2021: The Year In Unpublishable Beauty

A fun lil retrospective of my most radical takes.

In the final days of 2020, Coveteur asked me if I would write an essay about the year in beauty. I did. I called it “2020: The Year The Beauty Industry Radicalized Me.” Judging by the fact that the article is now inexplicably hidden from my Coveteur.com author page (lol), it was perhaps not what the publication had in mind. One could say it was almost… unpublishable. Ha.

“If 2020 taught me anything, it’s that everything sucks, including the beauty industry. I wish I could put that more eloquently, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m tired,” I wrote. The article went on to outline how the beauty industry was implicated in every single super-sucky thing that made 2020 a super-sucky year — from Covid to institutionalized white supremacy to the wealth gap to global warming. I ended with this: “If we want a better beauty industry in 2021, it has to move beyond inclusive marketing campaigns and diverse foundation shades. It has to push past consumption as activism and performative self-care. It has to include community care and climate activism, racial and social justice, policy reform and protest. Above all, it has to advocate for the abolition of the outdated, oppressive systems it props up.”

Did 2021 deliver? I mean, sure, there were bright spots, but mostly, uh, no. The industry saw the launch of approximately one million new celebrity beauty brands. It continued to confuse sustainability with post-consumer recycled plastic packaging — which is literally juuust plastic, people! It turned “skinimalism” into stealth consumerism. It perpetuated Orientalism by falsely and lazily conflating Eastern medicine with anti-vaxx rhetoric. It took up the actually-pretty-racist cause of “anti-clean beauty.” It positioned old-school Big Beauty propaganda as “counterculture” and “cool.” It made a fossil fuel-derived petrochemical the most sought-after skincare product. It told us face lifts were radical. It pumped out more Botox than ever before. As my mom would say: Yikes.

I’m biased of course, but for me, the year’s biggest “bright spot in beauty” was watching this little pro-people, anti-product newsletter grow. It was featured in New York Magazine, The Sunday Times, Fast Company, and NRC! It was shouted out by Haley Nahman of Maybe Baby, Val Monroe of How Not To F*ck Up Your Face, Terry Nguyen in Embedded, and Sari Botton of Oldster Magazine! It was read by thousands upon thousands of you! It’s been so encouraging to get your feedback, to see you divest from standardized beauty, to hear how questioning beauty culture has positively impacted you and your communities. Thank you for being here, for reading, for sharing, and especially for subscribing. It means so much to me.

Would you allow me a little self-indulgent celebration by way of a month-by-month “best of” list??

January: The End of the Shelfie

I started the year with an anti-capitalist cry on Coveteur: “Why 2021 Will Be The End Of The Shelfie”.

Like selfies before them, shelfies have come to represent something deeper than decor: to “communicate one’s perceived identity,” as psychologist Nneoma G. Onyedire writes. “My shelf is the first thing I see when I wake and when I drift [off] at night,” aesthetician Despina Daniilidis told me over email in early 2020. “My shelf is my safe space more than anything. Like, each product is my baby, you know? They all have a home with me. And they’ve protected me and been there for me through many big life moments.” The influencer is one of many who feels emotionally tied to her skin-care collection. Beauty is inherently emotional, after all; there’s an entire field of dermatology dedicated to exploring the relationship between the skin and the mind. But it could also be argued that this kind of shelf-identification shifts the focus from truly caring for the skin (by giving it what it needs: less inanimate “skin care,” more support via sleep, hydration, nutrition, exercise, and stress reduction) to merely appearing to care for the skin (by amassing a mountain of picture-perfect products and needlessly refrigerating them).

February: Quitting Clean Beauty

I quit my job as a “clean beauty” columnist at HelloGiggles in February! In my farewell post I said:

I was initially drawn to the "clean" space—call it natural, non-toxic, sustainable, insert nice-sounding adjective here—because I wanted to make the beauty industry a safer place to be. I still want that. I still believe that safe ingredients are important. I still believe that conventional cosmetics contain some questionable ingredients, ones I'd rather not have permeating my precious skin barrier, thanks. I no longer believe ingredients are the bad guys of beauty, though.

The most toxic thing the industry sells isn't phthalates or sulfates or silicones. It's beauty standards.

Studies prove that beauty standards directly contribute to anxiety and depression. They can trigger body dysmorphia and disordered eating. They can fuel low self-esteem, self-harm, and even suicide. All of these conditions have risen in recent years, and all of them are unequivocally connected to beauty standards. 

March: The Colonizer Mindset

March brought The Unpublishable’s most-read piece to date: “How the Beauty Industry Fuels Anti-Asian Racism — Beyond Cultural Appropriation.”

