Now I Am Become Slime
The Don't Buy List: Issue #45
Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List! Let’s start with a moment of meditation. Close your eyes, breathe in through your nose, and consider that your flesh is but a rapidly-disintegrating layer of death and future-dust. Let go of the breath and everything else. Ahhh. Doesn’t that feel nice??
Anyway!
I can’t stop thinking about the “Cultural History of Slime” Lit Hub published last week. In it, author Susanne Wedlich chronicles the use of slime as a scare tactic, from H.P. Lovecraft to the Blob and beyond. “Ghostbusters, released in 1984, emerged at a time when almost every film with a hint of spookiness was swimming in gunk,” she writes. “Zombies ooze, while mutants, aliens and other beasts are made of goo or leave, at least, a trail of slobber to get their audience gagging.” There was the drool in Alien and the “oozing human-insect hybrid” in The Fly — but then, something changed. As media studies scholar Rebecca Bell-Metereau wrote in her 2004 essay on the topic, “The end of the millennium heralded the closing of a cycle … Slimy, disgusting movies passed out of fashion for a time.” There are some exceptions today (Stranger Things, the Ghostbusters remake) but for the most part, auteurs and audiences alike aren’t scared of slime anymore. And here’s where my sick need to turn every story into a beauty story surfaces: Is it possible we don’t fear slime because we’ve become slime?
At some point in the past ten years, mere moisture stopped being enough for skin. Dewiness became the dominant aesthetic standard, but that didn’t last long either. Today, consumers are encouraged to emulate the “sheeny shiny” skin of a dolphin, the gleam of a glazed donut. “Damp-looking” skin comes from “glow jobs,” celebrities aim to look “wet,” and influencers lube up their epidermal layers. Literally. In selfies, the object of desire is no longer the skin itself, but the product conspicuously smeared on top: globs of moisturizer, drops of serum, the telltale trail of slime that gives “slugging” — the act of coating one’s complexion in pure petroleum jelly — its name. We embrace the slime, we embody the slime, we buy the slime. And not only do we buy the slime, but we display the bottles that hold the slime — creams, oils, essences — on our shelves and social media feeds like cabinets of curiosities; a circus sideshow of skincare. In place of jars of pickled fetuses are jars of Epidermal Growth Factor harvested from fetal foreskins (a celeb-fave facial ingredient). The monster, I think, is too familiar to fear. It’s the face the mirror — glittering like an oil slick, slimy as a swamp thing, drenched and dripping with goop.
CNN anchor Don Lemon was temporarily suspended after arguing on-air that 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley “isn’t in her prime.” He went on to say that women are “considered to be in their prime in 20s and 30s and maybe 40s.” Backlash ensued. And I don’t know, it’s just funny to me that so many of the people (rightfully) upset about Lemon’s comments are people who also defend the beauty industry’s anti-aging practices — which communicate the same exact thing! — as acts of “care,” “health,” “empowerment,” and “autonomy.” While clicking Add-To-Cart on a moisturizer that promises the collagen levels of a 25-year-old: “How dare Don Lemon say that!” While at the dermatologist erasing all signs of crows feet with a syringe of Botulinum Toxin Type A: “Can you believe this guy??” It’s madness! If you reject the thought that a woman is in her prime in her 20s and 30s when it’s explicitly stated à la Lemon, you should reject it when it’s implicitly stated à la beauty culture.
TIME reports that “Estée Lauder’s Fabrizio Freda, who earned $66 million in 2022 while the company’s stock fell 33%” was the “second most overpaid CEO” last year — beating out the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, and JP Morgan & Chase. So yeah, that guy is who we “empower” when we source our supposed tools of “self-care” and “self-expression” from the many, many beauty brands Estée Lauder Companies owns: Estée Lauder, MAC Cosmetics, GLAMGLOW, Tom Ford Beauty, La Mer, Clinique, Dr. Jart, Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Jo Malone, Too Faced, Smashbox, Le Labo, and more. Not ourselves.
If the feminine beauty ideal were a consumer good, it would be Laura Mercier’s new “Real Flawless Weightless Perfecting Foundation.” I mean, the company really shoved it all in there!!! Not only will this base make you perfect — no flaws! no weight! — it will make you real.
On that note, I urge you to read “What is time to a brand?” by Jared Holst for his newsletter, Brands Mean A Lot. Most brands “know that no matter your love for their product, it can easily be replaced,” he writes. “This is why many of them use words and phrases to engender feelings of artificial closeness: ‘when you’re here you’re family’ (Olive Garden), ‘live better’ (Wal-Mart), ‘every pet deserves the best life’ (Purina). If a person said stuff like this to you upon a first meeting, you’d think they were either a cult leader, love bombing you, or even both.” There are endless beauty industry parallels here, from product names like Secure Attachment Serum to tag lines like “a hug in a bottle.” Cosmetic companies promise extreme emotional outcomes precisely because their products are so fucking useless. “There’s often an inverse relation to the replaceability of a brand’s product to the strength of wording it uses in marketing,” Holst says. “As in, the more a brand attempts to foster the feeling of a genuine relationship, the less vital its product is. Do you know the slogan of whatever company produces your toilet? Or IV drips? Or water heaters?”
The New Zealand Herald profiled me as “the woman the beauty industry fears.” And look at this double-page spread in the print edition!!
Somebody give me an ice roller to de-puff my swollen ego.
Two new beauty terms to watch: