Aesthetic Labor and the Politics of Beauty
I talk with Jessica DeFino, the writer behind "the beauty industry's least-favorite" newsletter, about the politics of beauty.
Context Curious features full-length conversations with the thinkers, practitioners, and owner-workers I feature on What Works.
For as much good stuff as I can include in an installment of What Works, there is always so much more on the cutting room floor. This is my chance to share that knowledge, observation, and experience with you—and give you another chance to dig into the work of people I've talked to over the last couple of years.
Today's episode is a conversation I had with Jessica DeFino for the Good Bodies episode of Self-Help, LLC in August 2022.
I was new to Jessica's work when I interviewed her, but as soon as I discovered her writing and reporting, I knew I wanted to talk with her. I found Jessica through an article on Vox she was featured in titled, "How the anti-aging industry turns you into a customer for life."
Jessica writes about beauty culture and how it intersects with capitalism, consumerism, gender, race, and many other cultural systems.
Today, I'm a premium subscriber of her Substack newsletter, , which she proudly calls the "beauty industry's least-favorite newsletter."
Here are a few selections to introduce you to Jessica’s work once you’ve listened to our conversation:
Listen above, or read a transcript that’s been lightly edited for clarity below.
Transcript
Tara McMullin: I want to talk, first, about this idea of makeup marketing and how it uses terms like empowerment and self-expression. How does beauty culture and beauty marketing promise to give us a leg up on our social, financial, political, and self-worth?
Jessica Defino: I think to start, it's important to define what I mean by beauty culture and beauty culture. I like to say it functions just like diet culture. It's diet cultures face-focused counterpart.
I think a lot of people may be more familiar with this idea of diet culture now, and familiar with the ways in which it sells us these ideas of beauty and empowerment, but really, is just exploiting us. So beauty culture functions much the same way.
It's this set of beliefs that's dispersed throughout society in many ways, through politics, through media, through social interactions. That tells us that, (1) being physically beautiful is the most important thing that you, especially as a woman, can be. And (2) defines being physically beautiful through these really sexist, racist, ageist, classist, and consumerist beauty standards.
Part of the way that beauty culture gets us is that it tells us that conforming to this ideal of beauty is self-love. It's self-worth. It's self-expression. It is empowerment. And then proceeds to siphon a way our actual sources of power through participation. So what are our actual sources of power that beauty culture steals from us?
Our time. That's a huge one. Our money. We are funneling so much money into basic upkeep. All of the effort that we put into looking a certain way. Our head space. All of the time that we spend thinking about being beautiful, and how to be more beautiful, and what we need to do, and setting up these appointments, and all of it...
And so, time, money, effort. These are finite resource. And we are spending them on this surface level look of empowerment instead of actually empowering ourselves.
Tara: I just dropped a whole bunch of money on makeup this morning.
Jessica: A lot of us do it. I don't wanna say 'we all,' because there are globally, many more people who don't participate in industrialized beauty than people who do. So this is not really that radical of an ask to say, 'let's divest.''
Because even participating in beauty culture in a lot of ways is a huge problem. We have a lot of room to divest and to question our behaviors.
Tara: One of the beauty products that I purchased this morning had a review that said something like, 'I put this on so that I didn't look unkempt.' It made me thinking about a certain standard appearance that's a barrier to entry, especially in the "professional" world.
Jessica: I talk a lot about performing beauty, the consequences of performing beauty, and the effort that goes into performing beauty. And a lot of times people think I'm talking about like emulating a Kardashian or Bella Hadid or like a TikTok influencer, or something. And that's not what I'm talking about at all.
That's like the highest level, right? Most of us in Western society are performing beauty all of the time without really even thinking about it anymore. So I'm talking about carrying out these tasks that are so integrated into the image of public-facing femininity, that they seem thoughtless. But they're very effortful, and they're very expensive.
Things like shaving your legs and your armpits, shaping your eyebrows, getting a blow out for a job interview or an a job appearance. Dying your gray hair, polishing your nails, having manicured nails, dealing with facial hair, bleaching your mustache, waxing your mustache or your peach fuzz, plucking those chin hairs, whitening your teeth.