I’m talking about the colonizer mindset that’s embedded in the beauty industry. The colonizer mindset is “a way of thinking, valuing, feeling, and behaving that reflects a norm of Euro-white dominance over non-white, subordinated peoples.” This is the mindset that glorifies Western medicine and vilifies Eastern medicine. It’s the mindset that consistently presents Eastern healing systems as weird, “woo-woo,” and worse. It’s the typical ~sassy~ women’s media tone; the one that raises an inquisitive (read: condescending) eyebrow at Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. It’s the implied eye roll that tells readers these ancient, sacred techniques — herbal remedies, crystal-carved tools, natural ingredients, facial massage, mindfulness — don’t really work. It’s the framing of Western medicine as the only medicine. It’s the framing of Eastern medicine as “alternative,” anti-science, and untrustworthy (despite the fact that Eastern healing systems have supported the wellbeing of Asian communities for centuries). All of the above present Eastern/Asian beliefs as inferior to Western/white beliefs. All of the above subtly or not-so-subtly contribute to xenophobia and the escalation of anti-Asian hate crimes across the country.

April: Beauty Culture Is An MLM

After Khloé Kardashian scrubbed the internet of an errant un-Photoshopped bikini photo, I wrote “We Are All Khloé Kardashian” — not my most popular opinion, but one I still stand by, goddammit!

Kardashian is a great example of how we are all harmed by beauty standards and how we all inflict harm by adhering to those beauty standards.

It may be helpful to think of beauty culture like an MLM (Multi-Level Marketing company): Beauty standards (the product) are produced by the powers that be: patriarchy, white supremacy, capitalism, colonialism. They’re then distributed by high-level executives: Corporations, brands, editors, influencers, dermatologists, aestheticians, reporters, celebrities. Individuals buy into these beauty standards and, in turn, “sell” those standards to their communities, creating a “downline.” The standards are now everywhere, as ubiquitous as a pair of LuLaRoe leggings.

In other words, society/culture conditions us into conforming to beauty standards. When we conform, we become the conditioners, compounding the conditioning for those within our personal spheres of influence. That conditioning radiates outward from us as individuals, through our private and personal networks, and into social networks, organizations, the general public, and finally, the culture. It comes full circle.

So yes, the toxicity starts at the top — but when that “Hey, hun!” shows up in your Facebook messages and fills you with rage, you’re more than willing to recognize the role of the individual, right? Hun… we have to exit the downline.

May: Skinimalism Is Minimalist Consumerism

One of the biggest skincare trends of the year was “skinimalism.” Did that translate to fewer skincare purchases? NO! Because skinimalism is, of course, a scam. As I wrote in “Is Skinimalism Just Minimalist Consumerism?”:

Skinimalism is one part mea culpa, one hundred parts marketing — a trend designed to sell the public a whole new set of minimal-minded products (see: the 26 unopened emails in my inbox from PR people promoting new “skinimalist” launches) while appearing to address the many, many, many issues the industry has created and exacerbated through the promotion of maximal skincare routines and constant product launches over the past five years.

June: Who Gets To Be Beautiful?

This June, I was beyond honored to appear on the Maybe Baby podcast with Haley Nahman, one of my favorite culture writers. In the episode — titled “Who Gets To Be Beautiful?” — Haley and I discussed makeup as a coping mechanism, the pseudo-science of skincare, and the costs and benefits of divesting from beauty standards.

July: Anxiety Eyebrows

A totally normal month: I turned 32 and wrote about my mental illness for Vogue!

It started as a pet name for the approximately three hairs scattered across my otherwise-empty brow bones: my Anxiety Eyebrows. What happened to the rest of them, you ask? Oh, I pulled them out. Mm-hmm, all of them. Hundreds of hairs, over and over, fingers animated by some unconscious, unignorable force—by some part of my brain that swore freeing the exact right hair from the exact right follicle would soothe the stress-induced ache in my pores.

I do this constantly and compulsively, weekly if not daily. My rational mind knows that picking doesn’t work, of course. I know the added stress of annihilating my own eyebrows (What did I do? Why am I like this? Should I get bangs?) will provoke another episode. I know the ache will come back and my brows might not. Doesn’t matter. Reason is no match for the fleeting euphoria of ripping a hair from its root!

I only mention it because my mental illness is trending. (That is an objectively absurd statement, yes, but we live in absurdist times.) Research published in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology recently revealed a pandemic-related increase in self-reported instances of trichotillomania—the technical term for the obsessive, unrelenting urge to pull your hair out.

August: Performing Beauty Is Productivity

In August, I escaped to the beach and with a copy of Lost In Work: Escaping Capitalism by Amelia Horgan and reviewed it for The Don’t Buy List.

