Sun Projection Factor
The Don't Buy List: Issue #95
Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! Joining a long list of beauty trends that celebrate sun damage through mimesis — fake tans, faux freckles, sunburn blush — is tan line makeup: “safe tan lines” created by brushing blush and bronzer around your bikini straps.
I doubt this particular technique will take off, but it did make me think: Are these trends not the mocktails of UV exposure? They replace a harmful substance (alcohol, excessive sunlight) with an aesthetic substitute, revealing our social dependence on the real thing in the process. The genre needs its own name: Sunmock? Sun-mulacra? Hypersun? SPF: Sun Projection Factor? I swear we’re thisclose to a fake melasma mustache you apply like a temporary tattoo.
Anyway! Onto the links…
IN THIS ISSUE: Haircare affirmations! The foodification of beauty! The NY Liberty x Vagisil! Rhode enters the mirror world! Notes on fragrance! Jane Austen stinks! Sharpie lipstick! Bathroom lip filler! Petrochemical alternatives! Evil beauty! Cuomo! Trump! Zohran! Lorde! Materialists! & more!
Fifteen years after founding Drybar (a blowout business built on sleek, heat-styled hair), beauty entrepreneur Alli Webb is back with Messy (a product line for undone, air-dried hair). Of course! As sure as dawn follows darkness, as sure as barrier repair balms follow barrier-buffing exfoliants, an empire of heat damage repair must follow an empire of heat styling. The pivot makes sense. Messy’s product names do not: There’s the “I Am Transformed” Instant Silk Revival Spray, the “I Will Not Be Broken” Overnight Repair Serum, the “I Can Begin Again” Shampoo, etc… To me, this sort of thing — see also: Rare Beauty, Self Made, Keys Soulcare, Philosophy — indicates a true and deep (perhaps unconscious) disdain for cosmetics qua cosmetics. Is styling one’s hair for the sake of styling one’s hair so objectionable that it must be disguised as emotional wellbeing/spiritual transcendence/personal growth?
I talked to BeautyMatter’s Sophie Pitt about “the foodification of beauty” (which somehow remains relevant). An excerpt:
Beauty critic and cultural commentator Jessica DeFino believes the rise of food-led beauty stems from the anti-diet culture rhetoric that entered the mainstream in the mid-2010s. “Anti-diet culture limited what beauty standards the media could promote without facing public backlash,” she said to BeautyMatter.
As body-critical advertising came to a slow, skin-critical messaging amplified to take its place, with the focus shifting from needing to lose weight in order to be seen as “beautiful” or “healthy” to needing to eliminate wrinkles, acne, and hyperpigmentation via a curated skincare routine. DeFino thinks the potential liberation of "all bodies are good bodies" was mitigated with "no skin is good skin" (yet). Soon we saw food take center stage in the skincare space, as "good skin" equated with "glazed donut skin" and "Jello skin."
Then came the GLP-1 (weight-loss drug) boom in 2024, and beauty was already primed to provide an alternative to actually eating. As studies found that GLP-1 users were consuming less food overall, sales of sweet bakery foods at grocery stores reduced by 7%. In this environment, official beauty partnerships with food and beverage brands such as Dove x Crumbl, e.l.f x Dunkin', allowed weight-conscious individuals to indulge in treat foods through nontraditional, beauty-focused formats that still sparked satisfaction.
“Food-themed beauty products just offer a different form of food consumption—one that conveniently keeps bodies compliant with the standard of beauty (undernourished) and faces compliant with the standard of beauty (overslathered).”
DeFino speculates that the rise of food in beauty is a reflection of the economic state of the Western world. “I also think this trend is related to inflation and the ever-increasing cost of groceries in America,” she said. “If food becomes something of a luxury, food-themed beauty products may become a sort of status symbol.”
Read the full thing here.
Hailey Bieber’s skincare company, Rhode, dropped a new Glazing Mist last week. The PR packages included branded product holsters for influencers to stick on their mirrors — primo selfie material, as Rhode knows from the viral success of its lip gloss phone case.
One reason this brand is thriving right now is that it doesn’t only make beauty products for the physical self — it makes products for the mirror self, or the image self, which more people are starting to identify as their “real self”. Someone at Rhode read Naomi Klein’s Doppelgänger for research :)
“The New York Liberty announced — via an exclusive story in Women’s Health magazine — a new partnership with Vagisil, the line of ‘feminine hygiene’ products that claim to provide ‘vaginal itching relief, dryness relief, and odor protection,’” writes
. “I find everything about this partnership, and the public framing of it, to be deeply troubling. These products are the exact opposite of healthy for people with vaginas. Not only are they physically harmful, but they are psychologically damaging, as well.” This is a must-read!! And if you haven’t already, follow that with de la Cretaz’s report on “athlete beauty campaigns in the age of transvestigations.”And now some Fragrance Notes: a rapid-fire recap of what’s new in perfume. Banana is the scent of the season. Or maybe it’s soy sauce. Or maybe gentrification? Credit cards? Poop, possibly? No, no, it’s pool water — a key note in at least three new fragrance launches. Ice Spice released a perfume line with Revlon. Blake Lively released a range of body mists. So did Glossier. Calvin Klein, too. Perfume Is the New Status Hoodie. Is 192 perfume bottles too many? Is Wearing Perfume on a Plane Okay? Would you spend $1,100 to smell like “Aristotle Onassis, chewing a cigar, irritated by the flashbulbs”? Maybe if GLP-1s changed your sense of smell… Discontinued scents are big business. Sephora, Ulta, and TikTok Shop are in an all-out “fragrance war.” Would you let a robot choose your eau de toilette? Can you bottle a memory measured in brainwaves? Avon launched a Gen Z-centric perfume line appropriately named Perfect Nonsense. The industry is “just getting started.”
Related: Fragrance brand D’OTTO launched a mini-collection of perfumes inspired by the work of Jane Austen. “The tender intrigue of Pride and Prejudice is evoked by cashmere and white musk, while Emma Woodhouse’s ‘elegance and intelligence’ are summoned with nutmeg, violet leaf and Sicilian mandarin. Unobjectionable choices, to my untrained nose anyway, though I can imagine some dissent from the claim that Austen’s artistry ‘finds its most poetic expression’ in the medium of eau de toilette,” Freya Graham writes in The New Statesman. Graham continues:
“…this latest collection only cashes in on a known truth: reading is a status symbol now. The brand Minor Canon ignited an online firestorm by selling baseball caps bearing the names of women writers like ‘Sheila Heti,’ ‘Rachel Cusk’ and ‘Joyce Carol Oates’. Dua Lipa has a book club. Italian fashion darling Miu Miu hosted a literary club during Milan Design Week, with panellists discussing topics like ‘The Power of Girlhood’. Zadie Smith, meanwhile, can be found posing in a leather suit jacket in Bottega Veneta’s latest ad campaign, and Dior’s upcoming autumn winter collection takes inspiration – always ‘inspiration’ – from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando. The cool girls read now, and by a marketer’s logic, that means that you can use books to sell things to girls who want to be cool.”
And moving onto the mouth: People are lining their lips with Sharpies and getting black market lip filler in… public toilets? I don’t know, sometimes I wonder if the shift to a digital and thus disembodied world must inevitably lead to us devaluing and/or disrespecting our own bodies…
In more uplifting news: Cellugy, a Danish biotechnology firm, has secured a $9.25 million grant from the European Union’s Life Programme to create petrochemical alternatives for use in beauty products. (Because you have fossil fuels on your face.)
