasted on the dead”.

When this scene from FX’s sci-fi series The Beauty aired in January, it already felt dated. Real-world cosmetic doctors had been injecting patients with AlloClae, a filler made from donated human cadaver fat, for over a year.

This is probably the macabre material you’ve been hearing about. Recent headlines include “I Got My BBL From A Cadaver” and “Back(side) from the dead!”. But while AlloClae has ignited a fresh cycle of disgust and debate over what I’ll call necrocosmetics, the category isn’t new.

The aesthetics industry has long harvested “cadaveric materials from organ and tissue donors to reconstruct people”, says Dr Melissa Doft, a plastic surgeon based in New York. “We use skin grafts to help repair burns and for breast reconstructions. We use rib grafts to reconstruct noses.”

A little over a decade ago, tissue bank MTF Biologics developed a method to repurpose donated human adipose tissue – AKA fat – which had previously been discarded after skin tissue collection. The injectable “allograft adipose matrix” treatment known as Renuva was born (or raised from the dead). The product can be used to plump cheeks, nasolabial folds, temples and cellulite dimples, and has the unique ability to merge with the recipient. “The body recognizes Renuva once you inject it,” explains Evi Chnari, the vice-president of R&D at MTF Biologics. “The patient’s own cells then convert it into their own fat.”

Death, quite literally, becomes you.

AlloClae, a Tiger Aesthetics product, functions similarly. Donor fat is purchased, processed and purified of genetic material. Since AlloClae includes lipid molecules and has a thicker consistency, it’s more suitable for use on the body: Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs), breast enhancements, hip dips.

It’s possible to perform these procedures sans dead people, I should note. Hyaluronic acid fillers like Juvéderm and Restylane can add volume to the face. Autologous fat transfer, in which fat is removed from one area of the patient’s body via liposuction and reinjected into other areas, is another popular option.

But beauty enthusiasts are increasingly opting to use human remains instead, mostly due to “filler fatigue” – traditional filler can cause problems such as puffiness and lymphatic issues – and the widespread use of GLP-1s. “People who are on Ozempic or are dieting heavily are really thin, and don’t have enough fat to transfer,” Doft says. “They want their legs and their belly to be skinny, but want their breasts to be fuller.”

Where’s a patient to turn? A corpse, of course.

“I thought everyone was going to get creeped out by it,” says Dr Haideh Hirmand, a plastic surgeon based in New York, but “less people than you’d think even care”. The creep-factor is apparently mitigated by convenience: Renuva and AlloClae don’t require downtime or anesthesia like fat transfers do, making the 30-minute lunch break boob job possible. (Thanks, donors!)

And yup, this is legal.

In the US, the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act (UAGA) authorizes tissue banks to collect voluntary donations from the dead for use in transplants, research, education and more. (Lobbyists for “the multibillion-dollar body parts industry” helped rewrite the UAGA in 2006 to make it “easier for body parts to be harvested quickly”, according to the LA Times.) MTF Biologics and Tiger Aesthetics’ products are FDA-cleared for use in the US.

Is it ethical, though? That’s a little harder to parse.

Continue Reading on the Guardian

The rest of my answer includes:

• a 200-person survey on the ethics of necrocosmetics (consent, profit, etc)

• how the beauty industry’s commodification of living bodies is and always has been built on the commodification of dead bodies

• insight from a bioethicist

• a framework for minimizing harm

• how necrocosmetics are affecting the donor registry

• and more!

Click through to the Guardian to read the full article (and if you decide to share it with friends or on social media or whatever, please share it via the Guardian link).

Read on the Guardian

Have a question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please!

Anyway! Onto the links…

IN THIS ISSUE: Women as subhuman playthings! Beauty as God! The American Society of Plastic Surgeons is “legitimizing and bolstering Trumpian anti-trans propaganda”! A psychoanalyst on anti-aging! Carcinogens in hair extensions! Tongue tinting! Butt blush! Neck lifts! Post-op status signaling! “Dead Girl Greige!” Pre-funeral manis! MAC, Rob Rausch, and male gaze psychosis! & more!

Following my report on the makers of Botox donating over $135,000 to legislators who voted to defund Planned Parenthood, I spoke to Alisha Haridasani Gupta of The New York Times about the famed healthcare organization’s decision to offer neuromodulators. I talked about how Planned Parenthood’s association with women’s health led to its symbolic feminization and subsequent political punishment. Now, it’s “operating the way I think many women feel they must operate in the world, which is to conform to beauty standards in order to get ahead, socially, financially, economically, politically.”

