'Challengers': An Ad For Augustinus Bader Body Cream?
The Don't Buy List: Issue #71
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Don’t Buy List! I just finished reading an advance copy of The Coin by Yasmin Zaher (out July 2024) and suggest you pre-order this very strange, very stirring novel right now. Written from the point of view of a wealthy Palestinian woman living in New York, the book contends with class, colonialism, and beauty culture, often through the narrator’s obsession with cleanliness. Her daily routine:
"In the morning I brushed my teeth with a soft toothbrush and my favorite Cattier toothpaste. Then I washed my face with an oil-based cleanser, followed by a water-based cleanser, followed by toner. All imported from Korea, the world capital of skin like porcelain, purity, and nothingness. Two thousand more years of snail cream and you will see a woman's brain through her face. Then, after drinking a glass of hot lemon water, a glass of lukewarm water, and a cup of coffee, I emptied my bowels. This happened easily, gloriously, requiring no effort or thought, like flipping through an abridged history of the fall of an empire. All out, insides clean. After work I got in the shower and repeated the steps of the skincare regimen under the hot water. I washed my hair with two kinds of shampoo, I scrubbed my feet with a pumice stone, I cleaned my ears and underneath my nails with cotton buds. Slippers from the shower to the bedroom. Ready for the white sheets. I never, ever got into bed without showering. I was a clean woman then, you could say. In cleanliness, I invested money, time, attention. But it was not enough. The dirt kept piling, pain is an accumulation."
She hovers on the edge of madness throughout the book, held there by a spot on her back that she can’t get clean — her roots? her inheritance? the ideal self, just out of reach? the limit of aesthetic transcendence? a drishti of disorder, dissociation, displacement, disgust? all of it? Story also includes: Burberry trench coats, an international Birkin-reselling scheme. Highly recommend.
And onto the links…
In this issue: The Skin-Brain Axis! Challengers is an Augustinus Bader ad! Sleep as a status symbol! Dove does it again! (It = hypocrisy.) Youthforia does it again! (It = racism.) Literary it girls! Charlotte Tilbury’s “Fragrance Collection of Emotions”! Bella Hadid’s perfume line! Mating! Are the women of SNL hot? Botched Botox, vampire facials linked to HIV, & more.
I talked to reporter Kish Lal for her Dazed Beauty piece “Will being ‘ugly’ be aspirational one day?” and went head-to-head with Julia Fox. Fox is a fan of “ugly” beauty trends, like bleached eyebrows; I think today’s so-called “ugly” trends can more accurately be described as “pre-pretty.” As I told Lal: “Ugly over time becomes pretty when that ugliness is associated with the ruling class. Because that's what beauty is; a class performance.” More from Dazed:
DeFino tells me that she likes the idea of a world that embraces ugly people but to achieve true neutrality, one must dream bigger than setting new beauty standards: we must destroy them.
“Beauty standards are a way to economically, politically, socially and financially punish people. If ugliness is part of that standard, I don’t think it has much benefit.”
Fox frames ugly beauty as some sort of progress, but progress toward what? What is gained by performing a high-effort aesthetic of “ugly” instead of a high-effort aesthetic of beauty? Either way, you’re sinking your resources (time, money, effort, thought) into your face. Either way, there are physical, psychological, environmental consequences (on the individual and collective levels) to consider. I’m more interested in the “ugliness” of opting out of aesthetic labor entirely.
I love P.E. Moskowitz’s newsletter Mental Hellth and was thrilled to do a Q&A with them on control, consumption, the brain-skin axis, etc.:
“The skin is the very literal bridge between people’s inner and outer world. It’s the only way our brains can sense that we’re all physical beings and not just floating psyches. And so a lot of the stuff that’s happening in our head, we’re psychologically prone to have the impulse to [express that through] our physical body in order to prove that it’s real. The skin becomes a canvas for what’s going on inside. That’s programmed into us. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But I don’t think that relationship should be mediated through mass consumption.”
Who else saw Challengers? Who else noticed the suspiciously lingering shots of Tashi’s blue jar of Augustinus Bader Body Cream?