The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel

Listen to my episode of the Money with Katie Show!

Today I’m a guest on Morning Brew’s Money with Katie Show, discussing the money- and soul-sucking cycle of beauty consumerism: how the existence of beauty standards inspires the production of beauty goods, then the existence of those beauty goods inspires new beauty standards, and then those standards inspire new goods, and then those goods inspire new standards, and so we keeping buying the goods, and the definition of “good skin” or “good hair” or whatever keeps changing, and we buy more and more and more and more, ad infinitum, forever and ever, amen. It siphons our capital! It steals our confidence! It hands both over to corporations!

Katie more succinctly calls this the “Hot Girl Hamster Wheel.”

My favorite part of this episode: After learning that the average woman spends $3,756 a year on her personal care routine — and calculating that she herself spends about 10% of her take home pay on beauty — Katie decided to stop using skincare products and try water and Mānuka honey instead. And her skin is fine!!

Listen to the full conversation for more on:

• the pseudoscience of industrialized skincare,

• how to assess whether a particular self-care ritual is life-enhancing or life-diminishing,

• standardized beauty as a class performance,

• anti-aging as infantilization,

• why I abhor “everybody is beautiful” rhetoric, and

• a plea to retire the “I do it for me!” thing. (Basically: Human beings have always adorned themselves for the sake of other people. The earliest recorded uses of makeup — in ancient Egypt, in Native American tribes — signaled a person’s status in the community or served a spiritual purpose in ceremony. It meant something and it was meant for someone else to see. It still does! Beauty is a form of communication; by definition, an offering to or exchange with something or someone outside of ourselves. It is not bad or wrong or like… disempowering to want to communicate and connect with other people via beauty! It is collectively disempowering and individualistic and atomizing and alienating to pretend this urge doesn’t exist; that it doesn’t influence our behavior; that our aesthetic preferences stem only from some pure, isolated, untouched “self” that manages to sidestep the influence of the society it belongs to [yet longs to be “expressed” via the tools of that society??? ha!]. Once we admit that we do perform beauty to say something about ourselves to other people — which is normal and healthy and fine — we can move onto the more pressing issue: what we’re saying and why.)

P.S. I recommend subscribing to the Money with Katie newsletter! It’s about “all things personal finance and optimizing for happiness — without putting you to sleep.”