Cosmetic Work As Chronic Hope
Sable Yong guest-edits The Don't Buy List: Issue #54
I’m taking July off to focus on finishing my book (!!!) and handing The Unpublishable over to a series of guest writers for the month.1 Today’s guest is Sable Yong, a former beauty editor who’s written for Vogue, Allure, and more, and now writes the newsletter
. (Subscribe here!) Below, her feelings on botched plastic surgery, balayage as caucasian cosplay, and a perfume priced at (omg) $27k. You’ll laugh! You’ll gasp! You’ll appreciate your thighs in a fresh and romantic way!!-Jessica
The Don’t Buy List: Issue #54
by Yong
Hi, hello, thank you for having me for this week’s edition of the Don’t Buy List: It’s Not You, It’s Them or alternatively the Wait, what? edition. I’m Sable Yong: former beauty editor, freelance writer, pre-author, and simultaneous beauty enthusiast and agnostic (from the school of “old man yells at cloud”). I write the substack Hard Feelings and have an upcoming bookie book coming out on Harper Collins next summer called Die Hot With A Vengeance.
I come to you fully in my IDK, Man era of beauty where digital media cannibalizes stories left and right for clicks (which they know because every media site has some creepy Wizard Of Oz analytics tools that determine what topics, figures, and trends are indexing so we know what to publish to get the most clicks). Commerce pays the bills, which is why every beauty article is a market round-up, or a celebrity-driven product review. But on the one hand, it’s a very telling picture of what the masses are most interested in since media covers what the Internet wants to read, not the other way around.
Anywayyyyy, I’ve collected some of my favorite beauty-related links from across the WWW — some informative, some to make you go Hmm, and some to make you go Hehe — all of which I’ve bookmarked as worthy of inventory in my mind’s beauty cabinet.
The Venn Diagram Of Beauty Standards and Dark Comedy Is A Circle (Well, Almost).
One of the things I find most fascinating about beauty is how allegorical it can be. Beauty is my favorite dark comedy. It appeals to our most morbid fears as well as our most vulnerable wishes, which is how you can tell a lot about a person from the contents of their medicine cabinet. In Vox’s horror issue two years ago, Terry Nguyen wrote about our morbid fascination with “botched” plastic surgery in The Morbid Appeal Of “Botched” Plastic Surgery.
“Many have claimed that this fear of body modification and disfigurement reflects our social anxieties: over the advancement of biological science and Western medicine, the perceived loss of agency over our bodies, algorithm-influenced beauty standards, or bodies that fall outside societal norms.”
Our glee in seeing how the wealthy are not immune to “botched” vanity exploits (even if it’s just that the work makes itself too obvious) will never eclipse the fact that in the absence of one’s own self-determined definition of beauty, there are so many aesethetic practitioners who are more than happy to determine one for you. And sometimes that definition may even involve plastic surgery! It reminds me of one time meeting a well-known (to someone) Eastern European plastic surgeon at some beauty event in my early days a beauty editor, and him telling me that in Poland and Russia, the overdone look is desirable as a status symbol. Regional aesthetics are a surefire way to learn what beauty is for, according to different cultures. The irony of our western ideals is that in our obsession with “natural” beauty, artificial means of body maintenance and optimization are sought out and encouraged while also stigmatized for not possessing those ideal traits to begin with. And people wonder why feminine rage is so… this
“Ultimately, this morbid fascination and disdain is just a cover for that same old set of fears: that people, particularly women, are subject to the harsh whims of a society that demands they look a certain way (some far more so than others); that our bodies, despite our efforts, are at their core unruly and ungovernable; that we’re actually not so different from the people we gawk at after all.”
Body dysmorphia is such a common haunt that the way we perceive our own image so often becomes a manifestation of our anxieties and fears that create our own self-made superstitions. It’s spooky stuff. Beauty is a voyeur’s sport. The body becomes a testimony of our optimism and our fears when you consider the constant tension between self-optimization’s promised rewards and its potential collateral damage (and punishments). I suppose it’s a lot easier to place moral judgments on an individual’s choices than the system that led to those choices.
“If you are ever trapped between a hungry bear and a blonde with an attitude, fight the bear.”
