You're Not Bad, You're Just Influenced That Way

An interview with author Jessica Elefante. Plus: Come see me in NYC!

I went to a housewarming the other night. I knew the host well; everyone else, not so much. When the wine-tipsy talk turned to beauty routines — non-invasive needles, very invasive surgeries, the usual “do what makes you happy” takes — my friend caught my eye, almost daring me to bring up my work. I smiled but didn’t. No one wants to be the “well actually, Botox is the product of an ageist, sexist society that perpetuates itself by convincing the very same aging women it systematically devalues to promote the patriarchal project of anti-aging through the adoption and celebration of youth-centric aesthetics” asshole at the party, am I right??

Then the pro-tanning bed conversation started (yes, tanning beds are back) and I couldn’t help myself. I said something like, “Well, at least none of us are snorting melanin!” I mentioned the brand Permatan, which makes a very risky albeit tan-inducing nasal inhaler, featuring an ingredient that imitates a melanocyte-stimulating hormone to darken users’ skin. My friend noted how sick it all is — how in this country, melanin means profitability for products but higher maternal mortality rates for people.

“No!” another partygoer shouted, offended and inebriated and — as you may have already assumed — self-tanned. “No! I am not a bad person just because I want to be tan!”

Of course you’re not a bad person, I wanted to say. But what if you’re under the influence of bad systems? What if we all are? What if we take a minute to laugh at how hard we defend our right to want things when we can barely explain why we want them in the first place, beyond “I like this”? Can we deconstruct those wants in a non-judgy but curious sort of way? Or maybe delight in the absurdity of it all?? Because honestly — we’re in our 30s and we don’t seem to know much about ourselves and our desires!! How did we get here? Ha, ha!

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RELATED: A Brief History of Tanning

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I didn’t, though. (I’m fun at parties, I swear.) I sipped my spritz and thought about the book on my bedside table instead — Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom From Influence In A World Where Everyone Wants Something From You (Including Me) by

Jessica Elefante

. In it, Elefante draws on her professional experience as a former corporate brand strategist and marketer to help readers uncover the systems, structures, and societal influences that make them want the things they want, and to what end.

“My whole life I wanted to be an artist but instead I became a bullshit artist,” Elefante writes. “Once I saw the truth of it, I became fascinated with understanding why.” And isn’t that just like beauty? We’re made to believe we’re creating art when often, we’re only recreating bullshit beauty standards. And who wouldn’t want to understand why?

Raising Hell, Living Well is out on October 10 — and I’m excited to share that I’ll be in conversation with author Jessica Elefante at the NYC book launch event on October 12! It’s all happening at Book Club Bar at 8pm (the event details are here) and if you live in or around New York, I would love to see you there.

In the meantime, I interviewed Elefante about some of the shady shit she pulled as a branding expert, her well-intentioned but ultimately disastrous pivot to influencing, and what I should’ve said to my friend’s fake-tan-loving friend.

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Jessica DeFino (me:): OK, so how would you have handled my tanning-enthusiast situation? I know nefarious cultural influences don’t make for good party conversation, but is there a way to discuss and debate these kinds of things without coming off as judgy or killing the vibe?

Jessica Elefante: One of the key things that I tried to do in the book was not to necessarily tell someone like, what’s happening to them directly. I ended each chapter or essay with a series of questions that the person reflects on. I find that people are more open to things when you speak about your own personal experience, and what you’ve learned, and so the book was obviously done that way — each chapter comes in through a personal narrative. I share all this information about what’s happening in the culture, but I make it about me. I don’t make it about the reader. And this is marketing and branding 101, right? People don’t want to be shamed or feel bad about themselves! For example, my own experience with technology is that I was totally addicted to it. But when I started Folk Rebellion [my digital wellbeing platform], if I went in and told people, like, ‘You’re scrambling your brains! You’re scrambling your kid’s brain!’ then people were going to tell me to go fuck off, right? They don’t want to hear it. They shut down instantly. My book isn’t directed at a person or at a group, but it’s more of an invitation to think about systems. It’s all about uncovering systems — but I’m uncovering them through myself. So, you know, I like to be tan. I love how I feel after I go out on the beach...

JD: I mean, I love the experiences that can lead to getting a tan, too. The beach, the sun. So I guess the question I’d invite there is, “What’s my motivation for adopting the aesthetic of an experience separate from the experience itself?” I don’t know, to me it’s like a simulacrum of being in the sun: opting into the look, opting out of the action, a general flattening of life down to its aesthetic markers…? So those aesthetic markers must signal something deeper, something coded as “desirable,” right? Wealth? Health? Class? Dominance? There’s so much to explore there! But to go back to Marketing and Branding 101. Can you tell readers a little more about your marketing background? How have you helped mold brands and — for lack of a better term — manipulate customers? In the book you’re a little light on specifics, which I assume is an NDA [Non-Disclosure Agreement] thing.

