Skincare Culture Is Dewy Diet Culture

Body acceptance advocate Katie Sturino is doing ads for Botox. Why?

This morning, I logged into Instagram to find outspoken body acceptance advocate Katie Sturino celebrating “the third annual Botox Cosmetic Day” with a Botox-sponsored post.

The influencer and entrepreneur—best known for her biting-but-humorous critiques of fatphobia in the fashion industry and #MakeMySize, a social media series that calls out clothing brands for excluding bigger-bodied customers—captioned the photo, “This seriously calls for cake and temporarily less frown lines.”

The juxtaposition of anti-diet-culture commentary (eat the cake!) and pro-beauty-culture rhetoric (freeze your frown lines!) is, unfortunately, familiar. Instagram’s Discover page is full of “body positive” influencers who rage against weight loss programs in one post and rave about lip fillers in the next, as if the two don’t stem from the same exact tenets of white supremacy and colonialism. That familiarity doesn’t make it any less frustrating, though — especially coming from Sturino, author of the recently released book Body Talk, which aims to address the “harm and wasted time that comes from chasing unattainable beauty standards,” according to Vogue.

Ahem. Considering the fact that aging is just another word for living, what beauty standard is more unattainable than anti-aging?

In the same Vogue piece, Sturino reveals it makes her “sad” to speak to “women who are in their 60s, 70s, 80s, still talking about body image and still saying, ‘I’ve got to lose that 10 pounds or I don’t look good.’” That makes me sad, too. It also makes me sad that women of all ages are still bombarded with messages — even sweet-sounding messages written in frosting! — that tell them the inevitable process of growing older is so shameful, so unsightly, that they oughta hide it by stabbing themselves between the eyes with a syringe of paralytic neurotoxins. It makes me sad that women are taught to erase signs of a deep, emotionally complex existence — frown lines, laugh lines, proof of life! —  in favor of deadened, doll-smooth faces. It makes me sad that these behaviors are often celebrated as acts of “empowerment” and “self-care” even though they compound the collective harm of beauty standards. It makes me sad that Sturino and so many of her peers don’t see that skincare culture is just dewy diet culture.

Here, let me show you:

Swap the words “frown lines” for “fat rolls” in your favorite brand, editor, influencer, or media platform’s content.

Swap the word “wrinkles” for “stretch marks” in your favorite brand, editor, influencer, or media platform’s content.

Swap the word “acne” for “cellulite” in your favorite brand, editor, influencer, or media platform’s content.

Swap the word “dull skin” for “extra five pounds” in your favorite brand, editor, influencer, or media platform’s content.

Does it hold up?

No. Because just like fat rolls and stretch marks, frown lines and wrinkles are normal and near-universal physical traits.

Swap the words “frown lines” for “fat rolls” in your favorite brand, editor, influencer, or media platform’s content.

And that’s just the tip of this fucked-up iceberg! There are endless parallels between diet culture and skincare culture.

In both instances, people have been made to believe that a certain aesthetic signifies health. They’ve been sold products to help them achieve that aesthetic at the expense of their health. They’ve been sent to doctors who reinforce beauty standards and call it care (think: MDs who tell fat people experiencing unrelated health issues to “just lose weight”, dermatologists who suggest Botox and fillers to patients at annual skin cancer screenings). They’ve been told that conforming to these beauty standards will increase their confidence when, in reality, beauty culture increases appearance-based anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, eating disorders, self-harm, and even suicide.

Thanks to the Black-led body acceptance movement, the collective is waking up to the fact that the diet culture has no real basis in science; that the diet industry purposely manufactures impossible standards, makes people feel bad about not living up to said impossible standards, and capitalizes on that insecurity in order to make money; that one’s external appearance is not a reliable indicator of internal health (or worth, for that matter). It’s time to wake up to the fact that the skincare culture is the same.

The truth is, there is no ideological difference between a “detox tea” and a “detox face mask.”

There is no ideological difference between obsessively counting calories and obsessively applying active ingredients.

There is no ideological difference between devising a diet to eliminate fat and devising a skincare routine to eliminate dead skin cells and oil and pimples and wrinkles.

There is no ideological difference between doing an ad for Trimspa and doing an ad for Botox.

Sturino once told Vogue, “I want all of these very recognizable rites of passage through diet culture and body shame that girls do together as bonding activities to stop. I want us to do better things with our energy than talk about the number on the scale going up and down. We were handed these issues and we have the power to change it. Let’s change it for the next generation of girls.”

I agree with this 100 percent. I want to do better. I want things to change. And I want the next generation to feel as comfortable with their faces as they do in their bodies.

It has to start with us.

So, Katie, if you’re reading: Will you reconsider future paid partnerships with Botox? Will you rethink the messages you’re sending your devoted followers? Will you stop promoting above-the-neck beauty standards? Will you extend some body acceptance to your face?

UPDATE 11/17: Sturino has deleted her Instagram ad for Botox, although she hasn’t addressed the decision in a statement.