From Allure: “Pop Stars Are Constantly Chasing Perfection. And Then There’s Lorde.” The article claims that Lorde, in the lead-up to her new album, Virgin, is purposefully avoiding aesthetic labor: Her hair “hasn’t been styled to perfection, and she’s been satisfied to let its naturally frizzy texture do its own thing,” it says. The singer has “rarely worn makeup … revealing pores, fine lines, dark circles, and all sorts of other normal skin textures for a 28-year-old to have,” the writer adds. “It’s nice to see a famous woman looking like she might have slept late, forgot to reapply her sunscreen, and didn’t feel like blowing out her hair that day.” I find this analysis to be both wrong and a little rude, lol. Lorde has made her extensive beauty routine a significant part of the Virgin rollout. Pre-album announcement, she posted a spironolactone pill — a prescription hormonal acne treatment — on main. In between dropping her first and second singles last month, she shared a shelfie featuring no less than 22 beauty products with Document Journal, many of them aimed at smoothing hair texture, reducing skin texture, minimizing the appearance of pores, and preventing wrinkles. This week, in conjunction with the album release, Lorde’s aesthetician gave ELLE a full breakdown of the singer’s skincare regimen and revealed she’s been working with Lorde for four years to enhance “radiance and luminosity.” If Lorde looks like she’s not “fully subscribed to the mainstream beauty machine,” as Allure says, it’s not for lack of trying, and I think it’s a bit odd to focus on her minimal output rather than her major input in a piece that’s ostensibly about finding some sort of freedom from beauty culture.
I’m currently reading ’s latest, The Möbius Book. Loved this passage:
“Recently this woman had asked her grandmother what she would do if she was single and young again and had to marry either a very beautiful man who was evil or a very ugly man who was kind. The grandmother was unapologetic and unequivocal in her answer — evil beauty — which proved the grandmother’s tenacious vanity, the beautiful woman explained.
But it made sense, I said, given her childhood, the war, the things she’d lived through. To me it seemed clear that evilness is just extreme self-preservation, and to be his possession would accompany his protection.”
During the New York City mayoral primary earlier this month, Andrew Cuomo’s SuperPAC designed a mailer featuring an altered image of Zohran Mamdani with a “darker, bushier beard.” Mamdani categorized it as “blatant Islamophobia — the kind of racism that explains why MAGA billionaires support his campaign.”
Last year, when J.D. Vance became the United States’ first major party nominee with a beard in 75 years, Vanessa Friedman wrote in The New York Times that prominent facial hair “is often seen as suspicious. Facial hair hides something — maybe something even more telling than a weak chin. It suggests subterfuge.” She noted its historical links to “the demon Mephistopheles” and “Dracula,” adding that voters may see bearded candidates “as more supportive of gun rights, military spending, and the deployment of force” — masculine, violent, aggressive. Here, with Mamdani, we can see how race influences those perceptions of aggression. On Vance, a white man, a beard reads as aggression in defense of the white establishment. On Mamdani, a person of color, Cuomo’s team hoped a darkened beard would suggest aggression against it.
Oh, Materialists. A truly terrible movie that asks if marriage should be a matter of love or math — Can a 39-year-old woman who wears a size 4 pull a 6’2” man making millions a year? Does it matter if his face is a 10 if his checking account has a three-digit balance? Etc., etc. — and lands on “love” without really showing the work. I talked to Katie Chow for Men’s Health about how looks factor into the equation here.
Finally, I’ll leave you with a quick poll. Have you been personally affected by the Perfume Boom?
Will report back with results :)
You’re Gonna Die Someday No Matter How Young You Look,
Jessica
The people slamming vaginal products for itching and order have clearly never had chronic itching or odor, or chronic UTIs. I’m a health coach and bodyworker for people with chronic pelvic pain, and for people with vestibulitis and vulvodynia, or chronic BV, these products can be immensely helpful. As someone who has myself suffered from vestibulitis and chronic UTIs in the past, products like these were a lifesaver.
In the Substack article you link in relation to this, they state “participants who reported using feminine washes had 2.5 times higher odds of having had a UTI, and 3.5 times higher odds of having had bacterial vaginosis (BV)”.
Correlation is not causation! I actually think the causation is in the opposite direction than what is implied. People with UTIs and BV are reaching for these products to soothe their discomfort.
Yes, there is obviously a level of shame involved in the marketing, but if you’ve ever had chronic itching (something OBGYNs CAN’T help with) these products are a lifesaver saver and I’m glad they exist.
Ironically, my interest in perfume has increased not because of culture but because my partner’s unwashed armpit smells exactly like Jo Malone Wood Sage and Sea Salt. It was crazy to discover that while playing with samples in sephora