Unlock Your Inner Beauty (With Your Outer Beauty)

A look at the unhinged marketing emails in my inbox.

There exists a section of my Gmail inbox labeled, simply, “UNHINGED.” This is where I keep my most upsetting emails — the emails from beauty brands, media outlets, and marketers that make me want to peel a layer of protective skin cells off my face with a Bioré Charcoal Pore Strip. (Just kidding! I would never do such a thing!!!)

Reader, the folder is overflowing. A smattering of recent entries, because I cannot go through this alone:

• Alicia Keys’ beauty brand Keys Soulcare just sent an email with the subject line “4 steps to unlock your inner beauty.” In the email were 4 makeup items. For outer beauty.

• Speaking of marketing that recasts the making of the body as the making of the spirit: Freewell Power Gloss promises to “Transform Your Hair and Revitalize Your Soul.”

• IT NEVER ENDS. If there were any doubts that beauty functions as a moral imperative, an ethical ideal, an organized religion, a product-lined portal to goodness — in short, a Pretty Prosperity Gospel… “Ready to be born again?” asks a Dieux Skin subject line. On the inside, the brand matches its moisturizer with a prayer: “Deliver me from uneven skin tone.”

• And on the other end of the beauty-as-dehumanization spectrum (which generally ranges from “glowing goddess” to “shard of glass”): “There Is Something So Ugly About TikTok’s ‘Bunny Pretty’ Trend,” Allure writes. “Why do we keep animalizing women's looks?” I don’t know, Allure! Maybe the 33 gushing articles about slugging on your site have something to do with it??

• There’s a new makeup brand named Polite Society. Get it? Because beauty is a status performance?

• Too Faced added a product to its Better Than Sex Mascara lineup, called the Foreplay Mascara Primer. And it’s like… Is the sex recession is somehow related to the beauty boom?? They are happening concurrently… And the industry has long trained customers to sublimate the desire for sex into a desire for products (mascara that’s “Better Than Sex”… “Orgasm” blush… that Herbal Essences commercial… “O Face” lipstick…the Lipsdick…!!)… It sort of reminds me of last season on “The Bachelor” when Gabi and Zach were about to go to the camera-free Fantasy Suite to fuck and Gabi told producers, “I can’t wait to show him my skincare routine”… I don’t know, man… We look “sexier” than ever and are having less sex than ever… It just seems suspicious is all I’m saying!!

me trying to connect the sex recession and the beauty boom

• OK, I know that last rant was a reach but this is really and truly sad: A new skincare brand called Cutocin claims “The Love In Your Life (or lack of it!) Can Affect Your Skin!” The pitch email goes on to explain that when you’re happy, spending time with friends, or in love, your skin “glows from within” due to a surge of oxytocin. (This is, on some level, true.) There’s no need to foster human connection to get the glow, though! All you need to do is buy Cutocin’s SOCIAL EXCHANGE MOISTURIZING CREAM (yes, this is the actual product name and yes, I’m crying), made with ingredients that “mimic the effects of oxytocin in the skin.” Cutocin: The hormones your body naturally produces — now in a convenient plastic bottle! Cutocin: LOVE at the low, low price of $159! Cutocin: The meaning of life, mass-produced! Cutocin: Because why fall in love when you can just look like it?

• YSL’s new fragrance is called MYSLF and Millie Bobby Brown’s is called Wildly Me. Here’s the thing about beauty as “self-expression”: We must first have selves to express! When the “self” is discovered and defined through beauty consumption, as it is here, what are we even expressing anymore?

• This Refinery 29 headline is fine, it just made me lol because it’s so unbelievably boring and who cares: “Sophia Richie Grainge Loves Skin Tints & Lotion.”

• Finally, NYLON let me know that Hailey Bieber’s skincare brand Rhode is collaborating with Krispy Kreme to promote its (inanimate, inadvisable) “glazed donut” look. 

It all reminds me of this quote from German cultural critic Walter Benjamin: “Humanity’s self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” I can think of no better way to explain modern beauty culture.