The Don't Buy List: Sparkly Cell Death, Blonde Jokes, & Botox For Camels
Plus, skincare sneakers: the nadir of beauty brand collabs.
Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List — the last one of the year! Let’s kick things off with an existentialist blonde joke. Alex Baia recently wrote a collection of them for The New Yorker, and they’re all laugh-inside-your-head funny (a very under-appreciated kind of funny, I think).
A blind man walks into a bar. He sits down and says, “Who wants to hear a dumb-blonde joke?”
The bartender says, “I’m actually blond! But I’d love to hear your joke, since stereotypes about my hair color help me explore my sense of anxiety about things I can’t control.”
I’m sorry, that’s not even the whole joke, but come on, how good is that line?? You can read the rest here.
Anyway!
A bunch of camels were disqualified from a camel beauty contest in Saudi Arabia after getting Botox. “Authorities discovered dozens of breeders had stretched out the lips and noses of camels, used hormones to boost the beasts’ muscles, injected camels’ heads and lips with Botox to make them bigger, inflated body parts with rubber bands, and used fillers to relax their faces,” according to Al Jazzera. The internet generally laughed at the absurdity of it all, with takes along the lines of, “Botox for camels? How weird! How cruel! How absolutely ridiculous!” And, like… Yes. Altering one’s appearance with cosmetic procedures in order to better adhere to some arbitrary standard of beauty that doesn’t actually exist in nature is absurd. But if it’s absurd for camels… isn’t it absurd for human animals? Press coverage of the event side-stepped my burning philosophical question by pointing out that “camels didn’t elect to have” these elective procedures (which, of course, is true — this is animal cruelty and it’s wrong, disturbing, etc). But do we elect to have these procedures? I don’t think so; not fully. I’m thinking about this quote from the recent Air Mail piece on journalist Stephen Glass: “Years in therapy and long discussions about lying made him realize it is poisonous to others, because it ‘deprives them of agency—the ability to make judgments and determinations’ on their own.” Not to be dramatic, but beauty culture is built on lies — lies about our worth, lies about our “flaws,” lies about what we lack and what we need, lies about our cultural and moral duty to look young and beautiful, lies about how we will feel and the rewards we will reap once we buy into society’s beauty standards. That’s why I cringe whenever someone equates getting cosmetic surgery/injectables with exercising “body autonomy.” You can’t have body autonomy without brain autonomy, without emotional autonomy — and so often, beauty culture brainwashes us out of that autonomy, that agency, that “ability to make judgements and determinations” on our own. I mean, if our decisions are coerced by outside forces, if they’re manipulated by marketing, are they really ours? I don’t know! I started reading an article about camels and now I’m here! I am clearly unwell!!
Also in this issue…
‘Tis the season for sparkly cell death! New research shows that microplastic pollution causes cell death, cell wall damage, and allergic reactions. Reminder: Glitter is a microplastic.
When small, sustainable brands are bought by cosmetic conglomerates! Can a company ever be “good to the planet” if it’s part of a highly-polluting corporation?
An educational PDF on Body Dysmorphic Disorder! Important insights on BDD from The Beautywell Project.
A critical analysis of self-care culture! “Helping people truly attain wellness and beauty would, technically, hurt the economy,” writes Zoe Tinnes at Heartability.
Skincare brands are launching sneaker collabs! Maybe because wearable merch is basically marketing that customers pay for and distribute themselves?
The Glossy 50 — the publication’s year-end list of industry change-makers and thought-leaders for 2021 — was sponsored by Amazon! Yeah… the industry is never gonna fuckin’ change.
& more!