I can’t help but notice the similarities between work culture and beauty culture. (Probably because performing prettiness is a form of productivity. More on how modern beauty standards were strategically escalated and enforced to impede women’s progress in the workplace here.) This part of the introduction really stuck with me: “While [work] might provide some satisfaction, even some pleasure, it does so at the expense of the cultivation of other kinds of pleasures, of other ways of living and producing, together.” The author says that critiquing work culture — and implementing better systems — is valid and necessary and ultimately beneficial for the collective… even though some people really like their jobs. Which, like, YES!! I want to copy-paste this sentiment and put it in front of all my work. Plenty of people enjoy performing beauty, and that’s lovely. But as Horgan puts it, “this … is not about people’s subjective preferences so much as the condition in which those preferences are formed, and the background of possibilities against which they exist, such as the lack of other sources of possible fulfillment and sociability.”

September: Beauty Culture Is A Public Health Issue

After supermodel Linda Evangelista announced she’d been “brutally disfigured” and “permanently deformed” by a CoolSculpting procedure, I wrote about beauty culture as a public health issue.

Beauty culture is a system of beliefs that defines “beauty” as the adherence to current societal beauty standards — standards that are largely shaped by patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism, and capitalism. It upholds beauty as a form of political, economic, and social capital. It reinforces racism, sexism, colorism, ableism, classism, ageism, fatphobia, and gender norms. It falsely equates beauty with health, wellness, worth, and moral goodness; and in this way, the pursuit of beauty is seen as the noble pursuit of “self-betterment” and “self-care”. Beauty culture positions normal features as “flaws” to be “fixed”. It systematically breaks down self-esteem and installs shame, so that it can then sell “confidence” back to you in the form of products, procedures, and practices. It rewards those who adhere to the current beauty ideal and oppresses those who don’t. It normalizes self-harm and self-mutilation as a means of achieving this ideal. It frames this achievement as “empowerment.” It siphons your time, money, and energy in the process. Beauty culture prioritizes appearance over physical, mental, and emotional wellbeing. It reinforces the idea that your beauty is the basis of your worth — that what you look like is more important than who you are — even through positive-sounding phrases like “Everybody is beautiful!” and “Because you’re worth it!”

Studies show that beauty culture contributes to anxiety, depression, disordered eating, body dysmorphia, self-harm, and even suicide. (Which is to say nothing of the physical harm often caused by skincare products, cosmetic procedures, injectables, and surgery, or the impact beauty culture has on the earth: the packaging, the plastic, the factory emissions, the industrial chemical waste — all for products no one actually needs — that contribute to the pollution that accelerates the very “signs of aging” we’re taught to treat with more products and procedures.)

October: Beauty Isn’t Superficial

For World Mental Health Day, I worked with Topicals to launch the Mental Health Spotline — a free, 24/7 mental health resource featuring audio messages designed to “help people better understand the connection between their appearance and mental health.” Here’s an excerpt from one of my messages, on why we’re so drawn to beauty (and why we can’t count on the industry to meet our needs):

Beauty — like freedom, like truth, like love! — is an innate human longing. We crave it. We need it in our lives. We’re filled with the urge to express it. The problem is, the kind of “beauty” that beauty culture promotes is a flattened, hollow, purely aesthetic approximation of the beauty the human spirit craves — which is why none of the industry’s products and procedures ever really satisfy us.

November: Meet Meta Face

When Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook corporate was officially rebranding as Meta, I couldn’t look away from his weirdly waxy face — all but indistinguishable from an A.I. rendering. I dubbed the look “Meta Face” and wondered whether it would be the future of Instagram Face.

Forgive me for mocking Zuckerberg’s slow descent into cyborg territory, but the bizarre beauty behaviors of tech’s elite demand dissection and discussion. These are the people creating the framework for filters. These are the people programming the algorithms. These are the people conceptualizing metaverse avatars. These are the people enforcing society’s beauty ideals. (Which is how Meta was always meant to function, by the way. Facebook was originally developed to rank the women on Harvard’s campus by hotness.) When the pressure to override the most basic traits of one’s earthly existence — aging, emotion, expression, reaction — is forced upon those with access to the most cutting-edge advancements in social technology, it’s forced upon all.

December: Question Everything

I closed out the year by critiquing yet another celebrity beauty brand launch — this time, UN/DN LAQR by Machine Gun Kelly — but also, by attempting to explain why beauty critique is so freaking important.

Aesthetic self-expression is an inherent human longing. It’s important. It’s fulfilling. It can be joyful. It can be political. It can create change. Also, one can simultaneously enjoy surface-level beauty and explore the self more deeply. But just because these things can be true does not mean these are the primary ways in which tools of beauty are currently being used. Today, the primary uses of beauty products are consumerism, conformity, and complacency. And by insisting that the above caveats be included in every critique of beauty culture — so as not to offend anyone, so as to protect the sacredness of our 10-step skincare routines! — we allow that consumerism, conformity, and complacency to flourish. We have to critique these tools precisely to preserve their power. Without critique, their worst and most widespread applications go unchecked.

Thanks for being here for these Unpublishable beauty moments. Cheers to finding freedom from beauty culture in 2022!