JE: So you're right, there are NDAs, but also, there’s a respect for the people that did hire me. And I did enjoy the work at the time. I came out from under the influence and realized what I was doing — so now, looking back, I feel bad about it, but at the time, I really had fun doing it. And I don’t think that sharing the brands specifically adds anything to my story. I will tell you that I specialized in what was called “emerging brands.” It was like the Wild West. I could do whatever I wanted, so long as I was making as much awareness as possible. As a wannabe artist and a storyteller, it was really easy for me to start to develop these online “communities” for these brands and operate them. It was the early days of [digital media] — there were no regulations, there was no “don’t write this, don't share that” rule. There was nothing like that. I don’t even think hashtags were a thing yet. It was amazing, because you could go from zero to 100,000 followers or a million dollars in sales to $200 million in sales. And it was fun, but it was exhausting. And it was really unhealthy for everyone involved. I didn’t realize that until later. Because of the success that some of my emerging brands had, they became dominant category leaders — everything from consumer products, to shelf stable foods in grocery stores. You’d find them in Whole Foods. I worked with luxury fashion designers that were very small but wanted to grow very big, on everything from building their communities to building their full-blown strategy to helping them expand to markets across the country. And then after a while, I started working with the big banks and the credit card companies.

JD: Did you work with any beauty brands?

JE: We would partner with bloggers and fashion influencers who were in beauty. And I would be gifting them for specific events — things like perfume or lotion, whatever the new product was. I remember tinted moisturizer was really big at the time.

JD: The BB cream and CC cream explosion of 2012.

JE: Yeah, that was kind of coming out everywhere. So beauty brands weren’t clients of mine, but certainly I had communication with them.

JD: I loved the part of the book where you explained how you’d hustle to get your clients’ products seen. Could you give us a quick breakdown of that? Say a product is in the pages of a magazine, or it’s in a celebrity’s hands in the paparazzi photos — how did it get there? What’s happening behind-the-scenes at the brand level to get these products seen and covered?

JE: I guess I always thought that this was understood, and it took me a long time to realize the general population doesn’t know this. Part of my job was getting my products in People magazine, or on, you know, any dot-com that was known for sharing “What’s In My Bag” celebrity content. Those did start out as these guerrilla campaigns — you would just go to a gifting suite and try and shove your products in there, and hope that the celebrity would recommend it or be seen with it. That was a very short period of time. Because then, you know, celebrities’ [managers] understood that they could monetize it, and they could be a go-between. Like, Hey, you want your lip balm in the hand of this celebrity? I can put you in touch with her, and it's going to cost $10,000 for me to put it in her bag, but there’s no guarantee that she's going to walk around with it. So that’s your entry, right? A guarantee [that the celebrity will be photographed with a product] is six figures. So all of those things you are seeing [in pap photos] are paid for, well over six figures. And that was 15 years ago! So I'm sure we’re talking huge bucks now. So basically, all this to say that when you see a celebrity with a product, it’s transactional.

JD: Another thing I loved reading about was how you pioneered this technique of sending celebrities and magazine editors these very elaborate packages. I was like, Oh my God, did Jess start the unboxing boom? You kind of did, right? Because that became huge right around that time. It was like, suddenly, the PR package itself was the PR. Influencers were filming themselves opening these over-the-top boxes, and then it trickled down to customers…

JE: I didn't even think about that. But yes. If someone is famous, and you want your brands aligned with them, their face, whatever? How are you going to stand out from every other free package that they get, right? We made these elaborate things, and we would deliver them certain ways — one brand, we did a singing telegram. It was whatever you could do to stand out from the pack. And back then, our attention wasn’t so split and fragmented, so it moved product. It made a difference. I’ve been out of it for a few years, but I imagine now it’s more difficult to get noticed, and therefore the packages are becoming more elaborate and super wasteful.

JD: I pitched a story about how unboxing affects the environment in 2020 and it was accepted by a major fashion magazine — but then the story was killed before I could write it, probably because the brands that make these elaborate, eco-disastrous packages are still pretty central to publishing profits. And that brings me to something the two of us have in common: You’re a reformed brand strategist, I’m a reformed beauty editor, and we’re both sort of trying to apologize for what we’ve done through our current work — but at the same time, we’ve both gotten pulled back into the bullshit in the process. When I stepped away from the Kardashian Apps, I was like, I'm going to be a beauty reporter, I'm gonna make a difference and for a while, I got sucked back into the world of the beauty media. I started thinking promoting overconsumption was OK as long as the products were “clean” or “eco-friendly.” And I think you would probably say the same happened to you — you had a breakdown, you left corporate marketing behind to launch Folk Rebellion, you became a successful influencer, which led to another breakdown. It shows how easy it is to be pulled back in to these systems, even after you “know better.” How did it happen to you? What lessons did you learn the second time around?

