This is a public discussion thread for anyone on The Unpublishable mailing list — free subscribers, paid subscribers, everyone!
“Skincare Tiktok has officially lost it,” beauty influencer Minsooky tweeted the other week. Underneath the proclamation, a post from one of the platform’s many skincare obsessives, detailing why and how she’d rather risk death than risk wrinkly hands.
“The back of your hands are constantly exposed to the sun,” the TikToker wrote. “Beyond sunscreen, derms also say to seek shade and wear sun protective clothing. So what I do is wear sunscreen and put my hands at the bottom of the steering wheel so the back of my hands are facing downwards.”
Ahem. OK. Yikes.
In case you’ve managed to avoid the unrelenting SPF-shaming of the skincare space, excess sun exposure can contribute to both skin cancer and signs of “aging” — and guess which one motivates more people to wear sunscreen?
The above act is not about skin cancer prevention. It is not about preserving health or wellbeing or life. It is literally putting your life — and others’ lives! — in imminent danger (there’s a reason we drive with our hands at 9 and 3) to avoid the imagined possibility of someday, maybe having old-looking hands!! It is the DEATH DRIVE!!! (Get it???) (For context, about ~10,000 people die from skin cancer every year in the U.S., and ~40,000 die from car accidents.)(I mean, talk about anti-aging, eh?)
The situation reminds me of the time I interviewed Katherine Power — founder of Merit Beauty, Versed Skincare, and Who What Wear — and she told me Merit’s target market was women “getting ready on the go. Super busy, driven women who are, you know, doing their makeup in the car.” The minimal products were “made with efficiency in mind. The pigment levels are such that you can’t mess it up,” Power said. “That was something that was important to us … so that you could do them in your car with one hand and not mess it up.”Launching a beauty brand for time-starved women who put their safety on the line as they struggle to meet society's minimum beauty requirements behind the wheel of a 3,000-pound killing machine is... wild? sad? something that should definitely not be normalized?? I pitched an article about this called “Makeup For Girlbosses Who Can’t Drive,” but alas, the media did not want it. [Editors: DO YOU WANT THIS ARTICLE? I STILL WANT TO WRITE THIS ARTICLE!]
Anyway!
My question for you is: What are the weird, unexpected, unhinged-in-hindsight ways you, your friends, your family members, your coworkers, your acquaintances, your enemies, etc. have put yourselves in harm's way for beauty? Could be big (tanning beds!) or small-ish (Kylie Jenner lip challenge!), could be life-or-death (risky BBL surgery!) or just a little painful (applying Lotion P50 til your skin peels off!).
Personally, I used to be a pro at putting on mascara while going 70 down the New Jersey Parkway. My mom was a big liquid-liner-in-the-rearview gal too. A former co-worker used to order hyaluronic acid lip filler from ALIBABA.COM and INJECT HER OWN LIPS AT HOME. I also — and this is bleak — bought those banned Anna Nicole Smith Trimspa diet pills in high school.
Feel free to keep this thread as lighthearted or serious as you like. And no judgment! I’m going to consider this anecdotal research on Beauty Culture Brain :)
I would regularly run miles every morning and then end up binging later on...then exercise twice as much as a punishment, and so on. By the end of it all I was burning 3000 calories a day and compulsively eating 4000-4300 (to my dismay.)
The grand result was......... I lost and gained the same 5 pounds over and over again over the course of four years
I looked "healthy", but messed up my muscle from years of cardio with no weights, and did something apparently un-diagnosable and kind of fucked up to my metabolism. But, it was minimal damage compared to what it could have been. I was taking in lots of essential nutrients during those binges. So, thank god for giving me a lack of "self control".
Couldn't to find medical or even psychological support for my situation so I used resources for ex-football players and marathon runners, to decrease both the exercise and eating slowly at the same time
My natural ADHD and a lack of money counteracted the other things I would have done in the name of "body image" back then. I was too broke and scattered to follow through on the shitty things I thought about myself. So that also was a blessing
Late to the party, but I’m an extreme outlier on cosmetic surgery. I’ve spent probably $100k all told, and have had seven separate surgeries on breasts alone. (Over the course of 25 years). Additionally I’ve had abdominoplasty, two rhinoplasties, a chin implant, buccal fat removal, neck sculpting, and a back lift. Plus laser hair removal everywhere. I get Botox twice a year and start to twitch when I see that I can wrinkle my forehead. I’d have had a BBL if I had enough fat but I don’t. I absolutely will get a facelift when the time comes. I despise every gray hair, my crepey hands, every freckle on my body, and so much more. I totally buy the argument that engaging with this stuff makes life worse for other women (especially after reading Heather Widdows’ Perfect Me) but I’m too much of a science project rather than a human being to really go back at this point. So I’m stuck in this weird limbo where I really really care how I look, count calories, exercise maniacally, pick apart my own flaws, even though I know I shouldn’t. I know my partner would love me if I didn’t feel the need to be “perfect” (which I could never be in any event) and I don’t know how to change at my age.
