10 Comments

That L’Oréal campaign… 😮 The moral dimension is so wrong! Take it too literally and your ‘worth’ will evaporate into plastic bottles and jars and L’Oréal’s big pockets!

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It's truly unhinged!

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I agree with beauty brands being sneaky and co-opting this whole “paradigm shift” and “body positivity” movement while still exploiting people’s insecurities of aging and having blemishes. There’s a lot of nuance of embodying beauty, especially when your body has acne, melanin, stretch marks, fat, is alive, etc.

Also, the idea of health and what is healthy; I recently found out one of my elders, who’s in her late 70s, is a habitual smoker, smokes a cigarette everyday after dinner and her doctors are fine with it?!? “Oh one cigarette that’s not a problem” she’s been smoking since she’s 13!

Very juicy topics and glad that there’s discussion around all this “vibe shift”.

There is this book I want to read “Reclaiming Ugly!” By Vanessa Rochelle Lewis. Interestingly it is out of print and not available to buy online and my local libraries don’t have it...wondering if anyone has read it or even has a copy to lend?

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I'm not familiar with that book but now I want to read it! I would also recommend Ugliness: A Cultural History by Gretchen E. Henderson if you haven't checked that one out yet.

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I heard about the book from Prentis Hemphill’s podcast Finding our Way, she interviewed Vanessa Lewis https://open.spotify.com/episode/0K91ilQ4hpEWoAhemxQ1kg?si=AET1RuF2RhCw3lbEaYY9DQ

I’ll check out Gretchen’s book thank you for the referral! 😊

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I think some of the answer is in your defensive footnotes - deep change in perspective can't happen when everything you read is a snippet divorced of context.

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And that is exactly why I'm writing a very long and involved book :)

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I think you we may need to elaborate on what paradigm shift means so people get it or else - there will be more statements such as don't think about your body // separate it from your head.

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For sure, I need to think about it more! Like I said, I don't really know what the hell I'm talking about either lol... I just know that we're debating things that ultimately do not even matter because they're so far away from the truth. But still, even if I knew EXACTLY what to say right now to get people to understand, those kinds of statements will always exist. The mainstream beauty media is deeply, deeply embedded in the paradigm :)

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I respect that. It's a continuous thought / conversation till we get to the bottom of it. I'm with you.

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