Lorde Of The Flies Guide To Desert Island Beauty
She's a man-eater, she'll chew you up boy, watch out...
Desert island beauty is a concept born from editorial relic. It has nothing to actually do with deserts or islands but uses both as parameters to position beauty products as a means of survival. It’s a fun little game we like to play where we imagine that when we’re shipwrecked on some postage stamp of an island, Sephora will drone-drop a lil care package for VIB Rouge members containing single-use Olaplex treatments and Anastasia Beverly Hill brow pencil nubs (points depending). It’s also an easy ice-breaking question tossed ad nauseam towards women celebrities for some padding in otherwise skint interviews or else failproof bait for commerce links.
It’s asked so often that any person unindoctrinated in the culture of women’s mags could reasonably assume that all women, at some point in their lives, are indeed deserted on some island, given only a single choice of effects for the duration of their stay. (If you’re a famous dude, sorry, you’re going to that island with nuh-thing.)
OK, but riddle me this: how is a desert also an island? Islands are surrounded by water. Deserts are famously dehydrated. When would I ever be in a scenario where I’m stranded on such an unlikely landmass? (Maybe this is what the Bermuda triangle is all about?) Geography was never my forte.
This is not an untimely ponder, considering that there are now multiple television shows about young girls being stranded on different landmasses for reasons. Showtime’s Yellowjackets takes place in the late 90s (well the stranded part does, which is what we’ll be covering). The Wilds on Amazon takes place on a current timeline and does indeed feature a more literal “deserted island” (in Hawaii or possibly New Zealand). According to both shows, the easiest way to get to these isolated places is to crash a plane in it. And whoever doesn’t die gets to be on TV.
Throughout each show’s 10-ish episodes, both first seasons propose the question: how would a bunch of teenage girls fare in brutal survivalist conditions? The subtext being: could they organize and share power as well as boys stranded on an island, a la Lord Of The Flies?
The gender binary fails to remember that those little lords did not do so hot on that island. Most of the boys just fuck around and repeatedly fail to maintain a signal fire several times (that fire becomes a touchy subject). They get obsessed with hunting this one pig, and then kill each other mostly accidentally and then more intentionally. Anyway, it’s like a metaphor, or whatever. And several decades later, we have our Lorde Of The Flies plot twist.
And yes, because it is Hollywood, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if everyone remained Blue Lagoon-glam as they bickered over who’s drinking all the La Croix supply salvaged from the aircraft and who’s not pulling their weight in cleaning makeshift menstrual pads and collecting materials for shelter. Both Yellowjackets and The Wilds make attempts to depict nature’s absolute disregard for looking hot and disrespect for regular hygiene and grooming when in the elements. Shower in this lake! Poop in this cave! I don’t care, I’m nature, I make the rules!
The Wilds does a good and loud job of sunburning this shit out of these poor girls, and not in like a cute sun-blush sort of way. (Byrdie wasted no time desert-island-beautying this cast in a feature interview.)
I mean, I think that’s meant to be sunburn — weirdly it does seem to be concentrated mostly on their faces and not on their shoulders or decolleté. Honestly, the island was pretty big and had lots of tree cover yet they chose to mostly spend their time bickering on a black sand beach. Girls!
Yellowjackets, while rich in intrigue and drama, has far too much nice hair in the face of ruin. They have more access to some hygiene essentials since most of their luggage was salvageable in the crash, but even though this is a pre-9/11 flight (on a PJ, no less), I’m betting most of them brought travel sizes. Their only means of bathing seems to be a lake, which I can’t imagine is so great for maintaining volume. Everyone’s lips look way too moist, all around. I don’t care what climate you’re in, with no lip balm on deck, mouths get shredded quickly. Even in civilization.
I’ve been stalking Sophie Thatcher's (Yellowjackets’ young Natalie) shmullet throughout the season (and throughout her Instagram). And the only visual markers of time passing throughout their stay at the cannibalism cabin is that her hair is growing out. Her bangs get longer and go curtain. (Also the pregnant girl gets pregnanter—a classic cinematic tool to indicate the passage of time).
And while Natalie’s mullet goes shag over time, what doesn’t ever emerge??? Her roots! As a double-process former platinum blonde, there is no timekeeper more infallible than your creeping roots.
Clearly, Natalie’s roots were NOT on the call sheet.
I cannot even fathom the super-human healing powers Van has, after surviving a plane crash AND a plane explosion, slipping away in the nick of time, just a little scorched on the dome. And then a wolf snacks on half her face (the same side that survived the plane explosion, bad luck), and she is healed up with Girl Scout stitches, maintaining the same structural form of her face even though one episode prior, you could see through her cheek to her teeth. It was basically wolf-performed buccal fat removal. She is… unkillable.
I mean, how would a bunch of teenage girls fare far and away from civilization? Part of me feels like it would differ, culturally, but that is the whole point, isn’t it — to romanticize the human spirit against all odds. It’s comforting to believe that despite our techno-addled world, we all still maintain our Homosapien survival instincts. You know, just in case. Because I think there’s always a little niggling doubt we have about the trajectory of our collective future.
It seems like as much as we like to romanticize our connection to nature, there is no valor or aspiration to fully return to it. I mean, certainly not in the way of jerking off sticks for fire and hunting/gathering. Which is understandable. I wouldn’t consider myself addicted to modern living or anything, but the idea of going without modern plumbing is…bleak.
Even as we tout the importance of immersion in nature being so beneficial for our overall wellness and sense of spirituality, the only way we seem to imagine a return to nature is through the extreme circumstance of an unmitigated disaster, one that removes us completely from the modern world we’ve built to our comfort, and the socio-economic pressures it subjects us to.
So we create disaster narratives and include youths to keep it sexy. We watch them struggle to survive and judge them when they don’t, as if by some glaring personal failing. We admire their resilience — a virtue that can only be earned through suffering, but one that’s often difficult to appreciate for the guilt and shame that often saddles with it.
Part of why I think everyone’s so drawn to these shows is that as a culture, we’ve always had a perverse obsession with the interior world of women — especially young women — and especially the tension between how they live their lives and how we think women ought to live their lives.
Women aren’t wholly allowed to express unhappiness, grief, and definitely not anger, let alone rage, despite experiencing those emotions as much as anyone else. Emotions always have a way of leaking out, either in passive-aggressive drips or else ill-aimed starts and fits when we drop the mask, triggered by an inconvenient moment. It’s similar to the revenge film genre; they indulge a taboo that gratifies something so suppressed within us.
The desert island scenario removes society’s stigmatization of those feelings while simultaneously introducing way more extreme reasons to have them. Community is crucial for survival but how much of our survival instincts lie dormant beneath the comforts and conveniences of modern society? What would you do to survive? Lose the stigma that no longer applies to the circumstance, for starters. And carry a big knife.
And if you are curious, the real-life Lords of the flies offer some handy tips for how to get through an involuntary desert island detention without offing each other unnecessarily.