I joined Brittany Luse on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute to unpack Epstein’s influence on the beauty industry, the legacy of America’s Next Top Model, and “how we’ve made beauty our God.”

I’m also on a new episode of the Don’t Start podcast! Listen here.

“‘This is embarrassing to admit, but I think I fell in with the right wing as an aesthetic choice initially,’ says Anna.” So begins Sam Adler-Bell’s “The Women Leaving The New Right” for Intelligencer, a look at how the right is losing women by “attempting to reestablish women’s abject dependence on men and marriage” and “encouraging young men to see women as subhuman playthings.” (At least women have a plethora of subhuman aesthetics to choose from: doll, glass, donut, dumpling, puppet, mannequin, robot…)

Then again, “a female has always been less than a person,” as Andrea Long Chu writes in Females, her polarizing exploration of gender and desire from 2019 — and our pick for March! Subscribe here to join our March 30th Zoom meeting, where we’ll discuss the book’s ideas in relation to non-human beauty icons (dolls/donuts/cyborgs), the right-wing attack on trans rights, the mainstreaming of looksmaxxing, and more.

Post-op aesthetics — whether or not there’s an op involved — continue to trend.

Read more

By rolling out cosmetic services — with filler and laser hair removal potentially coming soon, according to representatives — the famed healthcare organization aims to close a $100 million budget gap created by President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which defunded Planned Parenthood when it was signed into law in July 2025.

“They hope that unconventional offerings such as Botox will generate enough revenue to subsidize the healthcare Planned Parenthood is best known for,” the Wall Street Journal reports: abortions, birth control, STI testing, hormone treatment, cancer screenings, and more. Leaders also told the outlet they believe offering Botox supports its “larger mission of promoting bodily autonomy.”

But after reviewing data from the Federal Election Commission, FLESH WORLD has found that in the past year alone, the makers of Botox have donated over $135,000 to Republican politicians who voted to pass the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and defund Planned Parenthood.

Subscribe now

AbbVie, the parent company of Allergan Aesthetics — which owns Botox, Juvéderm, Kybella, Coolsculpting, Natrelle, and Latisse, among other cosmetic pharmaceuticals — made these contributions via its AbbVie Political Action Committee between 2025 - 2026. “We support candidates and organizations that understand how government actions can affect patients’ access to medical advances and that will work to promote an environment that fosters continued medical progress,” the AbbVie PAC site says.

While AbbVie’s PAC contributions are overall bipartisan, its continued support of legislators working to ban abortion, restrict access to birth control, and limit federal funding for reproductive healthcare suggests executives view bodily autonomy as a marketing tactic, not a corporate mission.

READ: “The Beauty Brands Backing Abortion Bans”

Recent campaigns position Botox Cosmetic as a tool of “empowerment” and “confidence” — a way to “own” one’s body.

Botox’s proximity to Planned Parenthood will serve to strengthen these messages. Botox will profit (reputationally, financially) from its association with an organization that stands for healthcare and autonomy. And if the AbbVie PAC’s donation history is any indication, those profits will continue to fund legislators intent on stripping people of both.

AbbVie has not responded to FLESH WORLD’s request for comment.

Today we’re talking about: Carrot-and-saddle-leather perfume to make you smell like a horse [2:07], protest fashion and shibari details on the AVN red carpet [8:11], investigating faux post-Botox photos of Florence Pugh [29:00], Deuxmoi’s affinity for AI slop [34:14], Deepak Chopra in the Epstein files & the fate of his (creepy!) beauty collab with Augustinus Bader [51:26], the cult of Clavicular [59:10], Brooklyn Beckham’s tattoo cover-up [1:35:44], and pilates and rosacea on Love Is Blind [1:38:48]. Plus more!

Media we mentioned: “The Most Bizarre Covers of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George Magazine” [Vanity Fair], “The AI Platform Reimagining The Future Of Wellness” [British Vogue], “Handsome at Any Cost” [New York Times], “CLAVICULAR Talks Female Psychology, Drug Habit, Infamy” [The Adam Friedland Show], “Inside the PSL Scale: The Looksmaxxer Rating System That All the Teenagers Are Referencing” [GQ], “Fashion’s Alt-Right Flirtation” [I <3 Mess], “People Are ‘Harmonizing’ Their Faces. Why?” [FLESH WORLD]

Also: We’re on YouTube now, for those who prefer to watch their podcasts!