As someone with PCOS and can grow facial hair, the removal of that has been trialed many ways over the years. One particularly bad time was using hair removal cream(for sensitive skin - lol), used for the correct time but the process stang. What came the day after was my face bleeding slowly. I was in a position that day of not being able to afford taking time off work + I was temping so no sick pay. I covered up with make up and had to keep going to the restroom to mop up the blood seeping through the make up. Bleak!
These days I wax while I contemplate the hobbies that I could take up with the time I spend doing this.
I got a boob job at 20. Nothing like literally going under the knife because your body doesn't look the way you're told it should. Had them taken out because I started reading about Breast implant illness being a thing and I was seeing symptoms of it and my anxiety was going crazy. I still struggle with my body, especially because of the self-imposed scars I now have. But I was encouraged by my own parents to do it. I love my parents and know they had the best intentions in mind but woof! Being told your body doesn't look right by the people that brought you into the world sucks!
Over-exercise and under-nutrition induced osteopenia at the age of 20 for the sake of thinness and enviable muscles! And mostly because I was miserable and not dealing with my feelings. I happened to be participating in a bone density study at the time (thank GOODNESS), and the study actually contacted me because they noticed I had lost some weight, and that my bone mass had shrunk by 25% (!!!!!) in just 12 months. I think I knew what I was doing wasn't healthy, but because my BMI was normal, and I got so much validation from those around me for looking "amazing" I was stuck in an unhealthy pattern. After hearing from the study, I told my mom I needed help. She helped me start therapy to deal with the feelings I was literally running from, I gained 15% of my body weight back over the summer between sophomore and junior year of college, and never looked back. I'm so grateful for that concerned letter, and for a swift resolution to some pretty disordered behavior.
I mean, this is kind funny but, when I was young (preteen or early teen, I cant remember) I read an article in Teen Cosmopolitan Magazine that addressed oily skin, which I had, and the advice was to wash your face with Dawn dish soap to "cut the grease". Not life threatening but lol my poor little micro-biome! The things we do/did....my mind reels.
Eating palm-sized quantities of food and also wearing unsupportive dress shoes during my four years at college while walking all over campus- I got it into my head that wearing anything else would make me less "desirable"--my poor feet!
When I was in high school, I spent very little time primping myself because I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I was very self conscious about my looks because I would see other girls and they looked awesome. I had no idea how much time they put into looking like that, I thought they just did and that there was something wrong with me or that I was too boyish (I was not a "tom boy" wasn't too into sports, mostly music and art). I know this was the result of beauty culture because none of the girls in school bullied or were even mean to me and some were my good friends.
I started counting calories in third grade. I was NINE years old!! I still can't piece together what exactly prompted this because my mom wasn't an unhealthy influence at all. After years of this it became second nature to know when I was approaching the 1,200 cal limit for the day. Even when I was a high school athlete. In college I finally started to actively unlearn my disordered eating habits and it was suddenly so clear to me how energy deprived I had been playing sports all of high school!! Running didn't have to involve feeling like I was about to pass out!! Oof. Happy to have moved past that completely after all these years.
I recently nannied for a seven year old girl and it was crazy to me to observe her transition from careless playful kid toward a self-conscious and body-conscious kid in the months I was with her. It was subtle, but definitely noticeable to a person who remembers the onset of body self-consciousness at an incredibly young age herself.
Hair removal cream. It's now twenty years later, and I am still reminded of that dumb choice whenever I look at my legs. It should have been obvious that stuff wasn't great.
i have a particularly kind of acne that has a white material under a thick layer of skin that lasted for years. (later i know that apparently you can get rid of it with BHA? but i still have 1 of this acne now.) my highschool self was so fed up with it that i literally used a needle to poke the acne on my face (which was near my eyes). bleed a lot and healed after quite a long time without any scar.
my mom was so bothered by my frizzy hair (they were frizzy because I was hitting puberty in a boarding school in the mountains with hard water running in the taps) that she asked me to try putting BODY LOTION in my hair after I washed it to keep the frizziness down.
I remember back in the ‘80s when my sister and I were in our early 20’s we starved ourselves and did hours of aerobic exercise in order to stay thin (we now both have osteopenia and she STILL has an eating disorder at age 59), we cooked ourselves in the sun after slathering ourselves with baby oil so that our skin wouldn’t be “chickeny white”, we permed our hair to oblivion and blow dried it and set it in hot rollers in order to get hair that would be “full of body and fullness” (we both have naturally stick straight hair), and spent an hour every morning putting on makeup before going to work at office jobs where we wore painful high heels for eight hours straight! Looking back, I cannot believe the time, energy and money that we wasted.
[CN eating disorders, numbers] developed a life-long eating disorder from which i’m only just recovering, and which fucked my mind up so much that even when i was *recovering having cancerous cells removed* i insisted on eating *max* 700kcal a day and walking aimlessly around until i’d gone above 12,000 steps on my ipod pedometer!
