Wellness Lies: Skincare & Makeup
There are many lies fed to individuals when it comes to their looks. This comes as a surprise to no one, but the extent of such lies is not always clear. The skincare and makeup industries are some of the worst liars out there. Often portrayed as at best beneficial, at worst harmless, a serious disregard for the functioning of our largest organ, the skin, causes extensive harm. Breaking down the history of these industries, the functioning of the skin—and the human body more generally—and the social impacts of both, we can start to see far more sinister forces at play in what have become daily practices for many.
History
Makeup has existed in many forms for much of human history, and people have cleansed themselves in water for as long as we know. However, the widespread use of soap over the past few hundred years has dramatically changed hygiene and “self-care”. Before this modern understanding of basic hygiene, the concept of disgust kept humans healthy and alive throughout history, though often this feeling was weaponized to control others.
This is the foundation of many religions, where the idea of causing a higher power to feel disgust toward you would be met with punishment. Thus, it was the responsibility of the individual to avoid disgusting said higher power through various means of social and behavioral control, often relayed through individuals who claim to have been told by the higher power themselves what is and is not acceptable. While the beliefs regarding hygiene and outward appearance have differed between religions, this was the foundation of the nebulous concept of “cleanliness” and its relation to “godliness” or morality. To be clean by the standards of a god is to be a morally upstanding individual.
When soap eventually came around, it was a basic, useful product. It helped prevent the spread of disease in new and growing cities where people easily spread infection while making use of excess animal fats from nearby meat processing facilities. This led to a soap boom, with a low cost of entry into the industry and an easily produced product. However, there is only so much innovation that can happen with soap, so the real product was branding. Various brands marketed their products using those same morality, purity, and youth connections introduced by religion.
Not only was this capitalism at its finest, but it enabled a global spread of social control. Colonizers brought soap with them to the lands they conquered and claimed dominance over the native people for being cleaner (despite there being no actual threshold to define “clean”). People of color not washing with soap was considered yet another reason for white colonizers to deem them inferior. While there is still much hygiene discrepancy around the world, it is not a result of inferiority, but merely a lack of safe, clean water with which to consume and wash hands.
Nonetheless, the soap propaganda continued its spread, convincing people they needed more and more soap beyond these basic hygiene needs. This would spread into the world of skincare during the mid to late 1800s with patent medicine creams. At the time, faith in contemporary healthcare was low, as it was expensive and ineffective for many people. This was seen as a perfect opportunity for snake oil men to sell “miracle” creams full of who knows what to help people with any and all afflictions. There were no regulations (many skincare products have minimal to no regulations to this day) so the ingredients in these could include anything, from absolutely nothing but oil to any number of illicit drugs. What mattered was that people bought them, and no one stopped them—a practice that continues to this day.
Eventually, as these products became widespread, the upper classes needed a way to differentiate themselves from the now-hygienic lower classes. They decided the best way to do this was to use greater quantities of increasingly expensive soaps and products, which have produced the out-of-control wellness and beauty industries that we have today. With a focus on profit and social control with absolutely no regard for the actual wellbeing or safety of consumers, this is an incredibly lucrative, multi-billion-dollar industry that is self-sustaining, causing conditions that people buy these products to help treat.
Skin Science
What science didn’t know at the time was microbes—the good little bacteria that live in our body and on our skin. These guys are wonderful and have evolved alongside us throughout history to help us thrive in exchange for a place to live and bodily oils and other secretions to consume. These little guys help kill pathogens, fungi, and skin cancer cells. When they are thrown out of balance, we are susceptible to conditions like food allergies, asthma, and eczema, and any number of illnesses they help defend against. They keep our oil levels in check to keep our skin protected and functional. And we wash these guys down the drain every time we shower with soap.
