Is Employment Making You Ugly?
The Don't Buy List: Issue #112
Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! Earlier this month, I exited the worst sauna experience of my life — a German Aufguss ceremony inexplicably set to heavy metal music, in which blistering heat and boiling water (accidentally splashed on me by an overly enthusiastic Aufgussmeister) left my skin red, raw, and stinging for days — only to run into a couple of New York Times reporters covering the event. My sisters-in-law and I described the session as “punishing,” “torture,” and “self-care for people who hate themselves.” In return, we were immortalized in this Sunday’s paper.
Cute! Could not recommend less, though.
Anyway, onto the links…
IN THIS ISSUE: Death is trending! The Gen Z pout! Under-eye patches as status symbols! Lip filler accent! Work is making you ugly! Glossier is closing its stores! Antiperspirant! Alix Earle! Chloe Fineman! “Cosmeticorexia”! Beauty > food! Gavin Newsom <3s Patrick Bateman! & more!
THE MORGUE GAZE: I was on NPR’s It’s Been A Minute with Brittany Luse again last week to talk about “the morbid lifelessness of modern beauty.”
Today’s guest, Jessica DeFino - beauty reporter, critic, and author of the FLESH WORLD Substack - says contemporary glamorization of anti-aging products and long dead icons like Caroline Bessette Kennedy all fall within a macabre beauty trend, what she calls ‘the morgue gaze.’ Ageless, poreless, lifeless beauty inspiration keeps consumers coming back for more numb, frozen aesthetics - forever.
Listen here!
THE GEN Z POUT: In the episode, I mentioned Rayne Fisher-Quann’s 2022 theory of the “dissociative pout,” a pose that’s recently been rebranded as the “Gen Z pout” and described as “blank-eyed and puffy-lipped, like a koi fish on Ativan.” Something I’ve been thinking about since: The dissociative and/or Gen Z pout mimics the effect of Botox and filler. The face is emptied — eyes wide and blank; facial muscles slack; lips puffed out and parted; expression smoothed — to approximate (or exaggerate) injectable inanimation. Which makes sense! Humans are hard-wired to unconsciously mirror each others’ microexpressions; it just so happens that one of today’s dominant facial expressions is non-expression.
RELATED: I wanted to fit this quote from Byung-Chul Han’s Capitalism and the Death Drive in my Guardian article on cadaver fat fillers, but I couldn’t, so I’ll just leave it here:
“Capitalism is obsessed with death … Performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies: these are manifestations of undead life. The undead lack any vitality … Capitalism’s striving for life without death creates the necropolis — an antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds and smells. [ED NOTE: I would add textures to this list!] Life processes are transformed into mechanical processes. The total adaptation of human life to mere functionality is already a culture of death. As a consequence of the performance principle, the human being ever more closely approximates a machine, and becomes alienated from itself.”
LIP FILLER ACCENT: For Defector, Alex Sujong Laughlin went long on “Lip Filler Accent” — “a noticeable pursing of the lips that creates more open space between the teeth and lips, constraining the shapes vowels take and compressing the sound,” which is even affecting the speech patterns of people who don’t have filler “through memetic transfer.”
STUPID STATUS SYMBOLS: Did you catch me in the Selleb Sisters newsletter the other day? Our interview covered laser hair removal, overrated status symbols, my morning skincare routine, and more.
SELLEB: What’s something that you used to judge people for buying that you now totally get?
Jessica: Laser hair removal? Probably cheaper than buying razors for the rest of my life. (Ideally I wouldn’t care about body hair, but beauty culture conditioning persists.)
SELLEB: What’s the most overrated “status symbol” right now?
Jessica: Logoed under-eye patches. I’m disturbed by the way brands have turned our faces into free ad space.
Check out the full feature here!
UG-EMPLOYMENT: Office jobs are making women uglier, apparently.