Text: Haley Mlotek
Illustration: Tracy Ma

As I sit with what I estimate to be nine dollars worth of purple conditioning mask combed through my hair—my imprecise measurements are the length of my fingers dipping into the tub of cream, subtracting what dripped onto the shower floor before I could tie my hair up and what I rinsed from my shoulders so it wouldn’t stain my skin, divided by the quantity of product left and what I know to be the somewhat absurdly high price I paid for it—I am speaking on the phone with Geoffrey G. Jones, a business historian at Harvard University, who studies the globalization of the beauty industry. “The beauty industry doesn’t sell functional products,” he says. “It sells aspirational products.” Yes, of course, I respond, and look at my hair in the mirror I can see out of the corner of my eye, propped up against a low shelf in my bedroom. I agree because I might know better but I still want, against all reason, to have bright-blonde hair.

If I wanted to, I could annotate the margins of their ingredient lists with memories. What I do instead is something different, and entirely the same as everyone else: I make it a lexicon that abandons its origins, the standards of beauty seem to want a tenseless language. What beauty is has not—should not— could not change. What beauty wants will not—does not—can not stay the same.

If my beauty school, which I graduated from more than ten years ago, had given proper grades I would have wanted ALL A’s. The way they rated or ranked our work was much more subjective. Do you see that there’s a hole in your eyeshadow? They’d say, pointing at my classmate’s closed eyelid. For the first few months of school I had no idea what they were referring to and then, one day, I did. It was 2007, and all I wanted was to prove that I was paying attention to everything they said. (See also: contour, gloss)

The BB CREAM was invented in the 1960s by a German dermatologist, and was one of the first Korean beauty products to become adopted and embraced in the Western market. (See also: K-beauty). It soothed the skin; it blurred and blushed; it made promises devotees swore it could keep.

“Don’t teach your clients how to CONTOUR,” my teachers said. “Then they’ll never need you again.” I often wondered how they felt as contouring kits took over the department store counters, the YouTube tutorials that showed how to map the planes of a face, the celebrity makeup artists who offered workshops for four-figures. You could learn for free, or you could pay thousands of dollars, and somehow this seemed to be the same. (See also: cut crease, a technique I mastered watching videos years after graduating)

What is this DEDICATION to a cosmetic that offers the reflection of loyalty? My whole life I thought the height of elegance and maturity was a beautiful person explaining that she only used one type of lip balm, one type of moisturizer, one type of shampoo.

The HBO show EUPHORIA is, I realize on my second watch of the first season, doing what television for teenagers should do. It shows the way they now realize they want to dress, rather than the way they do. For months I see the glitter tears pressed onto the cheeks of teenagers, the disco ball nail polishes and ECKHAUS LATTA mocknecks and think: wanting is as good, if not better, than being.

FENTY BEAUTY reported $72,000,000 in sales for their first month of operations. A recent Forbes report, in 2018, showed $570,000,000 in revenue and an estimated valuation of $3,000,000,000.

My makeup teachers used to warn us that the people in our chairs would want to talk, and would eventually mistake proximity for closeness and closeness for privacy, and soon we would know all their secrets. To best demonstrate how important it would be to not betray this accidental trust they told us a story about how Jennifer Lopez found out which member of her staff was selling information about her to the tabloids. She told everyone a different, fake story, and then waited to see which story made it to print; as a result, she ended up firing one of her makeup artists. I don’t know if this story is true, and I don’t think that matters. The lesson remains.
Or:

The first department store cosmetic I ever bought, in 1998, was MAC LipGLASS. No matter what income level I reach, no matter how absurd the discretionary purchase I could ever afford to make, I truly believe nothing will ever match the thrill of handing over 21 Canadian dollars for a product that made my lips look so shiny; paying for the privilege of pulling strands of hair that got glued to the thick sheen; believing that everyone who saw me could tell that something had changed.
Or:

What counts as vanity and what counts as hygiene? The answer reveals much more than such a question should: the conventions of cleanliness are, for some reason, positioned to be opposite cosmetics. This binary mimics another false equivocacy between types of customers: here’s what a man will buy, reads a bottle of something scented as though a tree were capable of a temper tantrum. Here’s what a woman should buy, reads a bottle of something painted like the underside of a flower petal. It is not a coincidence that they often reference elements of something organic, not an error that the deep roots of profound change in the way people understand themselves becomes another product that can be sold. In 2019, the sector of the global industry inexplicably known as “male grooming” was valued at $63 billion.

To read any fashion or beauty publication was to read stories both so specific and yet so universal that their purpose could become any kind of direction: if something bad happened in them, I often referred to them as the don’t leave your house feature. If something good happened to them, it was mostly because of beauty. It happened to me, they’d say, and they could be referring to a murder or a marriage or almost anything in between.

On my teenage bedroom walls I taped up photos of the models I knew as the JOHN FRIEDA TWINS, though I’ve since learned that they have real names, of course. They were teenage girls with impossible blonde hairstyles—the kind of choppy, piecey cuts only seen on the big binder of hairdresser reference photos, and on Meg Ryan in romantic comedies or Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen in direct-to-video movies—and I believed then and still kind of do now that if I just bought the right product (perhaps even John Frieda’s Frizz-Ease?) and twisted my wrist in exactly the right motion I could have that impossible hairstyle too. Later I learned that these girls (their names were Brit & Alex) were, in fact, the children of John Frieda’s business partner.