Every soap shower, every skincare product, every bit of makeup, all of it throws off the balance of microbes on our skin. The human body is completely reliant on homeostasis, and throwing off microbes on the skin causes many of the conditions beauty and “wellness” products aim to treat, prevent, or mask. People pay extraordinary amounts of money on products they’ve been told are necessary, only to fall into a vicious cycle of worsening the problems, when realistically, a rebalancing of microbes is what’s necessary. When it comes to the skin, less really is more.
Many people do stand by skincare products though, claiming they are effective. This is wrong, but there may be a real reason for their perceived effectiveness. We are at a point in human history where chronic stress is abundant. Stress can negatively impact microbes and thus your skin. Where skincare might help is not the products themselves, but in stress reduction. A reliable routine that provides a sense of control in times of uncertainty can help reduce stress and lessen the harm to microbes.
However, we don’t have to keep harming our microbes by using products to gain that sense of control. While an effective placebo and sometimes a relaxing, stress-reducing routine that might feel like a beneficial luxury in stressful daily life, there are significant costs. Not just tampering with our delicate skin microbes and larger skin organ through unregulated skincare and makeup products, but financial costs as well.
estimates that women spend around $313 a month on beauty products and services. At a time when so many people are stressed about finances, this can be a serious additional stressor that is only making matters worse.This money could be saved or used to make daily necessities less of a burden, but not everyone wants to give up their little luxuries that help make life more enjoyable. Instead, this money could go toward different, more beneficial routines that still help one feel in control and reduce stress. Investing in improving skin and overall health through means that are known to work, such as nutritious food, proper hydration, and improved sleep, can all help reduce stress and provide that feeling of control. You need to eat anyway, so why not use that $313 every month to create a special food routine that makes your body feel good (produce contains high levels of helpful microbes!) or to go out for a meal with friends, since social connections are a great way to reduce stress, especially in our “loneliness crisis”. Or get something like a massage that is still in line with these luxurious “wellness” practices but doesn’t harm microbes. There are plenty of things to enjoy that are not harmful and can work toward long-term health.
Social Impacts
There will still be some people who defend skincare and makeup products, who still believe the marketing lies, even when told that they are ineffective. They will still try ingesting or topically applying collagen or various vitamins in the hopes that somehow these molecules can fight their way through stomach acids and organ membranes to somehow make their way into their skin without acquiring a lethal blood infection. Despite the sarcasm, attacking these people is not helpful. No one benefits from making abused people feel bad about themselves for being abused. We have let this cycle of abuse go on for so long that some people do face legitimate backlash for not engaging in these practices. These fears not only keep people controlled behaviorally, but they also help prevent upward economic mobility.
The rich individuals who own these businesses, profit from the cycles of abuse, and who control the beauty standards that serve to benefit them the most, don’t want anyone to threaten their positions of power. Consumers are pressured to keep spending, lining the wealthy’s wallets, giving them even more power and control. People are prevented from saving as the beauty standards the powerful individuals shape get increasingly more complex and thus more expensive. People will continue to spend more and more of their money chasing an ideal set by those who profit from it. This is even worse for women of color, disabled women, and trans women who have less power and often lower incomes. This is even the case for men, who face different but similar (and increasing) pressures regarding appearance and the effort needed to maintain it.
With everyone distracted and increasingly poorer, no one is willing or able to challenge the systems of abuse, and those in control can continue to profit. There is a hope that a new understanding of the science of skin and the microbes that inhabit it will create a shift in these industries, but it is only through avoiding giving in to their control that we can make efforts to stop them, as they will likely take any new science and twist it to find new methods of profit. As is often the case, it is left to the abused to fight their abusers, and that’s a rough position to be in.
Conclusion
There is no easy answer to any of this. While articles like this can hopefully get through to people and save some innocent microbes in the process, encouraging the masses to change their minds or erase decades of propaganda are unlikely. But maybe seeing the costs and damage of the beauty and wellness industries can help some people break away from it. Beauty is a difficult thing to challenge, but it’s not impossible. People always have the power to fight back against systems of harm, and it’s comforting to know we have countless little guys on our bodies who are on our side. I’m going to choose to protect them.
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