About the podcast: Mess World is a podcast by Jessica DeFino and Emily Kirkpatrick that takes a critical look at the dregs of pop culture. Jessica is the writer behind FLESH WORLD, which has been called the newsletter “the beauty industry fears,” and Emily is the creator of I <3 Mess, a weekly roundup of the best of the worst celebrity fashion. Together, they dissect the biggest and dumbest celebrity happenings every month and give their unfiltered opinion on everything going on in the world of fashion and beauty.

Subscribe to I <3 Mess

About the theme music: The Mess World theme song is “Hot Mess” by Carly Lind. Find more about Carly here and listen to her music here.

• COSMETICS (products, physical appearance)

• HEALTH (physical and psychological wellbeing, hygiene)

• DESIRE (sex, attractiveness)

• POWER (class, wealth, status)

Where does Martha Stewart’s makeup-at-the-gym routine fall? What about MAHA’s embrace of saunas? Or Glossier’s “You Smell Good” campaign? Was the Love Is Blind pilates drama about attraction or power? And how does Chinese Medicine as a “Hot Girl Aesthetic” factor into all of this? Well…

Quadrant 1 (Cosmetics / Desire)

• “Horny Yearning Is The Season’s Hottest Beauty Trend,” per Allure

• Martha Stewart wears makeup to the gym because “there’s men at the gym”

• “Brontë Blush” is trending

• Glossier’s “You Smell Good” campaign says perfume yields social currency (compliments)

Quadrant 2 (Cosmetics / Power)

• Major industry players appear in the Epstein files

• Clavicular and Liv Schmidt walk the Elena Velez runway

• Makeup companies want to cash in on kindergarten customers

• Penis-Gate hits the Olympics

• Erewhon collabs with Ject for Botox events

• On Love Is Blind, Chris breaks up with Jessica because she doesn’t do Pilates daily

Quadrant 3 (Health / Desire)

• Glowery launches Kissing Rash Remedy for post-makeout irritation

• Kourtney Kardashian’s LEMME Bedroom Bundle includes supplements for intimacy and a sweeter-tasting vagina

Quadrant 4 (Health / Power)

• RFK, Jr. and Kid Rock sauna together in new MAHA promo

• Parents are feeding their babies sticks of butter to (among other things) give them better bone structure

• Estée Lauder violates the Canadian Environmental Protection Act by not disclosing PFAS in its products

• Evie Magazine calls Chinese Medicine a “Hot Girl Aesthetic”

Middle

• NYC aesthetician Delphine Breyne practices “restorative beauty” for patients affected by cancer, burns, trichotillomania, and skin-picking

MORE FROM FLESH WORLD:

Hi Ugly,

I tend to get pimples, especially around my period. This is fine and normal. What’s not fine is that I cannot stop picking at them, making my skin irritated and red.

It’s important to me to let go of beauty ideals: I don’t buy into the idea that skin has to be perfectly smooth to be beautiful, and I don’t mind pimples – but I do mind that I keep breaking my skin over and over, putting myself at risk for infections. And because it’s on my face, people can see this weird pseudo-mutilation. How can I stop picking?

– Picky

For the past 20 years – since I was 16 – I’ve compulsively picked out my eyebrow hairs one by one, trying to soothe some phantom pain in my follicles. My brain says the pain will stop once I pick the right hair, but then it turns out that there is no right hair, or maybe the right hair is simply the last hair. So I pick and pick and pick until my brow bones are nearly bald and sometimes bloody. Then I pick at the skin. And the scabs. And when the hairs grow back, I do it all over again.

Which is to say, you’ve either come to the exact right person or exact wrong person for advice.

I’ve tried to stop, of course. Iced the area to numb the urge. Basted my brows with Vaseline (maybe if the hairs are too slippery to pull…?). I’ve bought self-help books and fidget toys and joined a 30-day habit-breaking group online. If wanting and willpower were enough, I’d look like Brooke Shields from the forehead up. But I don’t, because the kind of picking I do isn’t a bad habit. It’s a mental illness.

The condition I’ve been diagnosed with, trichotillomania, is a body-focused repetitive behavior (BFRB), a category of compulsive self-grooming actions that result in injury.

What does all this have to do with you? Maybe nothing! But there is a related skin picking condition called dermatillomania. Obviously, I can’t diagnose you over the internet. (I’m an advice columnist, not a psychiatrist.) You say you “cannot stop” picking though, so it might be helpful to visit a professional and discuss your symptoms.

BRFBs also include nail biting and cheek biting compulsions, and “can be on the spectrum of anxiety disorder”, explains Dr Amy Wechsler, a dermatologist and psychiatrist based in New York. They typically manifest “during periods of a lot of stress”, she says.

