The Beauty Industry Taught Me to Hate My Skin, But I’m Done Buying It

Outside of Sephora—a major beauty store. Photo via USA Today.

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Glass skin. Phototherapy. Gua Sha. Clean Girl. Slugging. Skinamilism. Sephora Tween. Etc, Etc. 

These terms might seem familiar—common internetisms used by influencers, companies, news outlets, and netizens alike to describe aspects of a growing cult of overt skincare consumerism. And as both a social media phenomenon and as a tangible area of market growth, skincare is undoubtedly having a cultural moment. It is pushed by many as a more holistic alternative to traditional colored makeup. And perhaps there are warrants to this: skincare can often be about protecting and strengthening the natural skin barrier to make it healthier and to prevent damage, while makeup can often be about covering, contouring, and changing the appearance of natural skin. 

For these reasons, some women and social movements have over time aimed to reduce the use of makeup in favor of highlighting the natural appearances of women. In 2018, the “escape the corset” movement in South Korea encouraged women to break down beauty standards by halting their use of makeup and by wearing their hair short. This was in protest to South Korea’s historically strict social beauty standards, which have also been linked to social discrimination. In the U.S., while beauty standards are notably more fluid than in South Korea, expectations that women look certain ways or take care of themselves in certain ways still persist. In this way, it is overall good to encourage people to reevaluate the perception that beauty is something to be strived towards through the use of makeup. We absolutely should be developing a culture in which people can be very individualistic in their cosmetic choices and still not get inundated with judgement, discrimination, or externally-imposed insecurity. And if a cultural shift towards the acceptance of holistic skincare over the use of colored makeup was something that could do this, then that would also be a good thing. 

However, the cosmetics industry, in its co-opting of the language of holistic skincare as a means of increasing corporate profits, has turned the growing skincare sector into one that exploits people’s desires to care for themselves and reinforces problematic, often misogynistic, beauty standards. And, it has also created a hostile media environment fueled by consumerism where there is an overwhelming pressure on people, and particularly on women, to make their bare faces look perfect by buying and doing exactly what someone else tells them they should be buying and doing. 

A chief example of this is a video from Vogue France, which two years ago released Hailey Bieber’s skin care routine that she purportedly uses to achieve a “super glowy complexion.” It was a part of their beauty secrets collection—a video series dedicated to showing off how the uber-rich and famous achieve perfect skin and makeup looks. But, principal to Bieber’s video was that she used almost entirely her own product line—Rhode Beauty—in the video. The message is clear: if you just buy her products, you’ll get to look like her. This blatant act of self-promotion is part of what creates a hostile media environment, one in which the line between real and ad is deeply blurred, and one in which the expectations of how one should look barefaced are reinforced by the failures of influencers, celebrities, and corporations to disclose profit incentives in their content. 

To be clear, it would be reductive to ridicule skincare itself as completely unnecessary, or as entirely rooted in aestheticism. For example, we should absolutely encourage young people to wear sunscreen, a proven way to prevent skin cancer, which affects 1 in 5 Americans by the age of 70. We should also encourage people to learn to care for themselves in the ways that are most personally successful for them. But when companies, influencers, or members of the general public perpetuate a myth that skin care is a universality, that each type of it will have the same impacts and consequences on every person, they are encouraging a consumerist landscape that will inevitably cause harm. This harm comes in many forms, but notably, children and young teens are at risk of suffering under the pressures of aestheticized self-care. 

The beauty industry is at its most profitable when women hate at least one thing about both themselves and each other. After all, it is easier to sell concealer when women are made to feel like there is something on their skin in need of concealing, and it is easier to sell new kinds of acne treatments when acne remains ridiculed and unrepresented in the media. And when there is a prevailing social structure that rewards industry for pressuring women into beauty conformity, misogyny is necessarily perpetuated. 

There is no easy solution to this. One might suggest a more radical act, where women disengage with the beauty industry almost completely. This approach might suggest that women should stop wearing makeup, strip their skincare down to only the bare necessities, and largely ignore ads and influencer content promoting different brands, products, techniques, etc. But to do this would mean cutting women off from choice: the choice to present themselves how they want to, to take care of themselves how they want to, and to engage with their own appearance in the way that they want to. Additionally, to escape every ad, Instagram post, and Tiktok video that serves the beauty industry would be nearly impossible, especially in an age where ads are often undisclosed and overly aestheticized. Instead of radical disengagement, perhaps the better solution then is just the opposite: radical consciousness. Consciousness that we are constantly being sold something, and that we are being sold that something through being taught to hate ourselves, is maybe the only realistic way to create true change. 

So the next time you’re scrolling through instagram and see an influencer showing off the ‘miracle serum’ that left them with ‘glass skin,’ be conscious of both the message and the product that you are being sold. Consider for a second who their ad is benefiting. The answer is likely not you, and you certainly do not deserve to have your insecurities constructed and exploited for someone else’s profit margin.

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This article was edited by Naba Syed and Sarah Davey.