Bite Me, Hailey Bieber
"Glazed skin" is an issue both existential and epidermal.
In a new interview promoting her skincare brand, Rhode, and its hero products, Glazing Milk (an essence) and Peptide Glazing Fluid (a moisturizer), Hailey Bieber tells the Cut she likes to look as gooey as a glazed donut. “I want someone to want to take a bite out of my skin,” she explains. “I want you to want to bite me because it looks so delicious that you can’t resist.”
Bieber isn’t alone here, considering all the inanimate, ingestible beauty icons the skincare industry has encouraged consumers to emulate in recent years — donuts, dumplings, jello. It reminds me of the French phrase for “window shopping”: “lèche-vitrine” or, directly translated, window licking. We salivate over serums in their Google Chrome windows; we hope they transform us into something that — through the screen of a smartphone, the panes of an Instagram grid — makes someone else salivate. We buy products to become products. We consume to be consumable. (The sale gaze is the new male gaze, etc.) “Glazed donut skin” is as self-objectifying as skincare gets.
The issue with glazing goes beyond the existential, though. The practice also poses problems on the epidermal level.
“A waxy, glassy, shiny forehead is incorrectly associated with a ‘glow,’ which it is not,” Dr. Barbara Sturm, the founder of the skincare line of the same name, once told me. “It is the sign of injury.” Dermatologists confirm. Skin that seems candy-coated is skin that’s lost its essential skin-ness, its humanness, its form, its function. If you can see your reflection in your complexion, it’s probably trying to tell you something — like, “Look at what you’re doing to me!!!” or perhaps, “Please stop.”
Your face is simply is not supposed to be so wet.
Skin cells — also known as keratinocytes — are made of keratin, the same material that makes up hair and nails. You know how a stylist washes your hair before it’s cut, and a manicurist soaks your nails before they’re shaped? They do that because when keratin is very wet, it’s very easy to damage (i.e., snip or file). The same goes for skin. Too much wetness makes the skin barrier more penetrable. (It’s right there in Rhode’s description of Glazing Milk: “Better product absorption” means “better product penetration” means “worsened barrier function.”) The thing about the skin barrier is it does not want to be penetrated. It’s evolved to be all-but-impenetrable. It allows a few substances to pass through, sure — sunlight to synthesize vitamin D; fat-soluble vitamins like A, E, and K; magnesium and other key minerals that support the skin and body — but an intact barrier will keep almost everything else out. It does this to keep you alive. The barrier is what protects you from death-by-water-logging when you take a luxurious, two-hour bubble bath. It’s what protects you from pollution particles, pathogens, bacteria, viruses, and allergens. It’s part of the body’s overall immune system and has its own skin-specific immune system. It sustains the skin microbiome and makes it possible for the skin to self-cleanse, self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-heal, and self-protect.
“In a study in the British Journal of Dermatology, volunteers moisturized one forearm and left the other untreated for seven weeks. At the end of the study, the treated arm was drier than the arm that got no moisturizer at all,” Prevention Magazine reports. “[In] a similar study in the journal Acta Dermato-Venereologica … the treated arms not only showed more water loss but were much more easily irritated.”
The consistent application of external moisture interferes with the skin’s inherent ability to retain moisture, in other words. This can make it more sensitive (penetrable) and more prone to surface-level symptoms — redness, roughness, oiliness, flakiness, acne. This typically makes people reach for more topical products, which is great for the industry profiting off all the glazing, and not-so-great for the individual glazers: You over-moisturize to look glossy, you weaken the moisture barrier to the point of water loss. You layer on essences, serums, oils, masks, and more moisturizers to hold in whatever hydration you have left; you add a Barrier Restore Cream (Hailey Bieber sells one of those, too) to your regimen. Maybe you finish with a sheen of Vaseline (it’s a second-rate stand-in for a skin barrier, but hey, it’s affordable — and you just paid a lot of money to demolish your own).
Glassy-eyed and glassy-faced, you continue glazing your skin into a familiar sort of submission: broken to fit a broken idea of beauty, dying to be devoured.
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I love the connection between male gaze and sale gaze.
the hypercommodification of our lives means we are all commodities. Our looks, our lives are now 'brands', our hobbies are 'hustles'.
"We buy products to become products. We consume to be consumable." wow YES! So well stated.