My head has been every color in the ROYGBIV spectrum, but before that, it was platinum blonde for a while (necessary if you want to dabble in any sort of pastel color not found in nature). As a former bleachcreep, my attachment to the hair color was always at the mercy of chemistry and in some ways, irony (since there isn’t really a believable way to be platinum blonde as an Asian). Look, I had the means (press credentials), identity is malleable, and hair grows back, so why not try something extreme yet not irreversible?
Author and professor Tressie McMillan Cottom’s NYT op-ed What We Mean When We Talk About “Blonde” so eloquently captured something I intrinsically knew then (2014) but didn’t know how to articulate — which is that blondeness represents something more than just a hair color; it’s a marker of racially-coded status that no one wants to admit even as they adamantly cleave to their identity the fact that they were born blonde.
“Most of us hate the idea that whom we are attracted to, for instance, has any political context. We hate thinking that the things we enjoy — like a soapy western with conservative tropes — mean anything. That is the thing about status. We all want it, but, should we acquire it, we don’t want it to mean anything. We don’t want to feel bad about having status. The real blondes let me have it because, they maintained, being blond should mean something for them but not mean anything for the rest of us. That is not how status works.
When people have outsize emotional reactions to benign inquiries about their self-evident beliefs, it is often an indicator that status is doing invisible work. That makes the culture, economics and politics of blondness great ways to think about how status derives its power and how we use that power in our own lives.”
(Although, I attest that platinum blonde Asians are a different sort of neo-liberal canon that while still status adjacent, is often misconstrued by those unburdened by critical thinking as some sort of “wanting to be white” thing, when the true caucasian cosplay is actually balayage).
It’s a face cream; how much could it be — $1000?
It’s funny — working in beauty media, you quickly pick up on the way corporations perceive high fashion as prestige and beauty as gauche but necessary for advertising mostly; it’s an addendum to the glamour they purport but never the prize. Fashion has quiet luxury but beauty’s version has never been “quiet” per se. And now there is “ultra luxury,” where expensive beauty products that have the same function as other expensive products are now made even more expensive by way of packaging, exclusivity, and of course, optics. It’s giving “Do you like L u x u r y?”
It’s giving House Of Atoz Youth Milk, featuring propriety ingredients such as distilled water from street puddles in Indo-nahh-zia.
It’s only a little bit astounding how the price of a face goo can actually influence one into believing that it has extraordinary abilities beyond its ingredient list (of which are largely just occlusives, with those really luxury triple-figure creams). My former colleague and brilliant friend Brennan Kilbane wrote an in-depth piece about Augustinus Bader’s rise to be the new Le Mer (tl;dr it’s mostly just getting the right lip service – famous lips, mostly).
I remember when Louboutin Beauty released their sculptural and collectable-looking $50 nail polishes and $90 lipsticks (back in, I wanna say, 2014), and it seemed like such a stunt — but as a business move makes perfect sense for brand awareness, and gives those who long for red bottoms somewhere else they can invest their acorns (red Louboutin lipsticks). Even though I know for a fact, that people who buy those lipsticks (for themselves or as gifts) never use them, as they are “too fancy” for daily casual use. Such is the luxury dilemma for those whom money is a rather large object, so rarely do we allow ourselves to enjoy whatever material privileges we’re afforded as if its inherent value is in its possession alone (cue Billy Ray Cyrus “Much to think about” meme).
Business Of Fashion calls the trend “premiumisation” — a reminder that there really are people so wealthy that they can ostensibly accidentally launder a pair of jeans with a $209 lip balm in the pocket, oops. A $200 lipstick, $1000 moisturizer, and now Guerlain’s new $27k fragrance — Bouquet de la Mariée Murano Edition by Aristide Najean, of which only 10 bottles were made and all of which have sold out. As a plebe, I imagine that this ultra luxury sector appeals to the newly monied or the wealthy whose gaping insecurities are fed with glittering high-ticket trinkets with no value other than what they represent. I mean, for better but usually worse, no one knows more than the wealthy that money is fake.
What tf is a strawberry leg??
There is nothing more I love than opting out — of plans, of a relationship, of a job, and especially of an arbitrary set of social codes that weren’t made for me in mind anyway.