Dermatillomania affects an estimated 2-5% of the population. For context, you probably know twice as many skin pickers as natural redheads – maybe more, since the shame surrounding self-harm often keeps pickers from reporting their symptoms.

Diagnosis depends on frequency, severity and damage. Picking that’s sporadic or easily stopped is probably just “a bad habit”, Wechsler says. It enters disorder territory when the patient is “drawing blood, leaving scars or picking at an area that other people can see”, or if the behavior is uncontrollable and “getting in the way of their life in any way, socially or professionally or at school”.

Whether your picking is a temporary habit or something more serious, meditation can probably help. (I personally go longer between brow-plucking attacks when I consistently practice deep breathing.) Talk therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy with a mental health professional can help manage stress too, says Wechsler, and anxiety medication is also an option.

As far as surface-level solutions, Wechsler recommends treating the underlying acne that triggers the skin picking, since most patients in your position “will not pick if there’s nothing there”, she says.

This might be an uncomfortable concept for someone who cares, as you do, about divesting from toxic beauty standards. But beauty culture is complex. Appearance ideals are never only appearance ideals; they intersect with health and hygiene, class and power, expression and autonomy. Addressing persistent acne, in this case, isn’t about submitting to someone else’s standard of “beauty”. It’s about reducing the harm – to your skin and psyche – of a condition you’re struggling to control on your own.

Continue Reading On The Guardian

The rest of my answer includes:

• hormonal acne treatment options

• how visible symptoms of illness can affect mental health

• the potential benefits of “restorative beauty,” according to NYC-based aesthetician Delphine Breyne

• my own experience with brow microblading as a “cosmetic coping mechanism”

• and more!

Click through to the Guardian to read the full article (and if you decide to share it with friends or on social media or whatever, please share it via the Guardian link).

Read On The Guardian

Bonus! Here are some extra tidbits that didn’t make the final edit:

• I like to think of BFRBs as signs of a strong brain-skin connection. “On seeing the effects of our deepest thoughts seeping through our skin, Carl Jung, the legendary Swiss psychoanalyst, is said to have exclaimed: ‘Aha! A looking glass into the unconscious!’” Monty Lyman writes in The Remarkable Life of the Skin. Isn’t that lovely?

• GLP-1s like Ozempic and Zepbound are “being studied for just about everything,” Dr. Wechsler told me, including compulsive behaviors like BFRBs. Evidence of efficacy — empirical, anecdotal — is debatable, and I hesitate to suggest treating an anxiety disorder with what’s been compared to “an injectable eating disorder”, but it is another potential path for compulsive pickers to discuss with their medical teams.

Have a question for Ask Ugly? Submit it anonymously here — and be as detailed as possible, please!

It’s a flaw, but it’s fine. Better than fine, even. It’s what makes Banks — supermodel, creator of America’s Next Top Model, and subject of the new Netflix documentary, Reality Check: Inside America’s Next Top Model — “flawsome.”

Along with “smizing” and “tooching,” Banks coined the term “flawsome” on the set of ANTM, the model-molding reality show that aired from 2003 to 2018. In later seasons, she encouraged contestants to identify a flaw — a large forehead, freckles — and reframe it as an asset; something to set them apart in a sea of homogeneously beautiful women. “Flaws are awesome,” Banks said. “So, flawsome! I love making up a word.”

At the time, it seemed to symbolize a break from Banks and her fellow judges’ often violent fixation on physical perfection. (Contestants were body-shamed, coerced into unwanted cosmetic procedures, subjected to scalp-damaging hair treatments, hospitalized for hypothermia following grueling shoots, etc.) But in practice, flawsomeness was less about defying beauty standards than putting a feel-good spin on compliance.1

Implicit in the concept of flawsome was a caveat: A model’s flaw could only function as beauty capital if the model embodied the ideal in every other way: thin, young, smooth, and taut, with otherwise symmetrical and/or desirable features. Which is, of course, how beauty standards have functioned for much of history.

Philosopher Heather Widdows writes in Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal:

“In some contexts so much value is placed on skin tone that the failure to meet other features is negated: ‘fair skin makes up for other bodily flaws.’ In other contexts the opposite is true. For instance, skin color may be irrelevant as long as other features — for example thinness — are met. … That some features matter less in some contexts does not shake the dominance of the ideal as some of the key features are always required, in some or other combination. For example, it is possible to be bigger, if you are also firm, smooth, and young. It is less likely you will be considered beautiful, or just good enough, if you are bigger and hairy and have cellulite and jowls.”

And so, with flawsome, Banks cloaked the limitations of beauty culture in the language of liberation.

The portmanteau has since fallen out of favor, but its lesson lives on. In the post-Instagram Face era of algorithmic beauty, flawsome is the dominant ideal for people who like to see themselves as challenging the dominant ideal (or who do genuinely challenge one or some aspect[s] of the dominant ideal). Flawsome is a makeup-free Pamela Anderson selling skincare and haircare and supplements. It’s “perfectly imperfect” veneers. It’s body positive influencers shilling for Botox and silver influencers pushing promo codes for retinol. It’s “French girls keep their lower bleph” and “bad features, good facial harmony” and reapplying freckles with a pen post-foundation. It’s “messy girl makeup” atop strategically applied concealer, a logoed pimple patch on glazed donut skin, an acne reveal in a Vogue Beauty Secrets video. Flawsome is the satisfaction of rejecting beauty norms and the safety of embodying “some of the key features … required, in some or other combination.”

In Reality Check, the ANTM judges apparently “reckon” with their lowest moments by repeating, “It was a different time.” Was it, though? Since 2003, have the conditions of beauty culture been materially improved, or just linguistically improved?

I haven’t watched the documentary yet; want to watch it with me? Then join me in the FLESH WORLD chat tonight at 6pm ET!

I’ll be live-texting my thoughts as I stream all three episodes on Netflix — I’d love to hear your thoughts on Tyra, ANTM, Reality Check, and flawsome aesthetics then too, even if you’ve seen it already. Talk soon!

(FYI: The chat is for paid subscribers only, but I just enabled the “free 7-day trial” option for anyone who isn’t a paid subscriber but does want to chat with us tonight. You’re welcome to upgrade below and cancel afterwards 😊.)

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Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! I’ve been MIA here but plugging away over at the , the fashion- and beauty-focused book club I run with (“deep thoughts about superficial things”). We’re working through Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis this month, and we’ll be analyzing how Davis’ work applies to modern beauty standards at our Zoom discussion meeting on March 2nd. Join us!! The registration link will go out to Lowbrow members next week.

Anyway! Onto the links…

IN THIS ISSUE: Beauty x the Epstein files! Cosmetic deviance! Eating butter for better-looking babies! Doppelgänger sex dolls! Robot salons! AI mirrors! MAHA saunas! The penis Olympics! Cosmetic vacationing! The “Wuthering Heights” skin room! A Marxist analysis of anti-perfume! Nude nips! Nose hairs! & more!

The buzziest collab of the moment: the beauty industry x the Epstein files! The FBI named Les Wexner, founder of Bath & Body Works, as a potential co-conspirator to Jeffrey Epstein in 2019. (He hasn’t been charged.) Ronald Lauder, heir to Estée Lauder Companies, appears in the files over 900 times. (Yes, this is the same Lauder encouraging Trump to buy Greenland.) Skincare brand founder Peter Thomas Roth is in there as well; emails suggest Roth visited the convicted sex offender’s home to “explain to all the girls about skin creams” in 2017. (Epstein pled guilty to soliciting minors in 2008.) Dr. Peter Attia, longevity guru and former chief science officer of David Protein, features in the files too; in a 2016 email, he assured Epstein that “pussy is, indeed, low carb.” (I can’t help but think of David’s latest campaign positioning protein as the new penis...) NYC-based dermatologist Dr. Steven Victor treated Epstein’s “girl friends” for free, New York Magazine reports, “in exchange for a loan helping him to start a ‘cosmeceutical company.’” And it also seems that Epstein owned 10,000 shares of Allergan Aesthetics, the makers of Botox and Juvéderm — hoping to recoup some of the money he spent on injectable appointments for his friends, assistants, and victims, maybe?

In late January, the White House posted a digitally altered picture of Nekima Levy Armstrong, who’d been arrested at an ICE protest. They removed her lipstick, darkened her skin, and made her cry.

It’s another example (among many!) of how this administration enforces a white supremacist/capitalist/patriarchal beauty ideal as an ethical ideal; deviance from it — darker skin, no makeup, added wrinkles and under-eye bags — is meant to signal deviant behavior. (We’ll talk more about this at the Lowbrow Book Club meeting.)

But liberals stay tethered to the beauty <—> goodness paradigm, too!

Maybe this is why RFK Jr. and the MAHA movement are working overtime to turn Kid Rock into a sexy, sexy wellness icon? See: this video of the Secretary of Health and Human Services ice-bathing and sauna-hopping (in jeans) with a shirtless Kid.

I had high hopes for the skin room in “Wuthering Heights.”

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