And then, especially in the job market, wearing "professional makeup." So there's like kind of this no-makeup makeup that's supposed to look like you're not wearing a lot—but you really are.
This is all invisible labor. This is just the baseline that we are expected to perform.
And like a lot of traditionally women's labor, it is completely devalued and not acknowledged as labor. You know, we see the same with care work, with housekeeping, with raising a family. This is labor. And we're not acknowledging it as such. We're just saying, 'Oh shit, this is something that I'm supposed to be good at as a woman. It's something I'm supposed to do as a woman.'
And it's not. It's work, and it's work that we have been conditioned to believe we have to do in order to ascend throughout these systems, these patriarchal systems, these white supremacist systems, especially, when you're talking "unkemptness" and "cleanliness." It's a form of presentability politics, and a lot of it is wrapped up in racism and classism.
There's so much to deconstruct there, and it is so much more universal than I think we acknowledge when we start talking about beauty and beauty standards. There's a lot of wiggle room for many women to step away from that and say, 'Well, I don't really participate in beauty too much. I don't care about beauty too much.'
Are you shaving your legs? Are you waxing your mustache? Are you dyeing your gray hairs? And are you wearing no-makeup makeup everyday? Then you're participating a lot.
Tara: aThat kind of brings us to a natural segue to my questions around the moral qualities of beauty and, of course, of health. As you mentioned, we've kind of started to change the conversation around bodies and diet culture and what we eat. We're, hopefully, talking less about good bodies versus bad bodies. But you say good skin versus bad skin hasn't been address in the same why. Why?
Jessica: yes. I see this huge gap in the sort of mainstream, vaguely liberal body positivity sphere and the messages that the mainstream media and social media are feeding us about how all bodies are beautiful. All bodies are good bodies. It's... I was gonna say interesting, but maybe it's just typical that at the same time we are hearing 'all bodies are good bodies,' we are getting more and more messaging about what we have to do in order to have good skin.
This idea of having good skin is dependent on a 10-step skincare routine twice a day, morning and night. It's dependent on injectables, it's dependent on facials, and procedures, and lasers, and surgeries—all of these sorts of things. So like as, as body positivity messaging ramps up, we are being led into stricter standards for skincare.
I think we can attribute that to this idea that the beauty ideal is not a static thing. There are all sorts of different features that can be accepted into this idea of the standard of beauty. So the standard of beauty is actually a set of parameters that allows for variation between a set of sort of like constantly repositioned goal posts.
And so throughout history, we're constantly renegotiating the boundaries of that range of ideal beauty. We're redrawing them, especially as the political landscape changes. As popular culture evolves, we get a different set of standards that we adhere to. Those goal posts are constantly being moved, but they're never being widen.
So you'll see throughout history, and we're seeing it now, when one boundary is pushed, another boundary is almost always moved up to meet it, to keep us within this strict boundary of the beauty ideal. As anti-diet culture rhetoric becomes more mainstream, skin-critical messaging is ramping up to meet it.
For example, a liberal beauty media site or vaguely liberal social media influencer will not tell you that you need to lose five pounds in order to be beautiful and good. But it will tell you that in order to have good skin, you need to address your wrinkles and your pimples ASAP.
It's also really easy to see this with a lot of body positive influencers. Like there's one that I'm thinking of specifically who like just wrote a book about loving your body no matter what it looks like, and also does sponsored posts with Botox.
You see it all throughout the body positive space where a lot of people are making peace with their bodies, but in order to accommodate that, they need new coping mechanism. When they decide to stop trying to lose weight or stop dieting, those are coping mechanisms for issues they haven't dealt with fully. What are you gonna do if you have not dealt with the underlying issue? You have to find another way to like exercise control over your body.
And what people are doing is exercising control over their skin, the size of their lips, the amount of wrinkles they have on their face, all of that.
Tara: Your work definitely has this theme of unpacking what we consider "normal" to be and why a norm exists in the first place. How is "normal" instrumentalized by capitalism and supremacy culture in the beauty industry?
