The Cult of Color Analysis
The Don't Buy List: #65
Hello and welcome to another edition of The Don’t Buy List! Some professional news: Last month, I received a 2023 Country & Town House Sustainability Award. What a dream to be honored alongside Stella McCartney,
, Lily Cole, Arizona Muse! What a nightmare to realize sustainable beauty coverage is rare enough to inspire a prize! I’ve been thinking more about beauty culture’s relationship to environmental breakdown ever since, and twisting every unrelated thing I read — like this updated analysis of Narcissus by John Milbank in Cracks in Postmodernity — into climate commentary:“Narcissus, having spurned the love of the nymph Echo, falls in love with the beauty of his own unrecognised reflection [in the water], seeks to embrace it, and drowns … He is lured not by fondness for his own mirror-image, like a Dorian Gray, but precisely by his failure to recognise that image in the seemingly alien medium of fluid nature.”
Narcissism and the pursuit of standardized beauty can both be misinterpreted as love of self, but it’s not “fondness” for our mirror-image, as Milbank says, that’s making us drown our pores in products and our oceans in glitter — it’s predicating that fondness on the industrial, mechanical manipulation of every last facial feature (even the ones we like, in the inane name of “enhancement”). It’s the failure to recognize ourselves in/as/through nature.
Anyway!
In this issue: Beauty as divorce from rational thought! “Longevity” as anti-aging! Debunking color analysis! Girl therapy! Nail therapy! Travel culture x beauty culture! Glossier x Starface! Gratitude journals are beauty products now! Peach fuzz! Trichotillomania! “May December”! And more!
Former beauty influencer Laura Read — you may remember her from my last New York Times piece — interviewed me for her newsletter,
. Each issue examines a different question Carrie poses over the course of the Sex & The City series, and Read and I attempted to answer a big (no pun intended) one — “Exactly how powerful was beauty?” — in our Q&A.Laura: I remember when I first joined Instagram, ads never had to be disclosed and I stumbled on a post by a British reality TV star, sharing a collagen drink that she allegedly drank every morning which was the reason for her glowing skin. I immediately ordered three months’ worth!
Jessica: Right! I think it speaks to how powerful beauty is — the potential available to us if we do become “beautiful” is so great, it overshadows any sort of skepticism or intellectual interrogation of the things that we’re buying. Beauty is such a source of power that we’re willing to forgo rational thought in order to hopefully, maybe, one day, attain it.
You can read the full interview here.
And — you may remember her from her Unpublishable guest post on the #everythingshower — interviewed me for an article on longevity in Off Chance Magazine.
“Longevity is a futuristic way to say anti-ageing. It's nothing more than a tech-inspired reimagining of the beauty industry’s decades-old anti-ageing ideology,” says Jessica DeFino, beauty editor known for her criticism of the beauty industry — and “because ‘longevity’ sounds like a more scientific goal, it's helping to spread classic anti-ageing ideas to groups beyond the beauty industry's target demographic: men, academics, intellectuals.”
Her full report can be found here.
Unshrinking: How To Face Fatphobia by
comes out on January 9, and I highly recommend pre-ordering. It’s a firm-but-gentle guide to finally getting free from fatphobia — individually, collectively, and within society at large — and must-read for anyone raised in the era of “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.”I’ve wanted to write about the color analysis trend taking over the TikTok feeds and beauty-poisoned brains of young women everywhere for a while now, but I can’t bring myself to do a deep dive. Too depressing. These side-by-side screenshots of an Instagram Reel sum it up, anyway: