The Unpublishable Gift Guide

Or, how not to perpetuate oppressive aesthetics via holiday presents.

My holiday hot take? Gifting beauty products is objectively weird. Take StriVectin’s Firm & Festive Duo, a seasonally-appropriate alternative to telling your mother her neck sags. Or Clarisonic’s Dark Spot Diminishing Stocking Stuffer, a generous way to call attention to a friend’s fading but not forgotten acne scars. Or Shiseido’s Ultimate Wrinkle Smoothing Eye Set, which claims to treat six different types of eye wrinkles — crow's feet, corner crinkling, under-eye wrinkles, lid creases, under-puff lines, and stress wrinkles. (This gift is both practical and educational, since the person receiving said set is likely unaware there are six different types of wrinkles, much less on their own face.)

Saw this in Sephora

The above holiday campaign from Kiehl’s — “Skincare About Someone!” — may help explain why, at first glance, these gifts seem normal or even nice: In so many ways, beauty culture has convinced us to replace actual care (of the skin, of the self, of others) with industrialized skincare. (See this unhinged Dear Abby letter, in which a woman believes offering an acquaintance an all-expenses-paid Botox appointment is some grand gesture of friendship.)

I mean, it’s right there in the New York Times 2022 Holiday Gift Guide: The “Self-Care” section features yoga mats and meditation apps alongside a high-tech tool to “lift facial muscles and reduce wrinkles” and a moisturizer to “create the appealing glow of healthy skin” — as if the surface is the self! As if at least half the tragedies in this tragic world can’t be traced back to a mass divestment from self/mass investment in surface! As if the pressures of standardized surface aesthetics don’t pose a direct threat to the health of the self (in the form of increased instances of appearance-related anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, facial dysmorphia, disordered eating, obsessive thoughts, self-harm)!!

And don’t get me started on Sephora’s seasonal sales line, “Give Something Beautiful,” which invokes an incorporeal understanding of beauty (as in, beauty, freedom, truth, love!) to inspire the purchase of consumer goods that aim to bring one’s corporeal being into closer alignment with current oppressive appearance ideals.

Anyway!

What to gift the beauty lover in your life, then, if not a festive package of acne-fighting formulas?

Books on Beauty

Allow me to gently guide you away from beauty products and toward beauty theory, a much more fun and fulfilling field of study.

• If they’re into science: Clean: The New Science of Skin and the Beauty of Doing Less by Dr. James Hamblin. In Clean, Hamblin covers the science of the skin itself, rather than the science of skincare products — and demonstrates how the latter often contradicts the former, to the detriment of the skin and the delight of the skincare industry.

• If they’re into philosophy: Intact: A Defence of the Unmodified Body by Dr. Clare Chambers. In Intact, Chambers proposes the philosophical and political principle of the unmodified body: a body that is acknowledged — by society, by the state, by the self — to be good enough, exactly as it is; a body that is allowed to opt out of modification without incurring social, emotional, economic, or political punishment.

• If they’re into fiction: Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom. "I chose scalpels, needles, lasers to inflict the pain I deserved, the transformation, the healing,” says Anna Wrey, the protagonist in this just-released novel. “Sometimes they worked. Mostly, they didn't.” Readers meet Anna as she’s about to undergo yet another cosmetic treatment: this time, “the high-risk, elective surgery Aesthetica™, a procedure that will reverse all her past plastic surgery procedures, returning her, she hopes, to a truer self.”

(For a well-rounded reading experience, I recommend a three-book bundle.)

A Skin Microbiome Kit

There are one one trillion reasons to gift the Skin Microbiome Kit from Dr. Elsa Jungman. Literally. The kit comes with everything you need to collect a sample of your own skin microbiome, AKA the collection of one trillion microorganisms that live in and on the skin, AKA the original “skincare products”. (I mean that. Some microbes eat dead skin cells, others eat excess oil, others produce ceramides and peptides and antioxidants and all the other buzzy beauty ingredients.) Mail the sample back, receive “an overview of the top 10 bacteria and fungi on your skin’s surface,” and learn how to support the microbiome’s inherent functions with a low-intervention approach. The information in this kit will do more for your (or your giftee’s) skin than another topical skincare product, I promise.

A Donation in Their Name

Any “beauty lover” deserving of the title should be invested in bettering the beauty industry. Introduce them to organizations already making it happen by making a donation in their name. The Unpublishable supports the culture-shifting work of The Beautywell Project (which aims to end skin-lightening practices and the resulting chemical exposures by educating communities on colorism, advocating for policy changes in the corporate and political spheres, and targeting brands and products that perpetuate racist beauty standards) and Slow Factory (a “climate innovation hub” tackling the unsustainable consumerism of the fashion and beauty industries with an “ecosystems over aesthetics” approach) by donating a portion of subscriber proceeds each month. A personalized offering to either of these nonprofits beats a plastic-packaged “brightening” serum any day!

A Subscription to The Unpublishable

The only serum I support is Truth Serum, in the form of this very newsletter. If you’d like to gift someone a subscription to The Unpublishable this season, there are two ways to do it: You can gift them one month free ($5) or one full year free ($55). You can even schedule the gift for a later date, so it arrives in their inbox exactly when you want it to — the day of the office holiday party, Christmas, New Year’s Eve, whatever. “If I had more money I would gift a subscription to everyone I know,” says one (real!) Unpublishable subscriber.