Jessica: I think the easiest way to illustrate the idea of normal and beauty is just to look at Sephora and how you can shop by skin type. There's dry, there's oily, there's acne prone, and there's normal. So normal is sort of defined as like, 'nothing's wrong with you.' It's defined by the absence of abnormalities.
So I wanted to research this a while ago, and I wrote a story on it for Teen Vogue about this idea of normal. That might be helpful for some people to read, but the idea of normal skin came from classifying the skin into skin types, and skin types weren't invented until the early 1900s. And this concept was not invented by a dermatologist or anyone with any special knowledge of the skin, but rather by a beauty brand founder.
Helen Rubenstein was the first one to categorize skin as either dry, oily, or normal. And she did it to market her moisturizer. So what she was positioning like exceedingly common things—like dry patches and oil production which are are features of normal human skin—as abnormal turning them into problems to be solved. She is one of the pioneers of industrialized standardized beauty.
There's nothing abnormal about dry skin, which affects like 70% of the population. There's nothing abnormal about oiliness. It's very common. There's nothing abnormal about acne. This is how the skin communicates with you. Like if your skin is alive and functioning, it's gonna have some stuff happen to it. You're gonna get wrinkles, you're gonna get a blemish. This is all normal.
But the beauty industry, specifically the skincare industry, makes a lot of money by telling us it's not and that completely featureless skin is normal. Like that's not normal.
Then, you get the other side of the coin, which is this idea of normalization—normalizing things that are abnormal, especially when it comes to beauty standards. So here's my favorite example of this and a really easy way to visualize this.
One of my like favorite trashy things to watch is the Bachelor/Bachelorette series. Go look up pictures of the Bachelorettes from the first season of the Bachelor and the Bachelorette now, and you can see what 20 years has done to the baseline standard of beauty. You look at these bachelorettes from the early 2000s, and they were beautiful women, but they looked sort of normal.
None of them would be on today's version of The Bachelor. They're not as thin. They don't have the fake boobs. They don't have the fake butts. They don't have the Botox. They don't have the injectables. They don't have the plump lips. I think it's really fascinating to just look at those two groups, 20 years apart, and see how we as a society are now defining like beautiful people, you know.
The more normalized these certain behaviors are, say, injectables and surgery, the more that normalization raises the baseline standard of beauty. I sort of think of it as aesthetic inflation.
Tara: Ooh, that's so good.
Jessica: Yes. And the higher that baseline of beauty gets, the harder it is for women and girls especially to opt out of them. To opt out of spending their time and money and energy on this aesthetic labor without facing the political, financial, and social consequences of not performing beauty.
It really is a collective issue. It is something that we are all a part of in all perpetuating to varying degrees, and our behaviors have impact on the people around us.
Tara: I think, for a lot of people, this probably seems like a women's issue or maybe a women-plus-expansive-performances-of-gender issue. But I think anything that is "women's issue" is also affecting men in some way as well.
Have you done any work or study or thinking about how beauty culture changes things for men?
Jessica: Yeah, it's interesting. I haven't done too much research there. But I do find this endlessly fascinating.
I think the most obvious example is that beauty is part of defining gender norms and gender roles. And so a lot of the time what we think of as traditionally feminine or traditionally masculine, or a good man or a good woman, these things are defined in opposition to each other.
So if a good woman does X, a good man doesn't do X. A lot of our ideas of what a woman is and what a man is, and the gender binary, are reinforced by beauty culture, not just for women, but by the absence of those things for men. And so we can see things like men who are participating in beauty in some way. Men who want to wear makeup or wear nail polish get discriminated against because that has been feminized.
I also am really fascinated with why we care so much about beauty.
I see beauty as an inherently human impulse, a human right. I see it up there with freedom, truth, love—like these are things that we as humans crave and we're constantly drawn to and we're constantly working towards.
So to me the idea of a 'beauty industry' is just as ridiculous as the idea of like a 'freedom industry.'
Tara: Well, we have that too.
