By Stacy Lee Kong

Remember earlier this year, when Kim Kardashian told Variety that she had the “best advice for women in business”? ( “Get your fucking ass up and work [because] it seems like nobody wants to work these days,” naturally.) Aside from a truly excellent laugh—yes, Kim, laziness is definitely what’s holding women back in business 🙃—the best part of that entire news cycle for me was discovering Jessica DeFino’s work. DeFino posted a viral tweet about her experience working on the official Kardashian apps in 2015, followed by an article for Vice about the experience, which saw her working extremely hard for little pay—or even respect. I could not hit ‘follow’ fast enough, and when I tell you it was one of my smartest decisions of the year, I am not exaggerating. DeFino’s work centres on what she calls beauty culture, the appearance-focused relative of diet culture, and how today’s cosmetics industry doesn’t just perpetuate oppression but is actually rooted in patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism. It’s absolutely worth digging into yourself, but this conversation is a good primer on the true purpose of the beauty industry, the way companies use the language of empowerment as marketing and how we can begin to divest from this culture.  

So the first thing I want to ask is super basic, but: what even attracted you to beauty as a beat?

I have been obsessed with beauty my entire life. I was that five- or six-year-old girl who was doing beauty pageants. I did community theatre starting when I was seven. I was a cheerleader. So, makeup and beauty have been a huge part of my life for as long as I can remember, especially because I've also always had really temperamental skin. I've been going to a dermatologist since I was 12 and have been on every prescription you could possibly imagine. But I only decided to pursue it as a career after I was working in the celebrity lifestyle space. I produced cover shoots for international magazines like Harper's Bazaar Arabia and Elle China, then fell into a job writing for the official Kardashian-Jenner apps in 2015.

This was the first time in my life that beauty PR firms were sending me free products to cover in the app, and I think that, combined with the stress of the job, really messed with my skin. It started me on this personal journey to try and heal my skin because traditional dermatology wasn't working. And as I started to dive more into that, I started unravelling beauty standards and examining my role in the industry and how I was perpetuating these standards by writing for the Kardashian apps. It became such a passion that I was like, ‘I have to pivot into beauty exclusively.’

One of the basic premises of your work is that the beauty industry is most concerned with consumerism and making women feel bad about themselves. Was there a moment or a situation that really hammered home that idea for you?

You know what? I don't think there was. I think this was a really gradual and nonlinear learning journey for me: I have this crisis of my skin (and of myself) while working at the app. I learn all this stuff about how the skin functions and how products are unnecessary and really do heal my skin by doing nothing, and I take that knowledge, and I say, ‘Okay, I really want to write in the beauty space.’ I start freelancing for Fashionista, Marie Claire, Glamour, and writing as a staff writer The Zoe Report. My mission is to write about healing your skin naturally, without products, but I get sucked right back into the beauty industry through these positions. And I have to learn the lesson all over again.

I was writing for these publications that I had read my entire life—I couldn't believe I was writing for Cosmo; I couldn't believe I was writing for like Fashionista, which I would refresh every couple of hours looking for new fashion and beauty news when I was in college. It was so addicting to me that I really got pulled into the industry again, and I convinced myself that if I was only promoting clean beauty, or natural products, it was somehow better.

I think the big switch for me was I was getting tons of free products mailed to me every day, and at one point, I just noticed all of the boxes, all of the bubble wrap, all of the paper inserts, all of the packaging, piling up in my foyer. Suddenly, I could envision all of the ways that I was contributing to [the problem] by accepting all of these products, writing about them and encouraging others to buy them. It really made me second-guess [myself], like shit, what am I doing here? I thought clean beauty was better, but clearly, I'm contributing to the same sorts of issues.

And that getting pulled back into the industry, then rejecting it, then getting pulled back in and then rejecting it probably happened two or three times before I became as radical as I am today.

I think all of the beauty editors I know have gone through a similar realization about waste, though they may not have gone quite as far on the path of rejecting the industry as you have. How did you navigate that cycle of pulling away and coming back to beauty? Were you a little bit more radical every time you got sucked back in?