I know this isn't particularly extreme but is another example of how the industry gets ya...! EXPENSIVE HAIRCUTS!!!! I have uncomplicated straight hair that I wear long and for years have been convinced that price = quality, even when I was a poor student, choosing a haircut over adequate food shopping. I now make my boyfriend cut my hair - free AND it takes about 5 minutes compared to an hour at the salon (why does it always take so long...?!)
I worry this will sound like some sort of a weird brag, but I was so lucky growing up because my mother flatly refused to introduce any beauty culture stuff into our household (as far as she could control it, being just one person). We didn't even own a scale. I feel like that helped me build a strong foundation of skepticism toward beauty culture. (Maybe this is a small brag in the sense that I think my mom is great, lol.)
Still, after I left home I promptly started worrying about wrinkles and my weight and acne and other things that the girls/women around me worried about. Probably the most dangerous thing I did was use retinol cream without initially realizing it puts you at higher risk for sun damage. I also feel like these leg-hair removal creams must have some toxic fumes because they smelled awful the few times I used them.
Oh my gosh, where to start? I'm 49 so I was basically a kid when my sister and I would "lay out" in the sun for hours/days really, with baby oil or coconut oil. (It was the 1980s) That's what it was called, like a past time. "Oh, hey, do you want to go lay out?". Then I sheared a line about 5 inches long of skin from my shin the first time I tried shaving (in secret of course.) 1990s...Perms, bleach, plucking. 2000s boob job (on a credit card!!!!), botox, lip fillers, the works! I don't do the botox or fillers anymore and I am now an avid sunscreen user after having several suspicious spots on my face removed. I can't thank you enough for your newsletter. I have learned so much about the industry and myself by reading it. I've been thinking about how normalized the boob job was. My best friend and I said when we were teens that as soon as we started making money, we would get one. Imagine if you'd never heard of what implants were and never saw anyone that had the surgery done...it would blow my mind that it was possible and that people were willing to risk SO much just to have one AND I was one of them. Bad habits die hard and I still use self tanner on occasion.
Lots of folks here talking pretty casually about tanning beds... one landed me in the emergency room with a diagnosis of radiation burn. Granted, I have very sensitive skin and had a pretty extreme reaction after only a few minutes, but it was extremely unpleasant (and oddly enough, feels nothing like a sunburn). Felt like someone dropped me in a vat of fiberglass and all the nerve endings in my body went haywire.
My sister managed a tanning salon and tanned all the time. She bullied me into buying a package so I wouldn't look pale and gross for my senior prom. I should have just skipped the whole prom thing: the prom wasn't even any fun and instead I missed a reception for an art award I had won while I was being dosed with Percocet and steroid shots in the ER.
Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022Liked by Jessica DeFino
@25 yrs ago, due to inadequate anesthesia, I woke up in the middle of my thigh liposuction & it remains one of the most painful things I’ve ever felt in my life.
Another HUGE one is skin lightening creams. This post from The Beautywell has some great insight (and their site is a wealth of information in general)
Jul 21, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022Liked by Jessica DeFino
Accutane was the worst. Had to stop halfway through the 6 months because I was coughing up blood. Should've sued my derm tbh, I was only 14 (I'm 24 now) and definitely did not have acne bad enough to warrant a pill that can basically abort babies (or at the very least cause birth defects). Extra annoyed because it actually expanded my otherwise okay pores lol.
In the late 90’s and early 2000’s all my girlfriends and I would take almost daily group trips to the tanning bed. We’d take those now banned diet pills even though we were already thin. The amount of time I spent flat ironing my hair was crazy! And the stiletto high heals I wore every day to my retail job and out all night dancing that my feet would go numb.
In my 30’s I started reevaluating my “beauty” routine and cut out anything with chemicals and animal testing.
Just turned 40 and just use jojoba oil and let my hair air dry to its natural waves and feel more myself than ever!
I look at girls in their 20s and wish they could see that all the things they put themselves through to fit society’s standards aren’t worth it.
1. I made a "DIY" lip-plumping scrub with cinnamon and white sugar, which inflamed my lips and the area around my mouth so much that I looked like a clown for several hours.
2. I used retinol without fully understanding just how sun-sensitive it made your skin and ended up with several new darker spots on my face (that of course the industry has more serums on offer to ~fix~!).
I have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and my higher androgen levels (and, honestly, crap genes) have had me dealing with acne through my adolescence and into adulthood. When I was in my early twenties, I was fed up with my skin and wanted to try a "natural" approach. I started using pure, undiluted apple cider vinegar as a toner, which dried out and damaged my skin. When new breakouts (normal immune responses to my devastated skin barrier!) appeared, I visited a dermatologist who *didn't even ask what my skincare regimen was* and prescribed the antibiotic spironolactone. The medication induced phototoxicity--a phenomenon where sun exposure basically NUKES your skin cells in an extreme, sometimes blistering sunburn. My skin was then broken out, dry, peeling, raw, and so extremely painful that I couldn't stand to be touched for days.
I once got my hands on this weird diet pill thing that basically bound to the fat in your body and you leaked orange out your bum whenever you ate. It was a low point. Oh, also I bought some chinese herbal tea that a friend from Hong Kong swore by. I ended up in hospital (unrelated) and they did a blood test and found weed in my system that must have come from the tea. God knows what I was drinking.
