Manifest Destiny Of The Dermis
The Don't Buy List: Issue #87
Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST. In this issue: Cosmetics & climate change! AI product reviews! Stem cell facelifts! Why Trump wants Greenland (and what it has to do with beauty)! The noses of A Complete Unknown! Bad breast reductions! Yoga boobs! Extremism in wellness! The glow-up as the modern hero’s journey! Non-consensual vaginoplasty, anti-aging hypocrisy, & more!
FIRST AND FOREMOST: If you’re able, please donate to help victims of the LA wildfires through American Red Cross, Friends In Deed, this extensive list of mutual aid resources, or this list of GoFundMes. My sister and best friends have been evacuated from their homes, and it’s a horrifying, heartbreaking time for everyone in the Los Angeles area.
GLOSSY REPORTS: “LA beauty and fashion brands collect donations to support each other after fire damage.”
HOWEVER: While it’s great to see the beauty industry come together to help manage the immediate crisis in California, I would also love to see actual, long-term accountability re: its role in exacerbating the climate crisis (which of course plays a role in the wildfires). Its mass-production of mostly-non-recyclable plastic bottles. Its reliance on fossil fuels and petrochemicals. Its over-promotion of overconsumption. Its gleeful adoption of AI — not just for its own “creativity and innovation,” but for, apparently, product reviews? Using the AI Assist form below (c/o a Note from Cydney Hayes) to generate a 100-word “customer” testimonial for R.E.M. Beauty’s Lip Stain would use (read: waste) a full bottle of water and enough electricity to power 14 LED light bulbs for an hour. Like… What are we doing here and why?
STEM SELLS: Last year, I wrote about the body as a site of extractive cosmetic capitalism (doctors removing patients’ own fat, stem cells, and blood for use in aesthetic treatments). Last month, I wrote about “natural to be unnatural” as the new “high maintenance to be low maintenance” (procedures using “naturally-derived substances to mimic ‘unnatural’ interventions, like stem cell treatments for facelift-level tightening”). And just last week, celebrities were gifted $40,000 “stem cell facelifts” in their Golden Globes gift bags. The process involves harvesting the patient’s fat tissue, separating out the patient’s stem cells, and strategically re-injecting them into the face for a surgically-lifted look sans scalpel. (Would you pay $40k for access to your own parts?) (This also feels very “Mr. Potato Head Beauty” as I said on the pod a while ago.)
FAT IS THE NEW HAIR: On that note, I’d like to submit one more entry into my 2025 beauty predictions — that fat is the new hair, in the sense that it’s undesirable in certain spots and very desirable in others and women (primarily) pay ungodly amounts of money to remove it from one area (laser hair removal of the mustache, say) and graft it onto another just inches away (microbladed eyebrows, say). In theory, this has been the case with fat for a long time, but in practice, technology is only catching up now. There are more relatively accessible ways to eliminate fat (GLP-1s, surgical fat transfer) and redistribute it (injectables, surgical fat transfer) than ever before.
MAD MED: And speaking of predictions, this AirMail investigation into plastic surgeons who’re “operating on their wives, mothers, daughters, sons — and parading them as their best advertisement” ties into my recent theories on Stepford Skin and Longevity Dads.
LAUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK: I like to say there’s a beauty angle on everything. Even President Trump’s obsession with taking over Greenland, which is an idea he got from Ronald Lauder, of Estée Lauder fame and fortune.
WHO NOSE? I saw A Complete Unknown the other week and I can’t stop thinking about the noses. Why make Timothée Chalamet and Edward Norton wear prosthetic noses? The actors’ real-life noses are really not so different from their characters’ real-life noses. But if you must, why not also make Elle Fanning and Monica Barbaro wear prosthetic noses? The actress’ real-life noses are significantly smaller than their characters’ real-life noses! Or why not hire larger-nosed actresses?? Must all female romantic leads have button noses to be believably lovable???
EXPLORE MORE: Actress Brooke Shields released a new memoir, Brooke Shields Is Not Allowed to Get Old, which her publisher describes as “an intimate and empowering exploration of aging that flips the script on the idea of what it means for a woman to grow older.” Wonderful. Lovely. Except! Shields is also the founder of an anti-aging hair care line that explicitly refers to “thinning” hair and “lack of shine” — two natural, normal things that happen to women as they age — as “problems.”
SUE HIM: In that same memoir, Shields shares that her plastic surgeon performed an unplanned procedure to “tighten” her vagina without her consent while she was under anesthesia for a (planned) labia reduction. Afterwards, “He informed me that he threw in a little ‘bonus,’” she told Us. “It felt like such an invasion — such a bizarre, like, rape of some kind.” Yes. I would 100% classify this as medical rape.
GROAN UP: Courting adolescents or babying adults? The new arrivals section of Ulta.com includes a Magic Marker-shaped lip stain, an Elmer’s Glue-inspired primer, Mickey Mouse makeup brushes, and stickers (of the traditional and facial varieties).
ON THE BOOB: “The incision beneath my right breast began to heal and then scar, looking very much like it did before,” Katie Heaney writes of her “breast reduction from hell” on the Cut. “At the same time, I found myself consumed by a new fixation: the skin between my chin and my neck, which no one on television has anymore. I pinched at it, studied it in the mirror, and sent a selfie to my best friend, who claimed never to have noticed. I absorbed entire reality shows without watching anything but anyone’s jawline. I could see it now: This is how it starts. Having tried to correct just one thing, I simply moved my target.”
ALSO: Referring to understated breast augmentations as “yoga boobs” feels like an insult to yoga.
BUNSEN BURNERS: I find these science-y ads from The Ordinary silly considering the products consistently give customers chemical burns. (Although many people still believe burning = working…)
GLOW NO: Rebecca Jennings embarked on a 75-day “glow-up journey,” wrote about it for Vox, and asked me what I thought:
DeFino guesses that our cultural obsession with glowing-up and watching other people do so too is a reflection of the American dream. No matter where we start from, it’s part of our national spirit to believe, however foolishly, that it’s always within our capacity to improve. “It’s the new Hero’s Journey,” she says.
I also think a consequence of living in a visually dominant culture (and in a country sliding toward fascism) is that mere aesthetics start to take precedence over more substantial modes of expression. This Manifest Destiny of the Dermis doesn’t have a deeper point — not even a deeper self-serving point. It’s not about self-improvement or self-actualization or self-care. (In fact, “glowing up” is often at odds with self-improvement, self-actualization, and self-care.) It’s all surface. “It feels like part of a greater trend toward infantilization,” I told Jennings. “It’s concerning in terms of our critical thinking, our literacy, our political awareness. Beauty is being swept up into this larger political trend of wanting easy answers.” Jennings and I also looked back at beauty trends through the political cycle of the recent past — 2016 kicked off the self-care boom, 2020 was all about skincare. And for 2025?
“I think there’s going to be a stronger focus on femininity and gender,” DeFino says. “Anything that’s reinforcing the [idea that] women are expected to be as beautiful as possible as part of their own morality and duty to society is pretty dangerous in combination with some of the other things that we’re seeing right now.”
Those other things she’s referring to are the terrifying and deadly rollbacks in women’s reproductive rights and trans people’s access to gender-affirming care. The idea that women should “look like women” has implications far beyond the aesthetic; it reinforces the idea that we should be fearful of trans and nonbinary people and that attacks against them are justified.
FOR EXAMPLE: Fashion and beauty’s fixation on glamming up female athletes — Ilona Maher just partnered with Paula’s Choice, Angel Reese and Gabby Thomas cover Vogue’s winter issues — which, as I wrote the other week, functions as an apologetic and affirmation of femininity in a time of national gender panic (and can’t be separated from the recent “transvestigations” in women’s sports).
RAW DEAL: “Wellness Culture Is Now Peddling Extremism,” Sara Radin writes for Atmos. I was thrilled to be interviewed for the piece.
“We need to start looking at content that may seem liberal on its face, but that’s actually promoting the idea that women need to be and should be as beautiful as possible,” DeFino said. “This is often under the guise of doing it for their own health or their own empowerment or their own fun and freedom and expression.”
In reality, however, DeFino says these trends—and “glow up” culture more broadly—enforce traditional, conservative ideals that women exist to be looked at, even if the one who’s doing the looking is themselves. “People often say, ‘I do it for me, I like to look this way,’” she said. “But this is still [objectification] … and not any more liberatory than the trad wife concept that all women should be wives.”
FINALLY: I’ll leave you with this.
“Running into your ex without makeup. And walking slower.” Because investing hours in skincare to look good for a man is different and better than investing minutes in makeup to look good for a man! (Yes, I’m back on Instagram.)
You’re Gonna Die Someday No Matter How Young You Look,
Jessica
Oof, yes, this: "It’s concerning in terms of our critical thinking, our literacy, our political awareness. Beauty is being swept up into this larger political trend of wanting easy answers.”
No war but the class war, Miss Jessica!