Beauty x The Epstein Files
The Don't Buy List: Issue #110
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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 Lowbrow Book Club, the fashion- and beauty-focused book club I run with Emily Kirkpatrick (“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.”