Throughout all of my ups and downs, I did try to write about beauty for the same publications in a way that I could feel good about, and what happened was as my pitches would get rejected again and again and again. A lot of these platforms were not allowing me to write about the things that I wanted to write about in the way that I wanted to write about them. So, for a long time, it was me just making compromises with myself. I would write about sustainability, but then I would have to recommend these ‘sustainable’ products to buy at the end of the article. There was a lot of that going on, which I'm not necessarily proud of. And then there were times when I would write an article and try to be critical of a brand or a particular product, and my articles would get edited to protect those brand and advertiser relationships. So, for instance, the name of a corporation would be taken out, and the message would become much more generalized. But it was like, I have to make a living. I have to make money! So, if this is all the publication is allowing me to do, what am I gonna do? 

The real turning point for me was the pandemic. Lockdown was really, really hard on the publishing industry and specifically really hard on freelancers. At the time, I'd had a bunch of articles in edits, but the publication said they were not working with freelancers [at that time] and couldn’t afford to take the stories on. So, I had these pieces that I had put a lot of time and effort into investigating returned to me. I took it as an opportunity to punch them up and say what I really wanted to without holding back. So, that's what I did. I started my newsletter in May 2020 and it all snowballed from there. The newsletter has allowed me to publish these more truthful, critical pieces without having to compromise or negotiate with editors.

I often default to saying the beauty industry, but in your work, you talk about ‘beauty culture.’ Can you explain what you mean by that?

I like to explain beauty culture by comparing it to diet culture because I think people are really familiar with diet culture at this point. So, I often describe beauty culture as diet culture’s face-focused, fraternal twin. Basically, it is this set of beliefs that are dispersed throughout society in various ways, whether that's through media, government, the laws of the land, celebrity and pop culture or corporations. We get these messages every day, basically, from the moment we're born, telling us that being beautiful is the most important thing a woman can be. It sets beauty up as this moral and ethical ideal—if you're a good person, you're a beautiful person, and if you're a person who is ugly [then you’re bad]. I think an easy illustration of this is to look at any Disney princess movie: Ariel? Gorgeous hero of the film. Ursula? Ugly, the villain. We get this message really early on that beauty is a moral imperative and that chasing beauty is somehow chasing goodness or self-improvement or becoming a better version of yourself. I think when you explain it that way, women, in particular, understand that they have been socialized to prioritize appearance or to base their self-worth on their appearance… which is all beauty culture 

And the natural outcome of that is that beauty becomes a tool of oppression, right? In one of your newsletters from earlier this year, you talked about how beauty culture actually exists to uphold patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

I think as long as people have been hungry for power, beauty has been part of that equation. And I like to specify that we're talking about physical appearance; when we call it ‘beauty,’ it gets a little confusing because nature is beautiful, but that is not the type of beauty that beauty culture is feeding us. Beauty culture tells us that beauty is a one-dimensional, physical appearance thing. That is what we're talking about here.

So, basically, for thousands and thousands of years, appearance standards have stemmed from systems of oppression. As you said, those systems are patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism, and I think it's pretty easy to understand most of these when you just think about it. So, for instance, the beauty industry’s target market is women, which is sexism in its basic form because the beauty industry forces standards on women that are not forced upon men. And, women's opportunities in the world, whether political, economic or social, are limited based on how well they adhere to the standard of beauty.

And not to go off on another side tangent, but when I say women are held to a beauty standard, I'm not necessarily talking about emulating a TikTok star or trying to look like Kim Kardashian. I'm talking about really basic things that we think of as normal, like shaving your legs, shaping your eyebrows, bleaching your mustache, wearing no-makeup makeup to the office, dyeing your gray hair, all of these sorts of things. For women to ascend to any sort of political or corporate power, they have to play by these rules, while men can generally get ahead without conforming to any of that.

So, when we focus on those four main forces—patriarchy, white supremacy, colonialism and capitalism—those give birth to all forms of discrimination, including sexism, ageism, classism, colorism, ableism, reinforcing the gender binary…. Anti-aging is beauty’s number one promise, though they like to call it ‘pro-aging’ now to pretend that it's something different, but it's really not. That's ageism and sexism because it’s again mostly targeted at women. And that targeting reinforces the oppression of a gender binary and creates these impossible ideals of femininity and masculinity.

