EAT ME!

My latest for the Sunday Times, all about the "food face" phenomenon.

My latest article for the Sunday Times was published today: “The rise and rise of ‘dewy dumpling skin.” It addresses a glut of recent beauty trends that promise to make you look less like you and more like a variety of foodstuffs: dewy dumpling skin (pioneered by makeup artist Nam Vo), glazed donut skin (popularized by Hailey Bieber), blueberry milk nails, etc. Click through to read the full and fully researched story on the Times site! Below, an excerpt (and some unpublished extras) exploring why, exactly, skincare enthusiasts ache to embody the edible, inanimate glow of a Krispy Kreme…

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On what can we blame the collective embrace of “Food Face”?

Dehumanisation 

Dehumanisation is always on the menu when it comes to female beauty standards. Throughout history women were peaches, pieces of meat, their skin compared to porcelain — a plate on which their beauty (cheeks like apples, lips like cherries) was served.

Today, skin is the main course. Skincare commands a larger portion of the beauty market pie than make-up and haircare combined, a growth spurt accelerated by the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president, the simultaneous start of Brexit, the subsequent rollback of women’s rights and economic opportunities, and the feminist recentring of self-care in uncertain times.

Activists quoted the late Audre Lorde: “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation and that is an act of political warfare,” she said. Beauty brands slyly swapped “myself” for “my skin”. Customers ate it up — of course Lorde meant Saran Wrap when she preached about preservation! — because exfoliating is easier than engaging in political action.

And just like that, people began to funnel their finite time, money and energy into being pastries instead.

Consumerism

This urge to replace what is living and inevitable (pores, pigmentation, wrinkles, blemishes) with what is inanimate and ingestible (flour, icing) isn’t so surprising, really. It’s in line with decades of unrealistic beauty ideals, which exist to service “a secular society” that worships “ever-increasing industrial productivity”, Susan Sontag writes in On Women. The philosopher describes a sort of self-objectification that isn’t concerned with appealing to men, but rather with deifying and even identifying with products.

If the male gaze describes the psychological condition of existing under patriarchy, the psychological condition of existing under capitalism could be called the “sale gaze”.

The existence of an internalised sale gaze explains the current beauty culture climate: the rise of the shelfie (an Instagram-worthy photo of one’s beauty products that, like the selfie before it, has come to communicate the poster’s “perceived identity”); the aforementioned conflation of “self-care” and purchasable skincare; and the era of ingestible beauty icons, marked by — and impossible without — significant and sustained product intervention. Beauty has become synonymous with buying. After all, when you see glazed doughnut skin it’s not skin you’re seeing, it’s the layer of sheer, shiny, mass-produced skincare formulas on top of it.

It calls to mind the French phrase for window shopping, lèche-vitrine. Window licking. Beauty enthusiasts salivate over serums in their Google Chrome windows and hope to be transformed into something that — through the screen of a smartphone, through the panes of a TikTok grid — makes someone else salivate.

Food face, then, is buying products to become a product. It’s consuming to be consumable.

Cannibalism¹

On that note, the flesh-as-foodstuffs craze could easily sit on a list with the Armie Hammer allegations and Yellowjackets and Bones and All and the Chelsea G. Summers novel A Certain Hunger as an example of pop culture’s obsession with cannibalism.

“Late-stage capitalism, most of us are realizing, isn’t delivering on its promise, and endless participation in grind-core hustle culture often feels like we’re being devoured one bite at a time,” Summers wrote in British Vogue on the origins of today’s human food fad. It may also be a way to “reclaim an appetite,” the author said. 

Perhaps the pushed-down desire to stuff one’s face — discouraged by society, damped by Ozempic — is sublimated into the performance of a gleaming Krispy Kreme?

More likely, “bite me beauty” represents a sublimated desire for connection. To want to be devoured by another person is to want to be close to them, to be inside of them. And with loneliness and skincare sales both reaching record rates, it (kind of?) makes sense that cosmetic cannibalism is trending.

Trauma

“My mom traumatised me!” Nam Vo, the New York-based make-up artist who coined the term “dewy dumpling skin”, said with a laugh when I asked what inspired it. “When I was a child she used to sit me next to her and be, like, ‘Do you want these brown spots? Do you want melasma?’ ” Since then Vo has been on a mission to defeat nature. Ageing is a “nightmare” and people with minimal beauty routines are “horrifying to me”, she says.

namvo

A post shared by @namvo

The trauma of food face is more than existential, though. It’s epidermal. “The overutilisation of these products can have a paradoxical damaging effect on your skin,” confirms Dr Neil Sadick, a dermatologist also based in New York.

The typical, multistep, glazed-and-glowy skincare routine may sensitise the barrier and compromise the microbiome and acid mantle — the body’s built-in protective measures. The amount of moisture required for that wet-out-of-the-oven look makes the skin overly permeable, says the aesthetician and product formulator Mary Schook, and prone to surface-level symptoms (redness, roughness, oiliness, flakiness, acne) as well as sun damage.

At the very least constant stimulation of the skin barrier can cause inflammation. It’s thanks to that swelling that pores may “appear somewhat tighter” and as smooth as a steamed dumpling, according to Sadick.

Self-annihilation has its own particular appeal, of course. “After the pandemic we were sitting at home, hopeless, dry, dehydrated, depressed,” Vo says. The project of becoming “moist, dewy and delicious like a dumpling” — even if dermatologically inadvisable — functioned as a “light and cute” distraction from a world of horrors, and still does. (The horrors persist.)

Maybe a glazed-over complexion is the beauty industry’s answer to trad-wifery, the conservative social media movement to glamorise the “traditional” 1950s housewife. What is food face if not a retreat into another age-old role: object?

The Death Drive

Then again, Freud might say the drive to emulate the inanimate is nothing more than the death drive in disguise — a spiritual longing to return to an insentient state, an acknowledgement of death as the aim of all life. I might agree.

Bieber, Vo and their dewy devotees might say, “Eat me.”

1. The cannibalism section was cut from the final Times edit but I do think it’s relevant!!