Jessica: Yeah. It's like calling the prison industrial complex, the 'freedom industry.' Like it's not freedom. And so what we're sold when it's industrialized is it's not beauty.
We're sold this idea of beauty as this one dimensional, purely physical thing that you can purchase and consume your way into. In reality, the beauty that we really crave is not one dimensional. It's multidimensional. It is not about just the physical, it is about feeling.
I compare it to art sometimes. When you look at a piece of art and you think, 'Oh, that's beautiful,' you're not just admiring the $29.99 canvas that it's painted on. The canvas isn't really part of it. You're not just admiring like the color globs, that's not part of it. It's about the entire experience of the thing. It's about the feeling that it evokes in you. It's about your connection to it, your connection to the artist who created it.
There's so much in that kind of beauty that is the kind of beauty that we crave. But we're sold this idea that beauty is actually like this physical thing that has to do with how many wrinkles you have, and how big your lips are, and you know how smooth your hair is.
And so we chase that because we crave beauty and it's never fulfilling because it's not the kind of beauty we actually crave as humans.
To go back to how does this affect men: our idea of beauty, of physical beauty, encompasses attraction, appearance, and power. We've been sold this idea of beauty as just this one thing that accounts for all of that, and it's just not true.
I think it confuses men and women and everyone else, too. When you're drawn to somebody, when you're attracted to somebody, who isn't fitting within those beauty ideals, you sort of reject that part of yourself. You retrain yourself to be attracted to the current beauty ideal because that represents power, that represents participation in all of these systems, that represents the social norms of the day.
And what we're doing when we're gravitating towards this physical beauty is, inherently unfulfilling on so many levels of art of our basic humanity.
[00:24:07] Tara: Living a deeply unfulfilled and unsatisfying life just keeps you, keeps you at the cash register.
Jessica: Exactly.
Tara: I think the last thing I wanna ask you about is how work-from-home might be influencing our participation in beauty culture.
We're seeing ourselves in webcams, on Instagram, on TikTok, on Zoom all the time. How does today's technological environment impact how you see people relating to beauty and the beauty industry?
Jessica: With the Zoom boom came the Botox boom. Like there's data to back this up. Ever since work has moved remote for a large portion of Western population, at least, we have seen a huge uptick in cosmetic procedures and cosmetic surgeries because people are staring at themselves more, picking out flaws, and then funneling more time, money, and energy into altering their appearance.
So they're performing additional aesthetic labor in order to feel more comfortable doing their actual day to day labor. We see this in the statistics— beauty industry sales are up overall for makeup, for skincare especially. Cosmetic procedures are up, facelifts are up, Botox, lip fillers.
I got a press release the other day about lower facial procedures rising in popularity. So jawline fillers to make your jawline look sharper on Zoom or whatever. It's all this sort of invisible aesthetic labor.
We tend to think of like big makeup as visible labor or visually showing that we funneled effort into our appearance. But now we're sort of gravitating towards this sort of invisible aesthetic labor to make it seem like, 'Oh, I'm not putting any effort into this.''
But really we're putting more effort than ever before into reaching this baseline of beauty. It's complete bullshit because we're getting our current cues about what is beautiful almost exclusively through a screen—whether it's Zoom, whether it's video chatting at work, or whether it's looking at Instagram and scrolling through pictures of celebrities and influencers.
All of the cues that we are getting about what is beautiful are one-dimensional and filtered in some way. Even if you don't have a filter on your Zoom camera, there's a level of blurring that happens in that process. So we're not seeing real people. We're seeing a blurred version.
And then when you're on social media, there are filters, there's Photoshop, there's Face Tune. And then of course we're comparing ourselves to people who are face-tuning their faces in real life with procedures and surgeries. So it's just we have so few realistic interactions with what a human being looks like.
A lot of times the only real person we might see during the day is ourselves in the mirror. And so we're comparing our real life human pores to like the face that we're seeing on Instagram or in the company Zoom room. And we're saying, 'Oh my God, what's wrong with me? Nobody else looks like this.''
And it's because you're not actually seeing what they actually look like.