Dior Glow Lip Oil, A Slick Simulacrum
An interview on virality, luxury, and aesthetic labor with System Beauty.
“Dior Glow Lip Oil has been viral since its 2020 inception,” Biz Sherbert reports in System Beauty. “It has a distinctive look, producing a shine so intense and smooth that it’s almost like a CGI-rendered version of a glossed lip.”
The whole piece — “It’s nice to feel the shine” — is fantastic, and I’m not only saying that because I was interviewed for it. You can read the full thing in the latest print issue of System Beauty (order here). But since it’s not available online yet, I thought I’d share some extra bits and pieces from my conversation with Biz.
Below, my thoughts on the symbology of slick lips, the virality of petrochemicals, and luxury beauty lines as catnip for fast fashion customers.
Biz Sherbert: Have you noticed the virality of oil lip products, and what do you think is driving that level of popularity?
Jessica DeFino (me): It's kind of funny because for so long in the beauty industry, oil was kind of this boogeyman — you know, everyone wanted to avoid oil and there was this huge surge of oil-free products. And now that really high-shine, glossy look is in — but nobody’s using actual oil. Like if you look at the ingredients in the Dior Lip Glow Oil, it’s mostly polymers and petrochemicals. It's like, a simulacrum of oil. We've rejected real oil and we've replaced it with the look of oil.
That's so interesting. What do you think is driving this? I don't even know how to describe it, but it brought up your piece about milk as well. We've seen the Gisou hair oil also become really popular — it's almost like there's something that feels quite exotic and luxurious about an oil compared to a lip gloss or lipstick.
I think the the comparison to the milk thing is pretty on point. I think besides this blip in the industry in the ‘90s and early 2000s, where it was very anti-oil, traditionally oil has communicated luxury, right? You always hear about Cleopatra bathing her skin in oils. We have this romanticized, historical idea of oil as a beauty product — you know, Egyptians using olive oil or Greeks using olive oil. Almond oil was huge in ancient Roman times. The other thing I think is happening with the resurgence of oil is the idea of nourishment. Oils are a huge part of food culture. It makes me think of how foods are really popping up in the beauty industry right now as these sort of inanimate icons — we have dewy dumpling skin and glazed donut skin — and it's interesting to me that all of that is happening at the same time as we're seeing a big resurgence in diet culture behaviors and Ozempic. To me it feels like a sublimated desire for the things we won't eat. We won't eat foods fried in oils, but we're going to make our faces look like the things we won't put inside of our bodies. There’s even a lot of fear around seed oils right now, so it's interesting to me that a lot of seed oils are big in beauty. I think that definitely has something to do with these older ideas of oil as luxury and oil as nourishment, as food.
I also have seen Dior specifically become a brand that a lot of young girls are really interested in. They're obsessed with Instagram photos of Victoria's Secret models from like, 2011, and they're obsessed with the idea of going to Bath & Body Works and getting a sugar vanilla candle. And I wonder, are we seeing a different type of femininity in beauty? I just I just finished reading Glossy by Marissa Meltzer and I was thinking about how a specific type of femininity was captured by Glossier, and [girls] are coming back around to some sort of decadent ultra-femininity.
The first thing that comes to mind when you're talking about Bath & Body Works is, in the early 2000s, remember those Lancome Juicy Tubes? The lip glosses? That’s very reminiscent of the Dior Lip Oil. So I would say it’s definitely inspired by that very heavy lip gloss of the early 2000s. Obviously, beauty goes back and forth. One thing is cool, and then its opposite is cool, and then the original thing is cool again. So we had this very heavily made-up look that was trending for a time — I think Kardashians are representative of that. And then we got into this Glossier, faux-natural beauty — products that make you look like you're not wearing any products, but you're wearing a ton of products. And now I think the pendulum is starting to swing back in the direction of excess. There’s maybe a political undertone to some of it — it’s a rejection of the idea that we need to hide our aesthetic labor. And this idea is wrapped up in, you know, very old stereotypes of femininity and what a woman should be and how a woman should look, and “natural beauty” where the point is, it's supposed to look like it's effortless — it's supposed to look like beauty is just innate to womanhood. So I think there is maybe a little bit of a political pushback to that happening right now where it's like, No, I'm going to make my labor very obvious. You're going to know all of the effort that I'm putting in. I mean, I don't necessarily agree that that’s a coherent political stance, but I do think that's part of what's happening.
There's something so conspicuous about these Dior products, because the packaging is so overtly feminine, translucent pink and silver, it’s in the same vein as what you're saying of about being really overt about beauty and femininity.
I think you can even tie it back to the early 2000s logomania and this very high-end luxury aesthetic that may be coming back into fashion. There’s for sure a lot to be said about Dior as this storied fashion house that has found a younger consumer through their beauty line — to me, when fashion houses like that have these spin-off beauty lines, it's a way for them to participate in fast fashion culture through fast beauty. It's a way for them to access these consumers who don't have an unlimited budget, who have a little bit of money to spend, but still want to have this feeling of buying into luxury. That’s the purpose beauty serves for these luxury fashion brands; beauty is the inroad to the fast fashion customer who's going to keep buying tube after tube after tube after tube of lipgloss the same way an H&M customer buys mini dress after mini dress after mini dress.
What do you think tends to make a beauty product go viral?
A perfect formula for virality … is a product that has a sense of luxury about it, but a fairly accessible price point, which is probably a huge part of why this this lip oil is so viral. It gives the consumer the feeling that they're buying into something important and high-end and exclusive, when really, there's very little exclusivity involved, as evidenced by the fact that, you know, everybody has it.
Is there anything else you wanted to add?
I think the only thing — and I sort of mentioned this in my piece on oil-free products — is part of the comeback of this shiny, oily look is happening at the ingredient manufacturing level. The same way oil-free products surged when silicones became more widely used and available, high-shine products like the Dior Lip Glow Oil and Vaseline are made mainly with petrochemicals and are trending as the petrochemical market expands, which is not by accident. Petrochemicals are the largest driver of global oil demand — they’re the oil industry’s new major growth market, due to a decrease in fuel demand and a focus clean energy options. So as the fossil fuel industry ramps down fuel production, it’s ramping up petrochemical production to make up for financial losses, and the beauty industry is a big customer there. If you look at the Dior Lip Glow Oil ingredients, it’s mostly petrochemicals, which are very cheap for beauty brands to formulate with. It makes for high profit margins.
To read more of Biz Sherbert’s work, follow her on Instagram or listen to her podcast, Nymphet Alumni.
The link between decreasing petrochemical use for energy and increasing for personal care/beauty products is mind blowing
OK, thinking out loud a little here —your mention of this new lip oil trend as a throwback to early 2000s Juicy Tubes had me immediately thinking, ‘it goes back further than that!’ When I was in middle school in the 1970s, lip glosses in tiny roll-on bottles were popular. They felt super greasy and were kind of sticky. My mom would mock my friends and me, imitating the way she said it made us stick our lips out to keep them from touching. This was probably 1976, 1977, when the U.S. was in the midst of an oil crisis and gasoline shortages. Could there be a connection?