The Don't Buy List: Stardust, Spoiled Shoppers, & Pre-Death Beauty Prep

Plus, l-ascorbic acid is not an identity.

Hello, dewy dust bunnies, and welcome to another edition of the The Don’t Buy List! I know this newsletter can get a little snarky, so today, I want to start by reminding you that your skin is literally made of stardust — it’s a fleeting, physical manifestation of Big Bang energy. These are just scientific facts. And doesn’t it feel nice to romanticize science sometimes?!

Anyway!

I was thrilled to be featured in “Here’s why body-shaming in the metaverse is inevitable,” a piece by Kish Lal for i-D Magazine. In it, Lal explores the potential physical and psychological effects of “beauty” in a digitally-rendered world — like, for instance, the virtual fashion models Pretty Little Thing uses. From the article:

“Research has shown that constantly seeing photoshopped, airbrushed and digitally altered human models has devastating effects on mental health,” says Jessica DeFino, a beauty reporter and the author of the monthly Substack, The Unpublishable. “I can only predict that the popularity of virtually-rendered models will further enforce even more unrealistic beauty standards, and compound all of the physical and psychological trauma that comes with them.”

Many of these models are racially ambiguous, Lal points out, which brings up the question of digital cultural appropriation — especially as it pertains to our own future Metaverse avatars. But if these avatars are culturally ambiguous and appropriative, they will only be recreating and iterating on the current beauty standard in the physical world: an amalgamation of features extracted from different races and ethnicities and grafted onto a single body to create an ideal that's physically impossible for any one person to meet without extensive product intervention. (See: the Kardashian-Jenners.) As I put it in our interview: