Podcast: Revealing The Real Face Of The Beauty Industry

I'm a guest on The Active Voice with Hamish McKenzie!

I am so excited (and retroactively anxious) to be a guest on Substack’s The Active Voice podcast today! You can listen to my interview with Substack co-founder Hamish McKenzie here:

The Active Voice: Jessica DeFino is revealing the real face of the beauty industry (and it’s not pretty)

Excerpts from the conversation:

Illustration by Joro Chen

On beauty

I’m really interested in looking at the systems behind industrialized beauty, but I always like to point out that the reason that I do this work is because I’m so passionate about beauty as a concept. I see beauty up there as “beauty, freedom, truth, love.” It is integral to our lives.

On skin saviors

The beauty industry for a long time has been messaged as this sort of ethical ideal, as this moral imperative. It has borrowed a lot of tactics from religion and Protestantism and Catholicism in particular. Even when you look at the language of the beauty industry, you’re like: it’s a miracle product. It’s the Holy Grail. It’s a skin savior.

On being an internet writer

I am very worried about having a limited perspective and not considering something that is actually really important and inadvertently hurting people. I don’t want my work to ever hurt anybody. I only want my work to help.

On ‘Instagram face’

People are consumed with this need to reflect their perfected digital selves. Instagram face is kind of the big one, but there’s also TikTok face and Snapchat face and all of these smaller micro trends, but the idea is just that a lot of what’s driving the beauty industry now is this obsession with emulating your digital avatar.

On social media’s effect on self-conception

We’re seeing increased rates of appearance-related anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, facial dysmorphia, disordered eating, self-harm, even suicide. This all-encompassing focus on the physical is really not good for our mental health. We’re very disconnected in general as a culture from our true selves.

On ageism 

Something as little as an anti-aging cream really does point to these giant, huge systems issues. I like to think of beauty standards as the physical manifestations of systems of oppression. I think that the anti-aging focus is a great example of that, where this really is just an outgrowth of ageism.

On building a movement with readers

I’m actually participating in this collective liberation of women from oppressive beauty ideals and influencing the people in my life and in my community, and that radiates outward to sort of change beauty culture on a mass scale. People like feeling like there is another pathway that is beneficial to them and beneficial to others.