Soap Scum (or The Morality of Showering)
The Don't Buy List: Issue #59
Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List! Let’s begin with a reminder that your face will never be quite right, no matter what you do. See: two beauty videos I watched back-to-back on Instagram the other day — one advising me to erase my sun-induced forehead freckles, and one teaching me to fake them with self-tanner.
With this in mind, I encourage us all to give up.
Anyway!
If you read one beauty story this week, it should be “Have you noticed that everyone’s teeth are a little too perfect?” by Jessica M. Goldstein for the Washington Post. It’s a thorough/thoroughly fascinating investigation into the world of celebrity and civilian veneers, and how “everybody has the same smile … and it’s kind of creepy.” I was thrilled to be interviewed for the piece!
“The beauty ideal [is] becoming increasingly inhuman,” said Jessica DeFino, beauty industry reporter and author of the newsletter the Unpublishable. “The standard that’s being reflected is not a marker of human health or even human possibility. It’s very marked by machinery and technological intervention … [and] visual signals that someone has attained a certain level of wealth and power.”
I really loved Goldstein’s observation about the before-and-after images that Dr. Kevin Sands (the cosmetic dentist responsible for Kim and Khloé Kardashian’s smiles) takes of his patients:
“The afters … are both better and worse, somehow, than the befores. They are technically improved but emotionally charmless, impossible to tell apart from the others on the page.”
You need to read the whole thing.
And now, onto the links…
In this issue: What Mila Kunis and Ashton Kutcher’s infrequent showers have to do with their support of convicted rapist Danny Masterson (nothing)! Moisturizer as a moral imperative! “Real Housewives” as a sales push for fake lashes! The Cost of Straight Hair! Amazon makeup! Jared Leto’s one good skincare idea! Ghost-watching “Get Ready With Me” videos! Tanning is back! Fashion Week beauty is monstrous! The faux-brow lift to “fox eye” pipeline! And more!