‎There are so many ways to illustrate how white supremacy has shaped the beauty industry, but I think the easiest way to visualize this is to go into any Sephora or Ulta and take a look at the foundation and concealer shades on display. Usually, between 70 and 80% of those shades are for lighter skin tones, and people with darker skin are left with 20%. That's imbued in the entire industry. There are entire brands that don't have one offering for women of colour. That's completely unacceptable. But not in the beauty industry; it’s actually the norm. It was interesting to me that, after Rihanna released Fenty Beauty with 40 shades of foundation, multiple brands were all of a sudden also offering 40 shades of foundation within, I don't know, 12 to 18 months? It wasn’t any sort of interest in inclusivity, it was capitalism, plain and simple. Rihanna illustrated that if you cater to women of colour, they will spend money, and the market just really had not considered that before.

Even the fact that so many companies debuted exactly 40 shades was, to me, a sign that it wasn't about innovating or serving a need or supporting a segment of the market. It was just about matching marketing. And the fact that it happened so quickly! Like, oh, you suddenly figured out how to develop all of these shades in 12 months? No, you didn't. You always knew how. But going back a little bit to the point you made that when we're talking about beauty culture, we're talking about this very narrow, physical idea of beauty. One thing you’ve talked about before is the idea that beauty is for everyone. Like, beauty culture is exclusionary, but real beauty isn’t. I really love that idea and want to hear about the difference.

My goal is not to abolish beauty, right? I do the work I do because I am obsessed with beauty—with true beauty, actual beauty, the beauty that is all around us and within us. I consider it up there with freedom, truth and love. These are inherent human longings; our human spirits crave these things. So, it's not wrong or bad to crave beauty. We need it. The problem is beauty culture has convinced us that the beauty we crave is the beauty its selling us. And the beauty its selling us is a one-dimensional, physical appearance thing that stems from systems of oppression. What beauty culture does is convince us that the beauty we want is oppression. I think we can all relate to how empty it feels when you get a new product, get a haircut or dye your hair and you're hoping for this massive life change, or at least to feel good in some way, but it only works for a little bit. Eventually, you're back to wanting more and more and more—like, what else can I do? What else can I buy? What else can I try? The reason it's so unfulfilling is that we've confused beauty with appearance.

I take your point that this industry has always functioned in this way, but one thing that does feel different to me is that self-care is now such a big part of this conversation. And that's even more complicated because, whereas before, you could reject beauty culture by saying this is about the male gaze or external validation, now, it's being tied up in our own sense of wellness.

I mean, that is a tactic. It's definitely not that suddenly the same things that used to be part of our oppression and used to stem from the male gaze are now good for us or are now helpful. It’s all marketing.

We can really see this when you look at products like IT Cosmetics’ Confidence in a Cream, or Dermalect has something called Self-Esteem Serum. These companies get really bold about their claims that somehow, this product that you're putting on your physical body will have some sort of emotional, revelatory effect on your life. And we have a lot of data that proves that's not what's happening. Beauty standards are associated with a higher incidence of appearance-related anxiety, depression, facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, obsessive thoughts, self-harm and even suicide. So while it can feel like self-care in the moment, the downstream effect of investing so much of our effort and energy into our external appearance is having a devastating effect on our mental and emotional health.

The other thing that complicates conversations around beauty and self-care, I think, is that self-care is actually hard. Taking care of yourself is not an easy thing. It's not just doing a face mask. It's eating the vegetables when you don't feel like eating the vegetables and going for a walk, even though it's hard to tear yourself away from your computer, or going to therapy when you’d rather not delve into the things you’re feeling. But we still often reduce self-care to what we can buy to bring us pleasure. Not that pleasure doesn't have a place in it, but you know, especially for women of colour, queer people, disabled people, just putting on a face mask actually isn't enough. Self-care means something different when you have less privilege. So, it undermines the idea of what care actually is.