I started shaving down there the moment I saw the hair appearing, I think I never saw how it naturally looked like until I was 19 or something like that, and it took me a few infections and disconfort to stop doing it. I really felt a lot of shame around body hair, I felt so hairy when honestly Im not, I think it was some kind of body dysmorphia or hyper fixation. Makes me sad to think abouy the amount of time money and energy i spent worring about it.
I love your newsletter Jessica thanks for bringing out the absurdity of the beauty industry I’ve always been a proponent of less is more but I do want to try Deca lash because I have to curl my eyelashes every morning so they turn up. Lol ps I would love for you to research why mens clothing is always so much nicer fabric wise than womens. That has always been a pet-peeve of mine.
my grandmothers did the exact opposite; in the summer they would lather up in baby oil and iodine and lay out in the sun until they were burnt to a crisp, all so they could be tan. it's a miracle they don't have skin cancer (knock on wood).
I've got a daughter now and worry about her growing up in this culture of misogyny and ageism. I've done plenty of stuff in my youth that was bodily harmful (but which I've recovered from thankfully). But at 46 now (and seeing my physical self begin to change, as is normal (as I'm *mortal*!) the dominance of the anti-ageing discourse is disheartening and hard to find my place within (where are the women celebrating these changes as normal? Shouldn't they be centred!!) Also, you can wear driving gloves (or get your windows UV protected - which an appearance obsessed relative of mine did) if you're that worried re hands etc.
I've got a history of putting myself in harm's way for beauty. Let me see: used a tanning bed in the 90s and ended up with melanoma, got a boob job after I had kids (because we're not allowed to LOOK like we breast-fed!) which ended up leaking toxic non-medical grade silicone and I had to have my left breast removed (yes, that's a mastectomy!!), used a lash serum which caused blepharitis which I have for life now, used retinol for acne which left me with permanently red cheeks. There are other things I've done which have not caused permanent damage, but I regret each and every one of them.
Years ago I juice fasted for 90 days and then again for 70. I said at the time it was for health and spiritual reasons but if I'd have thought I wasn't going to lose weight, I'm certain I wouldn't have done it. So many other things came to mind reading this thread: diet pills, tooth whitening strips that made my teeth sensitive, and I definitely lived in the "sun is good for you/sunscreen is evil" extreme for a long time.
Jul 20, 2022·edited Jul 21, 2022Liked by Jessica DeFino
I haven't seen this mentioned yet (apologies if it was and I missed it), high heels! I used to wear them to nightclubs while in college and experienced some degree of pain the entire time (increasing continuously throughout the night), because I thought my elongated legs were more attractive. Makes me think of how normalised female pain is, to the point where it becomes a joke among/about women (funny videos of teenage girls wearing heels for the first time, trope of a distraught woman removing heels while leaving a scene to echo her losing her composure). So much of women's clothing and shoes that align with beauty expectations ensures that the wearer is in some of amount of pain and discomfort at all times, and is only at rest once at home, unseen.
I forgot one! I went through an odd phase when I was younger where I thought my feet were too big and ugly, so I would intentionally buy shoes that were too small because I thought they would make my feet look smaller. Safe to say all I did was waste my money and absolutely wreck my feet for no reason.
Unrelated - but I listened to this podcast about the cult of plastic surgery and it was very very sad that I had to stop listening because I was listening through the critical lens of the beauty industry
Over scrubbing my face, shaving my armpits and legs from age 12 because friends said my armpit hair was disgusting. I mean, it’s not that bad, but for a 12 year-old to try to comply with beauty standards to be ‘attractive’ is kinda f-ed up.
All the things: diet culture, excessive and painful hair removal, and irresponsible sun exposure. I tried to sunbathe with baby oil at 10 years old so I’d get a tan (pale redhead so skin choices are WHITE or PINK). In college I came back from a year abroad in Central America looking like a fried hot dog with my skin tone almost matching my hair. Not a good look and yeah, permanent sun damage. Have been to derm to have questionable stuff removed and now regularly get checked for skin cancer.
Plastic surgery! I am close to someone who has had traveled to another country for multiple procedures in order to better embody the Kardashianification of the internet in general. One of them sounded incredibly painful and there was follow up waist training type self-torture that made it hard for her to sleep. WHY does our society compel us to literally cut/mutilate ourselves?!?!
I haven’t seen anything in the comment thread yet about textured hair and relaxers - I know way too many horror stories about young femmes getting scalp burns and hearing “the tingle means it’s working” encouragement from adults.
I am an able bodied pale skinned straight sized person with relatively “manageable” hair who speaks English as a first language and works in a less image-focused industry. I recognize the tremendous privilege I have. AND YET… I still have felt the need to torture and starve myself in the name of beauty. Society sucks.
My personal shameful one was the time I’d put Vicks vapour rub (an Australian menthol rub) on a pimple (something I’d previously done) and somehow it migrated into my eye. Had to go to the hospital on NYE to get my eye checked out in the emergency department. So dumb.