In 2019, the extensive catalogue of South Korean beauty and skincare products colloquially known as “K-BEAUTY” was valued at $10.3 billion dollars. By 2029, K-beauty is expected to be worth $31.6 billion dollars.

Here is the truth about having a face, which is doubly true for having a body: the fact of a three-dimensional form is as important, if not more important, than any of the other compositional facts that equal beauty. Symmetry is all very well and good, as are the right color choices for cosmetics, or the appearance of clean pores, bright eyes, white teeth—but work in cosmetics for long enough and you too will see that much of what we think of as appearance is just good LIGHTING. Concealer, for example, can hide the color of a pimple, but it is the artful direction of light and shadow that erases it from an image. Anyway, after five months of Zoom meetings I bought a ring light. (See also: like and subscribe)

“There’s a parallel,” Jones told me as I considered the effectiveness of my conditioner thirty minutes on, “from the late nineteenth century, when the growth of much better quality MIRRORS increased visual awareness. That was probably the biggest driver of the increased use of beauty products. We see absolutely the same thing now on Instagram.”

One might think that when a PORE can be seen as clear as a PIXEL they would be the impulse to hide the skin from prying, surveilling eyes. Not so; instead, for much of the last decade, the appearance of not wearing any makeup at all was the primary point of most cosmetics. NO-MAKEUP MAKEUP is its own category. (See also: water)

There was a period of time when shampoo was supposed to make you come, and blush was supposed to give you that same post-fucked flush. I have theories about what this OBSESSION with ORGASMS was about, but maybe they’re best left to the armchair anthropologists of the late nineties.

I often think about how when future production designers are working on movies set in the year 2016 everything will be millennial PINK. Like the packaging itself, cosmetic companies of the late 2010s sealed themselves in muted promises and neutral loyalties. The owners and founders reported outstandingly good revenue—all the better for the venture capitalists who financed their runs of product and pop-up storefronts—and by the time the color had completely saturated the culture it had been turned into a symbol that might not warrant an entire palette.

I am too impatient to wait for my nails to dry, but not, apparently, to read about how QUICK-DRYING NAIL POLISH works: it has basically the same ingredients as regular nail polish but a higher level of solvents, which means the liquid evaporates faster into a hard, painted shell. For every imagined consumer sold on the promise of SELF-CARE there is another platonic ideal of a person who wants SPEED. Copolymer, a film former, keeps the color deposit pure. But no matter how long I wait there is always the smudged swirl on at least one nail, a fingerprint of the wrong sort, as though the paint wants to make its mark.

In moments of intense concentration I can visit r/SKINCAREADDICTION, the Reddit forum that holds, I believe, all the world’s existing knowledge about the science and practice of skincare. I find myself nodding the same way I do when I am in a conversation with a much smarter person and believe we both know that I am not following but appreciate an unspoken agreement to keep talking. This is the ultimate culmination of self-taught experts and at-home scientists; their methods are pristine, and their recommendations are made with unflinching rigor, given carefully and retracted quickly. “NEVER MIND THIS MADE ME BREAK OUT AFTER A WEEK,” reads one follow-up report from what had been a rave. Noted.

Doesn’t it feel like everyone who looks good has some SECRET? One simple trick. That they know something seems like a given; that no matter how well they explain it to you, or show it to you, you’ll never have what it is: the feeling of knowing how to hold, and then show, beauty. In TUTORIALS, I learn more than I ever knew I wanted to. Lately I apply my concealer in small, pointed wings around the corners of my eyes because I saw artists do the same on TikTok. This tip just makes sense, the information is given freely, I UNDERSTAND it instantly. and yet it feels like one we’re all holding close.

Why do websites still ask me if I want to VIRTUALLY try on a color? I can’t think of anything more horrifying than seeing my own face staring at a tiny browser on my phone, let alone contemplate the mechanics of superimposing a digitized lipstick over my mouth.

I am still, in many ways, the person who was thrilled by a department store lip gloss, and I am still unconvinced by much of what is considered best practices, but I will admit to coming around to a spritz of mineral WATER before applying moisturizer. It just makes sense. Oh, also, (see: celebrities who swear their beauty secret is water) you should probably drink more of it.

When I look up XANTHAN GUM, beauty writers often write, either petulantly or apologetically, that it doesn’t get the same kind of name recognition that other ingredients do, like retinol or hyaluronic acid. It holds all the other ingredients together as a binder or emulsion stabilizer; it glides; it melts; it makes creams feel creamy. It appears in many products marked as “organic” and “natural;” it is also a staple ingredient for gluten-free baking.

On YOUTUBE there is more education than I ever got from beauty school. Sometimes better, sometimes surprising, but mostly it is just more. A quantity that outpaces learning. Outside of a classroom and years removed from grades or assignments I am still looking for teachers. YouTube is where I learned how to do a cut crease, how to clean a blending sponge, how to fill in my eyebrows,...or how to say, reflexively, like and subscribe, as a joke. If the past two decades of beauty could be summed up by a single phrase it would be welcome to my channel.

Haley Mlotek is a senior editor at SSENSE and an organizer for The Freelance Solidarity Project, a distinct division of digital media workers within the National Writers Union. She is currently working on a book about romance and divorce.