Have Some Beauty, as a Treat

On beauty as food, and bodily pleasure.

When Jessica Simpson launched her edible line of bodycare, Dessert Beauty, in 2004, she may not have known just how prescient the brand was. Unfortunately for Simpson, early aughts consumers were not particularly hungry for ingestible body wash that may or may not give you a yeast infection and the line was quickly shelved. It was forward-thinking in concept, if not spirit: Simpson’s launch conceived of beauty as an indulgence in the same vein as cupcakes, another early aughts fad. Twenty years later, the industry has caught up on the idea of edible beauty — albeit not as a toothachey confection or guilty pleasure, but as healthy nourishment. 

Earlier this year, the British skincare brand Haeckels launched seaweed and beet liquid supplements using blends already found in their face creams and serums. It's one of many beauty brands selling ingestibles alongside traditional skincare, joining the likes of mushroom-inspired Herbar’s edible skincare pearls and luxury-wellness line Awvi, which sells powdered retinol supplements alongside your usual serums and moisturizers. And even non-edible beauty products from the most zeitgeisty brands often look like something you might buy at Whole Foods rather than Sephora: Hailey Bieber’s Rhode launched a pineapple enzyme cleanser this year, while a bottle of Youth to the People’s hero product, the kale and spinach “superfood” cleanser, could easily be confused for a green juice. Drunk Elephant famously markets blending its products like a “smoothie,” akin to how you might build your protein shake each morning. Taking the metaphor even further, some skincare aficionados keep their products in a dedicated fridge.

These launches are curious to me as I look around and feel the sense of unease that we’ve entered an age where we’re not supposed to eat again. I lived through the early aughts version of this, but back then diet culture was more blatant in its goals: what if just didn’t really eat? What if you had a bowl of cereal for breakfast and lunch and called it a day? If you have to eat, have food that isn’t really food, like whatever it is Snackwell’s are made of or a yogurt that pretends to be some kind of dessert but is a disappointing take on both yogurt and said dessert. I heard the phrase “negative calories” in relation to certain vegetables more than I care to remember. And sure, maybe you’ll just always be a little bit hungry. It was very joyless; at least ‘70s crash diet culture let you have wine.

Such a restrictive approach to food became distasteful in the 2010s — not that dieting went away, but rather obsessing about clean eating became the accepted form of diet culture rather than simply restricting calories. As in, Gwyneth Paltrow proudly proclaiming the virtues of her detoxes or Weight Watchers rebranding as a wellness rather than diet company. If you must eat, let it be healthy. Be thin, yes, but don’t let anyone know that’s what you’re after.

But, as many others have written elsewhere, a more explicit desire for thinness has made a decisive comeback in the 2020s. Ozempic and other semaglutides have offered treatment for diseases like diabetes, and also the option for otherwise healthy users to quickly lose weight by simply not desiring food. Dieting without the white-knuckling of it all.

If we don’t really need food, edible skincare like the supplements from Haeckels and Awvi have made the case for beauty instead as a source of nourishment. You can eat, so long as it’s contributing to your skincare routine.

And like food, beauty in its current phase has taken on a moralizing quality. If you’re going to participate in beauty, let it not be for vanity but for “health” and “wellness.” Like our food choices, our beauty must be “clean.” The rise in skincare as the dominant category means beauty is less about the immediate act of adornment but instead a sort of delayed gratification; like dieting, you put the work in now to see results down the line. You should of course be beautiful still, but don’t let anyone know that’s your aim. It is all rather joyless once again, albeit in a different way than the diet and beauty culture of the early 2000s.

I’m mentally revisiting early 2000s diet culture as I recently read Emmeline Clein’s Dead Weight: Essays on Hunger and Harm. I appreciate Clein’s mix of personal narrative and researched analysis. Early in the book she makes a case to refute the “sexy starving girl” trope that pervades many cultural depictions of eating disorders, particularly those of the early aughts. Instead she writes of the uphill battles eating disorder patients face to get help, employing a breathless blend of personal anecdotes and stats and data. She acknowledges that eating disorders do not only thrive amongst thin, wealthy and straight white women. She writes too of orthorexia’s rise as diet culture moves from simple starvation to the guise of “health.”

But in getting ahead to the end points of eating disorders, the book’s tone takes it as a given that disordered eating is the unavoidable fate of girlhood. The systems at large, both cultual and medical, offer no way to avoid it, and little room to escape once you’re in it. Why so many women are susceptible to eating disorders isn’t really interrogated; I guess the answers — soul-crushing misogyny, fatphobia, and being raised to derive your self-worth from your body — are simply too obvious to name.

I don’t believe however that it needs to be a given that to live in a girl’s body is to suffer, that it is unavoidable to have a contentious relationship with our bodies and with food. Or that to live in awareness of our body and appearance means feeling the unbearable pain of conforming to an impossible standard.

You can call me trite, but I’m a great lover of advice columns. The best ones answer specific questions in a way that address universal struggles. When I feel distressed by my appearance I think often of this particular entry from John Paul Brammer, a.k.a. Hola Papi, in response to an aging queer trans man who feels shattered by his receding hairline (thanks, testosterone). Brammer does not encourage the letter writer to shy away from vanity, but to instead look to the parts of his appearance he can control: take joy in your adornment, be it through piercings or jewelry or makeup or clothes. Perhaps you can’t completely control that you’re a bit bald, or a bit fat, or a bit pimply, but you can craft yourself in your own desired image. You can never look the most beautiful, but you can look the most like yourself. It’s a small thing, in the face of the crushing beauty standards. But life is in the small things.

I don’t mean this in the vein of toxic positivity or to say that we should not speak of that pain of having a body; even the rise of body positivity in the 2010s brought with it a new, also impossible, standard of “loving” your body unconditionally at all times for many people, women especially. No beauty or diet practice exists in vacuum. There is no beauty product you can buy that is untethered from capitalism’s gnawing on our self-esteem. We are never wholly outside of the cultural expectations we were raised in or the benefits we receive from conforming to normative beauty standards.

But to live in a body can be pleasurable. Yes, even a female body. Food can be pleasurable. Interacting with beauty can be pleasurable too, I believe. Who cares if what we ingest is “good” for you or not? There is joy in the eating, in the primping. Even just in the moment.