The Don't Buy List: Revlon, Robot Skin, & Irritable Bowel Syndrome (For Your Face)
Plus, Julia Fox says "pretty is over."
Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List! A lab at the University of Tokyo has successfully engineered functioning “human skin” to give robots “the look of living creatures.” Meanwhile, labs across the Western beauty industry are successfully engineering products that degrade the functioning of human skin to give women the look of lifeless AI filters. At the risk of sounding clichéd: We are trapped in a late stage capitalist dystopia!!!
Anyway.
I have a quiz for you, based on this recent Sephora tweet.
Would you rather:
A) perform the rote, routine aesthetic labor of your nighttime skincare regimen; removing concealer from your tired, dark-shadowed under-eyes, loosening the grip of lengthening mascara on your average-length lashes, staring at your makeup-free face in the mirror and deciding which “concern” to address tonight — aging? hyperpigmentation? acne? dullness? — via a targeted serum approach
or
B) press your body into that of your significant other; reveling in the merging of microbes, the mingling of energy, the tangling of limbs — that singular sensation of skin-to-skin contact! the soul-deep tingle of human intimacy! an experience reserved for precious few beings in our galaxy (relative to the number of beings in our galaxy)! a feeling science cannot fully explain, because maybe it’s actually a little bit magic!
If you answered A: