Oh no: Inclusive beauty isn't the fix we thought it'd be

In order for Beauty™ to work as it does, it must be exclusionary.

… And maybe it shouldn’t—work, I mean.

If you feel like you’re doing everything you can (or that you see others doing so it looks important) to do Beauty, and your life and wellbeing isn’t improving the way that being hot promised they would, have I got some news for you…

I’ve figured it out! Well, no, actually. I figured out that one person cannot figure it out. And that’s a big something for me, who spent most of my waking hours 2021-2024 attempting to rhetorize the complex and intricate ways in which we are all hot and anxious now, and more pressingly, what is to be done about it.

For the past seven months, my brain felt like it was severed from all things beauty culture discourse, having mixed and poured the entirety of that part of my brain into a Die Hot With A Vengeance-shaped cake tin for the previous four years.

Those post-book blues have been a formidable boss level of brain frog that has made me uniquely dumb since publication. I have scarcely any new ideas, and if I manage to find any, I can’t adequately fish the sense out of them. I’m disinterested in things that used to be My Thing. Every day, I wake up and think, Time to sort out my life, I guess, and then I don’t. And all of this futility has been reflective of my attitude towards beauty after making a whole damn feast of it.

The other week, I led a discussion in a bookstore with Moshtari Hilal, author of UGLINESS, which was just translated to English from German. Her book details the origins of how ugliness came to be defined and by whom, and how that definition functions to dehumanize, criminalize, and other people based on appearance. In it, she includes photos, artwork, and poetry, which I found refreshing, beauty being a largely visual medium and all. I may have had enough of beauty, but I was very open to learning about ugliness. And did you know that ugliness has such an extensive history? One that tells truths in varying degrees of discomfort and disdain about beauty.

One of the cruelties of our current beauty culture is how it insists that Beauty is for everyone when historically that’s never been how it works—not the kind of Beauty™ that makes for valuable capital, anyway. Being that beauty is the only capital that women may possess without objection, it feels quite valuable, even if it only goes so far. Sure, it has some flexibility, but mainly when cashed in for a gender performance that fulfills expectations.

As long as we’re willing to buy into the belief that we can all achieve this, Beauty Culture will continue to invent new altruisms about the empowerment it supposedly grants to its most dedicated subjugations. I mean, the entire reason it persists as it is is because we continue to embody it. The purpose of a system is what it does, after all.

By the logic of Oscar Wilde’s “Everything is sex, except sex, which is power,” Everything is beautiful, except beauty, which is control. And while ugliness is considered the polar opposite of beauty, it does not convey freedom. Maybe it grants some release from the pressure to maintain what you’re constantly told is your primary value: your appearance. But to be ugly is, at best, to lack the capital that beauty grants and, at worst, to be excluded from “the good life” that our society rewards to those who strive for beauty, if not from society altogether. And not many people willingly choose that.

But maybe Beauty isn’t everyone’s idea of what is beautiful. And maybe that kind of good life isn’t everyone’s idea of a desirable life. So much of what I had absorbed about beauty was imitating who and what seemed to possess power (a rather superficial kind of soft power, which is kind of all a kid can realistically aspire to, but still). And I’ve been incredibly lucky and privileged to have accessed enough signifiers of the kind of good life that beauty can grant—enough to realize that rarely does it give me comfort beyond what I already have. That beauty, like all blessings, plateaus eventually. But it’s easy to brush off the beauty that’s always been available to me.

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Anyway, at the end of my Q&A with Hilal, attendees asked their questions. Inevitably, this always comes up when we discuss the perils of beauty culture: What now? How do we extract ourselves from the endless beauty culture cycle? How do we make beauty a more inclusive environment for everyone to thrive in?

The very question is a bit self-negating, even when earnestly sought. It’s difficult to seek an optimistic path when the contradictions have set the field so unevenly from the start. This thought has plagued me for… years now, though I was never able to sufficiently articulate what was behind its ominous flatness. We are all aware of why beauty isn’t inclusive: racism (white supremacy), gender essentialism, ageism, fatphobia, ableism, and at the bottom of it all, a classism that determines who has the means to do anything about these and to what extent. (Having money gives you one hell of a leg-up; money is way better capital than Beauty, which is mostly valuable within the system of oppression it supports.)