I cringe when I see derms on Instagram tell people it’s okay to put retinol under the eye if your skin can tolerate it. No mention of the risk of meibomian gland dysfunction and no response to the 1-2 people who mention it in the comments. But hey buy ROC retinol with my affiliate code guys. Scary that people are willing to risk dry eye (and consequently, serious vision problems) so they can prevent wrinkles in the area. Personally I’d like to live a life if independence when I’m elderly and be able to drive, see my family’s faces, you know, extravagant things like that.
I live on the west coast, Mecca for stupid “neutraceuticals” (pills) and fell for the “exhausted adrenals” bs when I was overworked and emotionally overextended. Actually was treated with snake venom (tiny homeopathic, worthless). The supposed adrenal exhaustion was grief, and I lost 20 lbs, was hospitalized w pneumonia before I pulled my head out of my ass.
I would regularly run miles every morning and then end up binging later on...then exercise twice as much as a punishment, and so on. By the end of it all I was burning 3000 calories a day and compulsively eating 4000-4300 (to my dismay.)
The grand result was......... I lost and gained the same 5 pounds over and over again over the course of four years
I looked "healthy", but messed up my muscle from years of cardio with no weights, and did something apparently un-diagnosable and kind of fucked up to my metabolism. But, it was minimal damage compared to what it could have been. I was taking in lots of essential nutrients during those binges. So, thank god for giving me a lack of "self control".
Couldn't to find medical or even psychological support for my situation so I used resources for ex-football players and marathon runners, to decrease both the exercise and eating slowly at the same time
My natural ADHD and a lack of money counteracted the other things I would have done in the name of "body image" back then. I was too broke and scattered to follow through on the shitty things I thought about myself. So that also was a blessing
Late to the party, but I’m an extreme outlier on cosmetic surgery. I’ve spent probably $100k all told, and have had seven separate surgeries on breasts alone. (Over the course of 25 years). Additionally I’ve had abdominoplasty, two rhinoplasties, a chin implant, buccal fat removal, neck sculpting, and a back lift. Plus laser hair removal everywhere. I get Botox twice a year and start to twitch when I see that I can wrinkle my forehead. I’d have had a BBL if I had enough fat but I don’t. I absolutely will get a facelift when the time comes. I despise every gray hair, my crepey hands, every freckle on my body, and so much more. I totally buy the argument that engaging with this stuff makes life worse for other women (especially after reading Heather Widdows’ Perfect Me) but I’m too much of a science project rather than a human being to really go back at this point. So I’m stuck in this weird limbo where I really really care how I look, count calories, exercise maniacally, pick apart my own flaws, even though I know I shouldn’t. I know my partner would love me if I didn’t feel the need to be “perfect” (which I could never be in any event) and I don’t know how to change at my age.
Hair removal!
As someone with PCOS and can grow facial hair, the removal of that has been trialed many ways over the years. One particularly bad time was using hair removal cream(for sensitive skin - lol), used for the correct time but the process stang. What came the day after was my face bleeding slowly. I was in a position that day of not being able to afford taking time off work + I was temping so no sick pay. I covered up with make up and had to keep going to the restroom to mop up the blood seeping through the make up. Bleak!
These days I wax while I contemplate the hobbies that I could take up with the time I spend doing this.
I haven't but so many readers of mine email me daily about their awful microneedling experiences its alarming, spread the word look at the comments https://thenakedchemist.com/microneedling-beware-it-can-seriously-mess-with-your-skin/....Love your work btw and this is coming from a skincare specialist!
Getting my hair chemically straightened, starting when I was 11 years old until about age 30. Super painful.
I got a boob job at 20. Nothing like literally going under the knife because your body doesn't look the way you're told it should. Had them taken out because I started reading about Breast implant illness being a thing and I was seeing symptoms of it and my anxiety was going crazy. I still struggle with my body, especially because of the self-imposed scars I now have. But I was encouraged by my own parents to do it. I love my parents and know they had the best intentions in mind but woof! Being told your body doesn't look right by the people that brought you into the world sucks!
Over-exercise and under-nutrition induced osteopenia at the age of 20 for the sake of thinness and enviable muscles! And mostly because I was miserable and not dealing with my feelings. I happened to be participating in a bone density study at the time (thank GOODNESS), and the study actually contacted me because they noticed I had lost some weight, and that my bone mass had shrunk by 25% (!!!!!) in just 12 months. I think I knew what I was doing wasn't healthy, but because my BMI was normal, and I got so much validation from those around me for looking "amazing" I was stuck in an unhealthy pattern. After hearing from the study, I told my mom I needed help. She helped me start therapy to deal with the feelings I was literally running from, I gained 15% of my body weight back over the summer between sophomore and junior year of college, and never looked back. I'm so grateful for that concerned letter, and for a swift resolution to some pretty disordered behavior.
I mean, this is kind funny but, when I was young (preteen or early teen, I cant remember) I read an article in Teen Cosmopolitan Magazine that addressed oily skin, which I had, and the advice was to wash your face with Dawn dish soap to "cut the grease". Not life threatening but lol my poor little micro-biome! The things we do/did....my mind reels.