Yes, that is such a great observation. And it also undermines the idea of what the self is; it reduces the self to the surface. When you're talking about health like that, sure, your physical being is part of it, but it's only one part. I think there is a real danger in conditioning people to think of self-care as topical and internal because of all of the things that you mentioned, but it also really gets us to start living our lives on the surface. There's been a huge debate about Shein recently, and people are like, ‘Well, I deserve to look nice, so I'm gonna buy this clothing from a company that exploits the workers who are making it and destroys the planet because I deserve to look nice.’ That is a symptom of living life on the surface—you're concerned with aesthetics at the expense of other people's lives and the well-being of the planet. These are all the extreme downstream consequences of beauty culture.

I’m glad you brought up Shein because I'm always really interested in how we talk about things, especially after 2020, and I really think the so-called racial reckoning pushed our language more than it pushed our actual behaviour. So, there's this talk about solidarity and progressiveness and rejecting different problematic ideas, but when it comes down to it, it seems like people don’t actually want to change their behaviour, even those of us who are people of colour or people who belong to other marginalized groups.

Oh, my gosh, 100%. And I think a lot of this stems from the fact that since the racial reckoning that you're talking about, there has been such a focus—and I'm guilty of it in my work—on these huge systems. We're talking about patriarchy, we're talking about white supremacy, and I think that gives people an excuse to take themselves out of the conversation because it doesn't feel personal. Where we failed is we're not examining how we are complicit as individuals and as communities. And we're not talking about the power that we do have. Because I do think that there's a lot of power in being better citizens of the world. I do think there's a lot of power in our consumer choices. I think there's a lot of power in individually divesting from these toxic systems that we're talking about. But it feels like the conversation really hasn't gone there. We’re really happy to blame giant evil forces, but are hesitant to look at how our everyday behaviours are feeding into those forces.

A lot of our conversation has been about engaging less with consumerism and with this problematic culture, but how do you recommend people actually divest from beauty culture? Because to your point, we're not just socialized to pursue beauty—we are punished when we don't.

I appreciate how difficult it is, and I never want to come off like I'm pressuring people not to engage, or saying that they need to drop everything right now, or that there's no good to be found in pursuing beauty. That's not what I'm saying at all. I think the first the first step to divesting is really educating yourself on beauty culture and the history of beauty standards, because when you realize the terrible systems of oppression that the beauty standards and the beauty trends that you're trying to adhere to stem from, when you're honest with yourself about where this thing comes from, and what your participation in these systems helps perpetuate, it really makes you not want to participate.

Start thinking of your beauty behaviours as coping mechanisms. Beauty culture is an inherently traumatic thing, right? We grew up hearing that our sole worth in society is based on our appearance and also that our appearance will never be good enough. That is spirit-crushing; that is soul-crushing. So, a lot of these beauty behaviours that many of us adopt are coping mechanisms to cope with the pain of beauty culture. Personally, that framing has helped me a lot. Like, okay, let me be honest with myself: I'm not wearing concealer right now because this is self-expression. That actually doesn't express me at all. I'm wearing concealer because I have extreme appearance anxiety about my acne scars because of all the messaging that I took in from beauty magazines. That doesn’t mean that I have been able to stop wearing concealer all the time. I still wear it when I need a superficial security blanket. But it helped me personally want to someday learn how to give up that particular coping mechanism and maybe find a healthier coping mechanism to deal with my anxiety, because you know, a lot of these things are superficial treatments for psychological issues.

And for me, one of the most practical and easiest ways to start divesting from industrialized beauty is to start with skincare. I always suggest that people who are interested in this take two weeks to an entire month off of skincare completely. And what happens when you do that is that your skin's inherent mechanisms start to re-regulate. The skin is equipped with the ability to self-cleanse, self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-heal and self-protect. Almost all of the things that we write rely on topical products to do, the skin can do itself. And if we give the skin time—28 days is the typical length of a skin cycle—if we give the skin an entire cycle to re-regulate, we can really pinpoint where we don't actually need most of our skincare products, where there are one or two things that we actually do need a little external support with. That’s how we can reduce our entire skincare routine to two products instead of 12.

Want to hear from Jessica? Find her on Twitter, Instagram and in your inbox thanks to her “truth serum” of a newsletter, The Unpublishable.

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