I know we know this because we are quick to name who has or has not launched with a broad enough shade range of complexion makeup, who makes efficacious skincare at an affordable enough price point, who has queer/trans/non-binary/plus-size models in its campaigns, or who designs packaging for differently abled people. And we all deserve these things, don’t get me wrong.

But these are exceptions to an overarching rule. They serve to reinforce the illusion that we have the power to reject what oppresses us, if not with our bodies, then with our dollars. As long as we have choices, we are less likely to question the parameters in which they’re offered, even if the choices presented are not the best. It’s easy to count concessions when there are so few of them. We couldn’t laud anyone for breaking any barriers if the barriers hadn’t long been there to begin with, you know?

And these are all Good Things, of course. But their inclusion also means that no one is spared from Beauty Culture’s agenda, not when it’s giving you all the tools and resources to optimize. The Beauty™ that we acknowledge and covet exists to maintain and reinforce its original hierarchies. That won’t change, even if the guest list expands.

“That inclusion is the best solution that we can seemingly come up with powerfully illustrates the need for fresh thinking. I don’t want to fight to be appreciated as an object. I want to transform the world in which objectification of women is the default.” ~Emma Dabiri, Disobedient Bodies

So how do we extricate ourselves from beauty’s control? You could vow to never allow any cosmetic product or treatment to touch you ever again if it makes your life easier, sure. I would love some fresher thinking than that, tbh. As we’ve learned from the enduring triumph of no-makeup makeup, it was never about the makeup. Having a skincare regimen, getting cosmetic injections, or choosing not to doesn’t alleviate the stigma of ageism (or our fear of mortality). Your omission is much more of a personal choice than your participation. Your participation in beauty culture doesn’t reshape the external forces that inform it; but it may allow you to more easily thrive within them.

Self-expression is a medium that often indulges one’s vanity. As a vain person, I love to express the self, and doing so often involves beauty products. They aren’t required to do what I do, but they quite enjoyably facilitate the whole being a person out in the world production when it’s useful for me to be to be A Person Out In The World.

If I were the type of person who didn’t have unseen things I was proud of about myself, I could see how easily my self-worth would come to be overwhelmingly defined by the quality of my appearance. If we don’t define our own self-worth, the rest of the world is more than ready to.

In Ugliness, the most concise definition of the word, if it can be so determined, is conceived by philosopher Franz Fanon “as the trauma of inhabiting a body you have learned to hate.” Part of my discussion with Moshtari Hilal made me think about this one chapter in Thick, where Tressie McMillan Cottom writes, “When I say that I am unattractive or ugly, I am not internalizing the dominant culture’s assessment of me. I am naming what has been done to me. And signaling who did it.” There is power in naming. Labels inform perspective. As to what can be done about it, I don’t think this is a The only way out is through situation. It seems to require a totally different plane.

I can read.

Leading a life that explores human expression and pleasure beyond what beauty’s dichotomy may grant, I think, is a good place to start. Get a hobby! It sounds dismissive, but I am dead serious. I feel so fulfilled and satisfied after doing my little crafts and whatnot. I’ve become feverishly obsessed with my little projects and tinkerings. They remind me how capable I am of creating my own contentedness. It’s a soothing thought that more than tides me over as I count the increasing number of white hairs sprouting from my temples.

Do shit that doesn’t involve looking at screens (and especially not at hot people performing hotness on screens), acquire a skill, create something with your hands. Learn to cook an elaborate meal (this is a big one for me). Talk to your loved ones—they’re often a way better mirror than the one in your hand. Redefine beauty beyond its visual constraints. You might find that beauty culture doesn’t feel as relevant when you’re busy doing other shit that makes you feel capable and proud. I don’t know that we are able to individually extricate ourselves from the great contradiction of Beauty™. But akin to grief, what we can do is build a meaningful life around it until it doesn’t feel as daunting.