Controlling the World Through Your Face

Jessica DeFino on beauty as a disordered response to our out-of-control world.

Jessica DeFino runs The Review of Beauty, one of my favorite Substacks, where she critiques beauty culture and writes about the harms of the beauty industry. We talked about “self care,” trying to find meaning in meaningless products, and why we all seem obsessed with putting stuff on our skin even if we know it’s bad for us.

How did you get into beauty in the first place?

I’ve always been obsessed with beauty and beauty products. When I was really young, like five or six, my mom put me in beauty pageants around our area in New Jersey. So it’s always been part of my life. But in 2015, that was my first professional entry into beauty—I started working on the Kardashian/Jenner apps. I was ghostwriting content for Kim and Khloe and Kylie. Being immersed in that world, I started to have a mental break. Seeing up close the manufacturing of a beauty standard and the mass production and the marketing of it to really trusting customers—I started to question everything I thought I knew and loved about beauty.

And then at the same time I was being gifted all these beauty products from brands who wanted to be featured on the apps, so I was using a ton of expensive skincare. And it ruined my skin. I developed dermatitis and my skin was like peeling off my face. I couldn’t wear makeup. I couldn’t go out in public. I was having a crisis of the skin and a crisis of the self. 

I started to wonder why I’d dedicated my life to these products that aren’t even good for you, so I started doing research about how the skin works, and how these ingredients work, and started getting really into the psychical and psychological consequences of beauty culture. I wondered why no one in the industry was talking about that stuff—but then it became very clear: because they’re all in it together, the advertisers, the affiliate sales, all of it is part of a system.

Is there something you found enjoyment or solace in with beauty, before you kind of turned on it?

I think it was less enjoyment and more that it was just such a part of my life that I didn’t even really think about it or consider it an interest. It used to be I wouldn’t even go to CVS to get toilet paper if I didn’t have a full face of makeup. To me, I think part of it was creating a persona, almost like stage makeup. I grew up doing musical theater and makeup became this way to almost create a character. And the character I was creating in life conveniently hit all the modern beauty standards. But then when I had that crisis with my skin, it turned into a crisis of the self because I could no longer be that character. It made me question who I was. It made me question why I couldn’t function in the world without makeup. I realized it was more a dependency than an enjoyment. 

Do you feel a freedom now that you are in a different phase of your life where you’re less dependent on this stuff?

I feel a certain freedom, I guess. But it’s not like I feel great about myself all the time. I still feel the pressure of beauty standards. I think that’s almost impossible to escape. But I do feel freedom just from having awareness about the desires that underlie these things.

I remember maybe six or seven years ago I got really into makeup and felt like, “this is about self-expression, about identity and exploration.” And then at a certain point I was like, “wait, what, if anything, am I actually self-expressing here?!”

Right like the self-expression is just: “I like makeup.” Like what’s the value in that? I had a lot of convenient lines I would use when I was very into the beauty industry. “It’s a form of self care. It’s a form of self-expression.” But looking back on all that, it wasn’t really an authentic act of care or expression for me. It was just a convenient way to excuse my consumption of these products. 

I feel like if you start to question people’s choices around this stuff, you get a lot of pushback though, right?

I do get a lot of pushback. I think beauty is so tied to identity. And I think for a lot of people, the tools of beauty are the tools of the self—of creating a self that feels compatible with this world. And so to have a critique of some of those tools feels like an attack on you. I think another thing is that there’s a lot of really fascinating science around the link between the skin and the brain and identity formation. And people’s intense reactions make a lot of sense when you think about the fact that the brain and skin are literally linked, in what’s called the gut-skin-brain axis.