Eating palm-sized quantities of food and also wearing unsupportive dress shoes during my four years at college while walking all over campus- I got it into my head that wearing anything else would make me less "desirable"--my poor feet!
Waxing. Let me pay money to be in pain. Ugh.
When I was in high school, I spent very little time primping myself because I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I was very self conscious about my looks because I would see other girls and they looked awesome. I had no idea how much time they put into looking like that, I thought they just did and that there was something wrong with me or that I was too boyish (I was not a "tom boy" wasn't too into sports, mostly music and art). I know this was the result of beauty culture because none of the girls in school bullied or were even mean to me and some were my good friends.
I started counting calories in third grade. I was NINE years old!! I still can't piece together what exactly prompted this because my mom wasn't an unhealthy influence at all. After years of this it became second nature to know when I was approaching the 1,200 cal limit for the day. Even when I was a high school athlete. In college I finally started to actively unlearn my disordered eating habits and it was suddenly so clear to me how energy deprived I had been playing sports all of high school!! Running didn't have to involve feeling like I was about to pass out!! Oof. Happy to have moved past that completely after all these years.
I recently nannied for a seven year old girl and it was crazy to me to observe her transition from careless playful kid toward a self-conscious and body-conscious kid in the months I was with her. It was subtle, but definitely noticeable to a person who remembers the onset of body self-consciousness at an incredibly young age herself.
Hair removal cream. It's now twenty years later, and I am still reminded of that dumb choice whenever I look at my legs. It should have been obvious that stuff wasn't great.
i have a particularly kind of acne that has a white material under a thick layer of skin that lasted for years. (later i know that apparently you can get rid of it with BHA? but i still have 1 of this acne now.) my highschool self was so fed up with it that i literally used a needle to poke the acne on my face (which was near my eyes). bleed a lot and healed after quite a long time without any scar.
my mom was so bothered by my frizzy hair (they were frizzy because I was hitting puberty in a boarding school in the mountains with hard water running in the taps) that she asked me to try putting BODY LOTION in my hair after I washed it to keep the frizziness down.
I remember back in the ‘80s when my sister and I were in our early 20’s we starved ourselves and did hours of aerobic exercise in order to stay thin (we now both have osteopenia and she STILL has an eating disorder at age 59), we cooked ourselves in the sun after slathering ourselves with baby oil so that our skin wouldn’t be “chickeny white”, we permed our hair to oblivion and blow dried it and set it in hot rollers in order to get hair that would be “full of body and fullness” (we both have naturally stick straight hair), and spent an hour every morning putting on makeup before going to work at office jobs where we wore painful high heels for eight hours straight! Looking back, I cannot believe the time, energy and money that we wasted.
[CN eating disorders, numbers] developed a life-long eating disorder from which i’m only just recovering, and which fucked my mind up so much that even when i was *recovering having cancerous cells removed* i insisted on eating *max* 700kcal a day and walking aimlessly around until i’d gone above 12,000 steps on my ipod pedometer!
I know this isn't particularly extreme but is another example of how the industry gets ya...! EXPENSIVE HAIRCUTS!!!! I have uncomplicated straight hair that I wear long and for years have been convinced that price = quality, even when I was a poor student, choosing a haircut over adequate food shopping. I now make my boyfriend cut my hair - free AND it takes about 5 minutes compared to an hour at the salon (why does it always take so long...?!)
I worry this will sound like some sort of a weird brag, but I was so lucky growing up because my mother flatly refused to introduce any beauty culture stuff into our household (as far as she could control it, being just one person). We didn't even own a scale. I feel like that helped me build a strong foundation of skepticism toward beauty culture. (Maybe this is a small brag in the sense that I think my mom is great, lol.)
Still, after I left home I promptly started worrying about wrinkles and my weight and acne and other things that the girls/women around me worried about. Probably the most dangerous thing I did was use retinol cream without initially realizing it puts you at higher risk for sun damage. I also feel like these leg-hair removal creams must have some toxic fumes because they smelled awful the few times I used them.
Oh my gosh, where to start? I'm 49 so I was basically a kid when my sister and I would "lay out" in the sun for hours/days really, with baby oil or coconut oil. (It was the 1980s) That's what it was called, like a past time. "Oh, hey, do you want to go lay out?". Then I sheared a line about 5 inches long of skin from my shin the first time I tried shaving (in secret of course.) 1990s...Perms, bleach, plucking. 2000s boob job (on a credit card!!!!), botox, lip fillers, the works! I don't do the botox or fillers anymore and I am now an avid sunscreen user after having several suspicious spots on my face removed. I can't thank you enough for your newsletter. I have learned so much about the industry and myself by reading it. I've been thinking about how normalized the boob job was. My best friend and I said when we were teens that as soon as we started making money, we would get one. Imagine if you'd never heard of what implants were and never saw anyone that had the surgery done...it would blow my mind that it was possible and that people were willing to risk SO much just to have one AND I was one of them. Bad habits die hard and I still use self tanner on occasion.
