Get Free From Skincare Culture (New Podcast!)
Listen: The F*ck It Podcast with Caroline Dooner, featuring me.
What’s better than Buy 1 Get 1 Free? Getting free from beauty culture! So today — Cyber Monday, the most soul-crushing Monday of all — I’m sharing three things to help you do just that.
1. Listen to the latest episode of The F*ck It Podcast
You may know author Caroline Dooner from her book The Fuck It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy, her podcast The F*ck It Podcast, or her wildly popular Instagram. We first met on social — our followers kept tagging us in each others’ content and commenting things like, “Jessica is the Caroline of beauty!” — and quickly realized that diet culture and skincare culture are basically identical, ideologically speaking. So we recorded a podcast about it.
As Caroline explains in the show notes: “Just like our relationship with food and diets, where we are led to believe we need diets, which leads to worse health and a worse relationship with food longterm… the same thing is true for our skin. Beauty companies have convinced us we need their products, but their products are disrupting our natural skin barrier and biome, and lead us to needing MORE of their products. Great for them. Not so great for us.”
Tune in to learn more about:
The science of the skin’s inherent functions!
Leaving Your Face The F*ck Alone!
Why raw vegan diets lead to breakouts!
The wonder of the Gut-Brain-Skin Axis!
The truth about “detoxing”!
How lymphatic drainage affects acne!
& more!
2. Dive into back issues of The Don’t Buy List
The Don’t Buy List is the main perk for The Unpublishable’s paying subscribers: It’s a bi-weekly roundup of product-free content, curated to challenge our culturally-conditioned beliefs about beauty. Last week, I unlocked all past editions of The Don’t Buy List (linked below) so that everyone — paid subscribers, free subscribers, Internet randos — has access to this info. The posts go back behind the paywall after tomorrow. Until then: Read, screenshot, share!
2/26: Botox, Britney, & Anti-Capitalist Beauty
3/10: The New Male Gaze, The Magic of Mushrooms, & Manuka Honey
3/24: Crying-As-Skincare, Nicole Kidman, & the BIEB“Our insistence on exerting manpower over our skin is directly tied to the colonizer mindset of exerting manpower over nature.”
4/6: Racism In 'Anti-Clean' Beauty, Anxiety Eyebrows, & Meditation-As-Moisturizer
4/20: Skin-Control, Sage, & Setting Boundaries
5/12: Retinoid Uglies, Recycling, & Natural Skincare As Eco-Guilt“The weeks-long period of ‘uglies’/irritation/sensitization/skin-barrier-degradation caused by retinoids is a very clear sign of skin injury. Anyone who tells you otherwise — i.e., it’s a sign it’s working! it’s a necessary evil! it’s totally normal! — is gaslighting you. (But probably only because the industry gaslit them, too.”
5/25: The Don't Buy List: Some Stuff To Buy, Actually
6/16: Kill Your (Skincare) Darlings
7/1: Beauty Anxiety, ScarJo Skincare, & Shutting The F*ck Up About The Sun
7/22: Hot Hyperpigmentation Summer, Beauty Loves Bezos, & Snake Oil Skincare“Want to know why it’s so hard to heal hyperpigmentation? Because the hyperpigmentation IS the healing.”
8/5: Fake Tans, Fake Butts, & (Over) Washing Your Face
8/19: Beauty Distractions, Bella Hadid's (First) Face, & Unf*cking Your Flora
9/2: The Bachelor, Ecaux Cotton, & Enforcing Ageism — The Glossier Way!
9/21: Jennifer Aniston, Manifesting Hotness, & Skincare As A Coping Mechanism“An outsize focus on the physical form actually amplifies those out-of-control feelings that prompt our ‘stress-relieving’ beauty routines in the first place: anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, obsessive thoughts about appearance.”
10/8: Botox Is Love, Pollution Is Anti-Aging, & Sunshine Will Kill You
10/22: EmRata, Death by Phthalate, & The 'Science' of Beauty
11/4: Juicy Gossip, Drying Skincare, & Feelings As Face Creme“YOU CANNOT USE THE MARKETING TERMS ‘SUSTAINABLY SOURCED’ AND ‘ZERO-WASTE’ IF THE PRODUCT THEY REFER TO IS SOMETHING NOBODY WANTS, NEEDS, OR ASKED FOR.”
3. Subscribe to The Unpublishable today for 25% off
If this newsletter has one raison d'être, it’s finding freedom from beauty culture. I like to think that each email furthers this mission by offering readers something — an action item, a history lesson, a fresh way of framing old ideas — that broadens their understanding of beauty and helps them divest from beauty culture. (Which, I think, leads to a more fulfilled, aligned, and joyful existence. Which, I think, is the point of it all!!) In honor of Black Friday Don’t Buy Day, monthly and yearly subscriptions are currently 25% off — but only until tomorrow!
Subscribe now to get this full-size Truth Serum* — the only serum your skin will ever need — delivered directly to your inbox.
*It’s the newsletter. The newsletter is the Truth Serum.
Hi Jessica!! Thank you so much for the work you do.
I started following you this summer after the TLC BFRB org shared your article about anxiety eyebrows. I have trich too, and have also had my brows microbladed to hide their nonexistence, so I really related to you right away. <3 Then everything you have to say about skincare culture just made SO MUCH SENSE that I was hooked.
I was just listening to this podcast and had a little epiphany. I've thought for a while that trich is a way that our bodies try to communicate our needs. If I've been pulling a lot, I'm probably not taking the best care of myself and could use some more water, sleep, and stress care activities like yoga. It occurred to me while listening to your conversation with Caroline that skin is the same way! If something is going on with our skin, our bodies probably have something to say that's worth listening to. And instead we shut them up with cleansers and toners and serums and creams. It's just another way our system keeps itself firmly rooted — by selling us expensive bandaids so we don't go looking for real solutions, like less miserable lives. I know I'm not saying anything you haven't said before, but I wanted to let you know that I hear you and I appreciate your work a TON. You've given me so much to think about and inspired me to take a real good, hard look at my relationship with beauty and what it means for my actual health. Keep fighting the good fight!
I LOVE this connection between Caroline's work and yours. I'm a huge fan of intuitive eating (it changed my life) and always thought that we needed an analog of that for skincare (and beauty more generally). Like the whole point of intuitive eating is that you don't need to follow any rules, basically just listen to your body and do what feels right, and *trust* that your body will figure it out. Your body doesn't want to eat cookies all day, and if you do that you will probably eventually crave a vegetable, and it will all balance out. Same thing with skincare and beauty. I think people might worry that if they stop following beauty rituals, everything will fall to pieces. But when I stopped using a million products and stopped wearing makeup and stopping fighting my hair cowlick, I looked better and felt better. And I still do some beauty rituals that feel right, that feel intuitive, but I've stopped doing the ones that felt forced. Anyway, love this parallel!