The Don't Buy List: Hot Hyperpigmentation Summer, Beauty Loves Bezos, & Snake Oil Skincare
The Don't Buy List: Hot Hyperpigmentation Summer, Beauty Loves Bezos, & Snake Oil Skincare
Plus, the real problem with benzene in sunscreen.
Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of The Don’t Buy List! I want to start by congratulating the members of the beauty media. Because of your tireless use of Amazon affiliate links—in the face of inhumane working conditions! regardless of the company’s role in accelerating climate change and consumerism! despite the growing wealth gap!—you were able to make 15 cents from every sale of Maybelline Great Lash Mascara, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was able to ride a dick-shaped rocket into space for 15 minutes! (If that’s not a perfect metaphor for the beauty industry, I don’t know what is.)
It’s summertime, and melasma comes easy. I’ve seen so many recent articles and social media posts about various forms of hyperpigmentation, all lamenting how hard it is to “heal.” Do you want to know why it’s hard? Because the hyperpigmentation IS the healing. Hear me out: Hyperpigmentation occurs after skin injury—overexposure to sun or environmental pollution, an inflamed pimple—because melanin is part of the skin’s healing response. Extra pigmentation is literally a sign that your body sensed some sort of skin damage and was like, “Don’t worry, I’ll activate a little melanocyte-stimulating hormone and heal this shit right the fuck now, because I am a force of nature and I can do that.” (This is a very brief and reductive overview of melanin production, but you get the point, right?) Nothing illustrates the absurdity of attempting to heal a healing mechanism better than this scientific paper, which asks, “Why are there so few effective treatments for hyperpigmentation?”, then answers its own damn question with the opening sentence, “Postinflammatory hyperpigmentation is a normal biological response in human skin.” Why are derms who know better so determined to “treat” a normal biological response?? Because, as the paper states, “dyspigmentation in the form of either hyperpigmentation or hypopigmentation is often psychologically devastating.” It’s true. It is. But I’m sorry… if a normal biological skin response is “psychologically devastating,” we should treat THE CAUSE OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL DEVASTATION—you know, the abnormal part of this situation!!!—and that is the unrealistic expectations and unrelenting pressure of beauty culture. I am therefore declaring this a Hot Hyperpigmentation Summer, babes. Changing our normal human skin to reflect societal standards is out and changing societal standards to reflect normal human skin is in.
A light interjection: I love this body butter!
Please, please, please read “The Very Real Social Problem of Ugly Discrimination,” a new essay from Tressie McMillan Cottom. It addresses the racist foundation of beauty standards, beauty as capital, beauty as a weapon, colorism, lookism… it is brilliant and researched and cited and sourced and quotes sociological studies and should be required reading for everyone in the beauty space. “We know that how we look matters to the way the world treats us,” the author writes. “That is why we spend so much time and effort on presenting ourselves to others. It is also why so many of us have been relieved to be wearing soft pants and natural faces and undyed hair during COVID. The performance of gender and class and power can be exhausting, even more so when you are in a body that isn’t supposed to exist out in public.” She posits that beauty is so often positioned as frivolous and fun because “few of us are ready to tackle what our most intimate choices mean for inequality. But, some of us are brave. Right?” Whew. OK. Punch me in the gut, Tressie.
Writer, artist, influencer, and scammer Caroline Calloway is now selling a skincare product called “Snake Oil”—get it? because she’s a scammer?—a DIY blend of plant-based oils that she makes in her apartment. After Calloway announced the launch, a bunch of people DMed me like, “Can you believe this woman? It’s a horrible day for the skincare industry!” Which I understand, I guess, but also… do you know me at all? I don’t use skincare, save for Manuka honey and jojoba oil! My job affords me access to free La Mer and La Prairie—every expensive La Whatever—and I choose to make my own products instead! I’ve dedicated my journalism career to uncovering the beauty industry’s bullshit! If you ask me, Snake Oil is brilliant. It’s an indictment of Big Beauty packaged as parody: The real snake oil, it says with a wink, is the stuff the skincare industry sells us. (I mean, if any of it really worked, would people be throwing $75 at an influencer with nice skin for a single ounce of her experimental DIY concoction even though there’s a literal cat hair sticking out of the label in the product imagery? No.) Was Calloway trying to make a (con) artistic statement here? Probably not, but an artistic statement it is.
I wrote about eyebrows—twice!—for Vogue this week. Check out “Reentering The World With Anxiety Eyebrows,” in which I explore my experience with trichotillomania, a mental illness that compels me pull all my precious brow hairs right out of my head; and “Meet the Microblading Artist Bringing French Girl Brows to New York,” in which I interview Delphine Breyne and attempt to break down the Eurocentric trope of “French girl beauty.”
So, scientists have been finding a lot of toxic chemicals in beauty products, huh? Following The Great PFA Find of 2021 comes The Continuing Disappointment of Johnson & Johnson: Sunscreens Contaminated With Carcinogenic Benzene Edition. And once again, beauty industry players are tripping over themselves to make excuses for a giant corporation that doesn’t care about its customers enough to do basic product testing; to downplay the impact of the contamination. Finding a component of gasoline that causes cancer in products meant to prevent cancer shouldn’t be downplayed. It’s a big deal! It’s an even bigger deal for communities of color living with the environment injustice of chemical co-exposures, those who can’t afford to inhale a little extra benzene at the beach (a subject I addressed here, if you’re curious to learn more about the racism embedded in the “cosmetic chemicals are safe for everyone” argument). The fact that many of the most-followed reporters, chemists, and influencers in the industry are implying that benzene in sunscreen isn’t that much of problem—telling the public, “if you want to reduce benzene exposure, the most important thing is not to park your car in an attached garage”!!!—is W-I-L-D to me. It misses the point completely. This situation doesn’t scare people because they’re afraid of benzene. (I guarantee you that the consumers throwing away their recalled sunscreens aren’t particularly benzene-avoidant in everyday life.) This situation scares people because it offers scientific proof that the beauty industry isn’t as safe as it claims to be or as regulated as it needs to be. It confirms that brands do not actually know what’s in their own fucking products; that, or they don’t fucking care. For many, being exposed to the ugly underbelly of the beauty industry is far more troubling than being exposed to trace amounts of benzene. So let’s maybe stop telling individuals they’ll be fine as long as they adjust their personal parking habits and start working toward a world that doesn’t slowly and secretly poison its people, via Aveeno sunscreen or attached garages or anything else.
Excuse me while I scream at Beauty Independent’s fist-clenchingly frustrating headline, “The Big Beauty Industry Potential Of Modern Society’s Stress Dilemma.”
Why am I screaming? Because every time a large-scale societal problem (like the insurmountable stress of existing under capitalism) is positioned as a new business opportunity (selling people individual solutions to systemic issues [Is your job slowly killing you? Look alive with our new caffeine-infused eye cream!]), it pushes us that much further from the large-scale societal solutions we so desperately need.
Finally, I need to share a pitch email I recently received from a PR agency promoting — I quote — the “first military, athletic and anti-aging line of products.” Ahem. Those three words? Together?? Multi-use for the MILITARY and ANTI-AGING??! Honestly, the way beauty culture treats women’s bodies as things to be beaten, controlled, and conquered… I can’t. I’m done. Bye!