My aunt wouldn’t wear a seat belt because she didn’t want her shirt to get wrinkled from wearing it.
Lots of folks here talking pretty casually about tanning beds... one landed me in the emergency room with a diagnosis of radiation burn. Granted, I have very sensitive skin and had a pretty extreme reaction after only a few minutes, but it was extremely unpleasant (and oddly enough, feels nothing like a sunburn). Felt like someone dropped me in a vat of fiberglass and all the nerve endings in my body went haywire.
My sister managed a tanning salon and tanned all the time. She bullied me into buying a package so I wouldn't look pale and gross for my senior prom. I should have just skipped the whole prom thing: the prom wasn't even any fun and instead I missed a reception for an art award I had won while I was being dosed with Percocet and steroid shots in the ER.
@25 yrs ago, due to inadequate anesthesia, I woke up in the middle of my thigh liposuction & it remains one of the most painful things I’ve ever felt in my life.
Another HUGE one is skin lightening creams. This post from The Beautywell has some great insight (and their site is a wealth of information in general)
https://twitter.com/beautiwell/status/1549442367664533505
Accutane was the worst. Had to stop halfway through the 6 months because I was coughing up blood. Should've sued my derm tbh, I was only 14 (I'm 24 now) and definitely did not have acne bad enough to warrant a pill that can basically abort babies (or at the very least cause birth defects). Extra annoyed because it actually expanded my otherwise okay pores lol.
In the late 90’s and early 2000’s all my girlfriends and I would take almost daily group trips to the tanning bed. We’d take those now banned diet pills even though we were already thin. The amount of time I spent flat ironing my hair was crazy! And the stiletto high heals I wore every day to my retail job and out all night dancing that my feet would go numb.
In my 30’s I started reevaluating my “beauty” routine and cut out anything with chemicals and animal testing.
Just turned 40 and just use jojoba oil and let my hair air dry to its natural waves and feel more myself than ever!
I look at girls in their 20s and wish they could see that all the things they put themselves through to fit society’s standards aren’t worth it.
Two things that come to mind:
1. I made a "DIY" lip-plumping scrub with cinnamon and white sugar, which inflamed my lips and the area around my mouth so much that I looked like a clown for several hours.
2. I used retinol without fully understanding just how sun-sensitive it made your skin and ended up with several new darker spots on my face (that of course the industry has more serums on offer to ~fix~!).
Wore teeth whitening strips that made my teeth so sensitive it hurt to BREATHE with my mouth open. Also was really into tanning beds in the 90s.
I have polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and my higher androgen levels (and, honestly, crap genes) have had me dealing with acne through my adolescence and into adulthood. When I was in my early twenties, I was fed up with my skin and wanted to try a "natural" approach. I started using pure, undiluted apple cider vinegar as a toner, which dried out and damaged my skin. When new breakouts (normal immune responses to my devastated skin barrier!) appeared, I visited a dermatologist who *didn't even ask what my skincare regimen was* and prescribed the antibiotic spironolactone. The medication induced phototoxicity--a phenomenon where sun exposure basically NUKES your skin cells in an extreme, sometimes blistering sunburn. My skin was then broken out, dry, peeling, raw, and so extremely painful that I couldn't stand to be touched for days.
I once got my hands on this weird diet pill thing that basically bound to the fat in your body and you leaked orange out your bum whenever you ate. It was a low point. Oh, also I bought some chinese herbal tea that a friend from Hong Kong swore by. I ended up in hospital (unrelated) and they did a blood test and found weed in my system that must have come from the tea. God knows what I was drinking.
I started shaving down there the moment I saw the hair appearing, I think I never saw how it naturally looked like until I was 19 or something like that, and it took me a few infections and disconfort to stop doing it. I really felt a lot of shame around body hair, I felt so hairy when honestly Im not, I think it was some kind of body dysmorphia or hyper fixation. Makes me sad to think abouy the amount of time money and energy i spent worring about it.
I love your newsletter Jessica thanks for bringing out the absurdity of the beauty industry I’ve always been a proponent of less is more but I do want to try Deca lash because I have to curl my eyelashes every morning so they turn up. Lol ps I would love for you to research why mens clothing is always so much nicer fabric wise than womens. That has always been a pet-peeve of mine.
my grandmothers did the exact opposite; in the summer they would lather up in baby oil and iodine and lay out in the sun until they were burnt to a crisp, all so they could be tan. it's a miracle they don't have skin cancer (knock on wood).
I've got a daughter now and worry about her growing up in this culture of misogyny and ageism. I've done plenty of stuff in my youth that was bodily harmful (but which I've recovered from thankfully). But at 46 now (and seeing my physical self begin to change, as is normal (as I'm *mortal*!) the dominance of the anti-ageing discourse is disheartening and hard to find my place within (where are the women celebrating these changes as normal? Shouldn't they be centred!!) Also, you can wear driving gloves (or get your windows UV protected - which an appearance obsessed relative of mine did) if you're that worried re hands etc.