JE: I have that answer! When I left my marketing and branding career, I left it because I wanted to wake the world up to how we were using our digital technology, right? It was very unhealthy. I had a total crash and burn, I was an early adopter and an over-user. I ended up being diagnosed with digital dementia, which wasn’t even a term back then. It was terrifying to me, and [leaving] came from this really innate motivation of, I don't want my kids to feel like this. So that was truly my calling. It very, very, very much came from this desire to “be good” and fix things. But I just recreated the same exact fucking problems all over again, because I was still under these cultural influences that I did not know I was under. I am of the girlboss generation. It’s all about ambition, achievement, hustle culture. When Folk Rebellion started to take off — and it took off pretty quickly — I became an influencer in the space, which I still find hard to say. I don’t consider myself an influencer in any way, shape, or form. But I was influential in the digital wellbeing movement. I ran an Instagram account with, you know, like 35,000 followers, and I guess what happened was that I recreated all the same problems — overworking, trying to do too many things at once, not walking the walk. I felt incredible, debilitating stress. I thought I was having a heart attack. I [was diagnosed with] costochondritis, which is inflammation around your heart and lungs. My business fell apart, the brand fell apart, my marriage fell apart. I was like, What the fuck am I doing? I’m doing the exact same thing in a new way. I realized it wasn’t a digital detox that I needed; it was awareness of the cultural influences I was under.

JD: In the book, you break these “spheres of influence” down to three categories: Inner World, Surface World, and Outer World:

1. Inner World — The place below the surface filled with the things that make us us. Fixed things like biology, genetics, childhood, experiences, age, family lineage, birth order, personality traits, and changeable things like knowledge, attitude, behaviors, skills, hobbies, beliefs, values, expectations, characteristics, health, needs.

2. Surface World — The real-world reciprocal relationships around us, the surface represents where, and with whom, we are present and in community. Family, friends, partners, co-workers, school, neighborhood, gym, participation sports, places of worship, local business.

Outer World — It is the universal atmosphere of the collective omnipresence of intangibles floating all around us. Business, brands, media, tech, norms, culture, the arts, trends, all the isms, beliefs, zeitgeist/trends, social media, content, books, movies, celebrities and also established structures and institutions, infrastructure, resources, policies, algorithms, politics, leaders, regulations, religion, education, government, history, socioeconomics, evolution, environmental conditions.

I’d love to get your take on Inner, Surface, and Outer World influences as applied to beauty.

JE: So one of my Inner World beauty influences would be that I’m female. How I exist within the world is going to be very different than how my brother exists, because the beauty industry doesn't treat him the same way that they treat me when it comes to beauty.

JD: Got it. Inner World could also be family expectations around your appearance, right? And Surface World would be how people treat you based on how you look? And Outer World would be media, marketing, advertisements, consumer goods?

JE: Right. I’m thinking of Outer World beauty influences growing up in the ‘90s — it was the age of the waif models. You were supposed to be rail thin. Then in the early aughts, it was Paris Hilton and Delia*s catalogs all that Y2K fashion that’s really making a comeback right now. At the time, I did try everything [to lose weight]. You name it. The diet pills that were literally speed. Trying to eat only a single meal a day. So these were the cultural, Outer World influences that were around me all the time — the Outer World telling me that I had to be beautiful, and not only did I have to be beautiful, but I had to be beautiful like these girls, right? All of those things get baked and encoded inside you.

JD: In the book, you reframe some of these societal messages as “folklore.” You argue that when we internalize the message, it becomes a “folktale,” and then you offer ideas for “folk rebellions” — or ways of getting out from under the influence. Could you give us an example of a folklore, a folktale, and a folk rebellion in terms of beauty?

JE: In the beauty industry, the folklore is that we have to present our “best selves” on the outside. The folktale — the tale we tell ourselves from there — is, I'm not good enough just as I am. I need to improve in some way. It’s goal-reaching, improvement, and optimization — that’s really at the crux of all the issues I have with influence. The folk rebellion would be asking, What the fuck is a “best self”? And who gets to decide that? So I have a 12-year-old son. The other day I walked past the TV screen and I was like, What the fuck is he watching? It’s a Disney show, but there were 12-year-old girls on the screen in full makeup, with hair extensions down their back. What I did not like was that my son was watching a young woman his age, and that is now maybe his expectation, or baseline, for what girls should look like. So I sat down, and he’s like, “What, Mom? It’s how they look, right?” And he goes, “Is it because they're too sexy?” And I go, “No, they can be sexy if they want, but they are children and they didn’t choose this.” There are people upon people and layers upon layers of influence above them saying, This is how girls need to look on television. And the person at the top is a man who’s very old, who has determined that this is what a young girl on the Disney Channel should look like. And that young girl on Disney Channel, who’s just an actress and has no say in it, is now informing my son that this is how young girls do look and should look.

JD: On that note, every chapter of the book ends with suggestion for how to “Raise Hell” against a particular influence. Do you have any tips on how to “Raise Hell” against these sorts of standards?

JE: I kind of think we should turn call-out culture on brands and corporations. Every time they say something ridiculous, just show them how ridiculous it is. Drag them through the mud. Embarrass them. I mean, you do such a good job of this — really putting marketing language under a microscope. We have to get that changed in those those marketing room cubicles, right? I understand that giant industries aren’t going away, but we can greatly change them. As someone who used to run these brands, I know nothing works better than than hate-tweeting, or making [criticism] go viral in a public forum. You will get an answer so quickly, and it will be brought to the next meeting on a Monday morning, and they will factor that into their next marketing campaign.

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This interview has been edited for length and clarity.