I've got a history of putting myself in harm's way for beauty. Let me see: used a tanning bed in the 90s and ended up with melanoma, got a boob job after I had kids (because we're not allowed to LOOK like we breast-fed!) which ended up leaking toxic non-medical grade silicone and I had to have my left breast removed (yes, that's a mastectomy!!), used a lash serum which caused blepharitis which I have for life now, used retinol for acne which left me with permanently red cheeks. There are other things I've done which have not caused permanent damage, but I regret each and every one of them.
Years ago I juice fasted for 90 days and then again for 70. I said at the time it was for health and spiritual reasons but if I'd have thought I wasn't going to lose weight, I'm certain I wouldn't have done it. So many other things came to mind reading this thread: diet pills, tooth whitening strips that made my teeth sensitive, and I definitely lived in the "sun is good for you/sunscreen is evil" extreme for a long time.
I haven't seen this mentioned yet (apologies if it was and I missed it), high heels! I used to wear them to nightclubs while in college and experienced some degree of pain the entire time (increasing continuously throughout the night), because I thought my elongated legs were more attractive. Makes me think of how normalised female pain is, to the point where it becomes a joke among/about women (funny videos of teenage girls wearing heels for the first time, trope of a distraught woman removing heels while leaving a scene to echo her losing her composure). So much of women's clothing and shoes that align with beauty expectations ensures that the wearer is in some of amount of pain and discomfort at all times, and is only at rest once at home, unseen.
I forgot one! I went through an odd phase when I was younger where I thought my feet were too big and ugly, so I would intentionally buy shoes that were too small because I thought they would make my feet look smaller. Safe to say all I did was waste my money and absolutely wreck my feet for no reason.
Boob job! 1990. On credit. Got em out just 8 months ago. Yikes.
Unrelated - but I listened to this podcast about the cult of plastic surgery and it was very very sad that I had to stop listening because I was listening through the critical lens of the beauty industry
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mnGrd5ItOTeVogYFlRVF8?si=UCDXH5reR-SrH1e0K0t9Zw&utm_source=copy-link
Over scrubbing my face, shaving my armpits and legs from age 12 because friends said my armpit hair was disgusting. I mean, it’s not that bad, but for a 12 year-old to try to comply with beauty standards to be ‘attractive’ is kinda f-ed up.
Brazilian waxes.
I used to slather my body in baby oil and lay and play out in the sun for HOURS to get as tan as I could.
All the things: diet culture, excessive and painful hair removal, and irresponsible sun exposure. I tried to sunbathe with baby oil at 10 years old so I’d get a tan (pale redhead so skin choices are WHITE or PINK). In college I came back from a year abroad in Central America looking like a fried hot dog with my skin tone almost matching my hair. Not a good look and yeah, permanent sun damage. Have been to derm to have questionable stuff removed and now regularly get checked for skin cancer.
Plastic surgery! I am close to someone who has had traveled to another country for multiple procedures in order to better embody the Kardashianification of the internet in general. One of them sounded incredibly painful and there was follow up waist training type self-torture that made it hard for her to sleep. WHY does our society compel us to literally cut/mutilate ourselves?!?!
I haven’t seen anything in the comment thread yet about textured hair and relaxers - I know way too many horror stories about young femmes getting scalp burns and hearing “the tingle means it’s working” encouragement from adults.
I am an able bodied pale skinned straight sized person with relatively “manageable” hair who speaks English as a first language and works in a less image-focused industry. I recognize the tremendous privilege I have. AND YET… I still have felt the need to torture and starve myself in the name of beauty. Society sucks.
My personal shameful one was the time I’d put Vicks vapour rub (an Australian menthol rub) on a pimple (something I’d previously done) and somehow it migrated into my eye. Had to go to the hospital on NYE to get my eye checked out in the emergency department. So dumb.
I cringe when I see derms on Instagram tell people it’s okay to put retinol under the eye if your skin can tolerate it. No mention of the risk of meibomian gland dysfunction and no response to the 1-2 people who mention it in the comments. But hey buy ROC retinol with my affiliate code guys. Scary that people are willing to risk dry eye (and consequently, serious vision problems) so they can prevent wrinkles in the area. Personally I’d like to live a life if independence when I’m elderly and be able to drive, see my family’s faces, you know, extravagant things like that.
Refused to quit smoking for years because I was substituting cigarettes to suppress my appetite and skip meals most days. Did not want to gain weight.
In the 90s. Pro-plus (caffeine tablets) and diet coke for lunch. To stay extra thin. It wasn't healthy, my body needed food instead.
I used a tanning bed 2-3 times a week during high school ... you know, to try to look like the "cool" kids. 100% not worth it BTW
I live on the west coast, Mecca for stupid “neutraceuticals” (pills) and fell for the “exhausted adrenals” bs when I was overworked and emotionally overextended. Actually was treated with snake venom (tiny homeopathic, worthless). The supposed adrenal exhaustion was grief, and I lost 20 lbs, was hospitalized w pneumonia before I pulled my head out of my ass.