You may have noticed that in our era of body positivity, fat acceptance and feelgood feminism, the celebrity diet is out.
In its place: celebrity skincare.
Yes, tabloids and celebrity-focused magazines like Us and People may still describe the diets that keep stars (mostly women) extremely thin, but it’s no longer a standard celebrity interview question. Nor are readers of fashion magazines routinely treated to photos of skinny blond movie stars scarfing down cheeseburgers to prove that celebs are just like us.
A mere six years ago, Jennifer Weiner noted in the New York Times that: “If the People diets signal virtue and discipline (Love me because I work so hard to look this way), the high-end fashion magazines’ repast serves up relatability on a plate (Love me, because I’m really just like you!). Meanwhile, all of the gleeful apology-free indulgence that goes on in GQ or Esquire sends a different message to male readers: Love me, because my appetite is sexy, and if I eat spare ribs in bed, there’s no telling what else I might do.”
Now, celebrity women are shilling something else entirely: not the discipline to stay skinny, or the effortlessness of staying skinny despite all the burger-eating, but the promise of youth. A lot of them are selling skincare.
Celebrities from Hailey Bieber and Jennifer Lopez to Kim Kardashian and Rihanna are hawking products that promise a smoother, brighter, younger-looking face. And don’t get me wrong: I spend as much money on my face as any other moderately vain New York woman staring down middle age. I follow skincare influencers on Instagram; I dutifully zap and scrape and massage; I’ll try just about any face mask, eye mask, serum, cream, gummy candy or prescription drug that promises to shrink my pores, plump up my collagen, erase my fine lines or leave me glassy as a glazed donut.
This is not an anti-skincare polemic. It is an objection to the fundamental reality of female beauty culture: the expectation that one should put in a lot of time, do a lot of work and spend a lot of money, never to actually achieve an end, but rather to constantly pursue betterment. And then one should hide the amount of time, money and effort, because a veneer of effortlessness is necessary to keep this whole scam going.
Take Bieber’s skincare line, Rhode. She is a gorgeous 26-year-old model married to one of the world’s biggest pop stars and she has the glowing, smooth, seemingly pore-less skin one might expect of an extremely wealthy and professionally beautiful twentysomething. Of course a great many of us want to believe that her face is something she could bottle and the rest of us could buy. Much like the “I love cheeseburgers” skinny women of yore, Bieber often takes a kind of everywoman position in talking about her skincare routine, which she says is made up largely of her own products and a handful of others you can grab at Sephora or your local drug store, most no more than $30 or $40. And it’s lovely, truly, that average women with average budgets can snag the well-priced and hopefully effective products that Bieber says make her skin so good.
Less lovely is the truth behind the articles. Many (most?) wealthy and famous women have great skin through some combination of a lot of money to spend on products and procedures, a good dermatologist, a good esthetician, good cosmetic work (injections, lasers, maybe more) and winning the genetic lottery. When it comes to time, effort and dollars dedicated to celebrity faces and bodies, stars are not just like us. But there are real costs to pulling back the curtain. Admitting the truth – that it’s a lot of work to look this good and maybe she wasn’t born with it – might suggest that these women aren’t “naturally” beautiful, or aren’t deserving of the money, attention, accolades and opportunities they receive for their looks.
There’s a reason why so many celebrity women deny having had obvious cosmetic procedures, even while they seem to morph into a kind of singular Instagram Face: we judge women for ageing or for having imperfect bodies or features and then we judge them if they do something too obvious to change it. We demand famous women walk an impossible tightrope between aspirational and accessible. We want access to the tools they use, with the promise that the right serum or lotion might make us just as beautiful. But we don’t want the reminder that most of those tools are simply out of reach for average people. We don’t want to see the real and often-ugly work behind the world’s most beautiful bodies and faces.
When it comes to celebrity diets, I’ve often wondered what’s better: the celebrities who are honest about what it actually takes to stay thin (Victoria Beckham eating nothing other than grilled fish and steamed vegetables every day for 25 years; Rebel Wilson eating 600 calories a day, less than a third of what the World Food Program provides in their basic food rations for people risking starvation), or the celebrities who claim to regularly wolf down chicken wings and nachos like the imagined average American. One sounds a lot like seriously disordered eating. The other sounds a lot like a lie.
The lie is dangerous because it reinforces the idea that women are supposed to be beautiful and thin and young and sexy and we should of course do things that please men (which apparently includes eating copious amounts of fast food), but it should all be very easy and natural for us and require no obvious sacrifice. And then there is the overlapping message: we are certainly supposed to work hard to appear beautiful and thin and young and sexy, but we aren’t supposed to show our work – “effortless perfection”, feminists and researchers have long called it. This is a recipe for dissonance and self-loathing. But we can’t be made to feel so bad that we give up; we also can’t get too feminist about the whole thing and reject beauty-seeking out of pocket. If that happened, we might stop buying all the things designed to keep us in an infinite loop of physical self-betterment.
And so the sweet spot, in a culture now saturated with “body positivity” and skeptical of airbrushing, is rebranding beauty as wellness and even empowerment. It’s less culturally acceptable to admit that you try really hard to shrink your body, even if you are still broadly expected to try really hard to shrink your body. But reading and watching audiences still want to know how they can look like celebrities. And so our gaze has moved from the body to the face.
It is perhaps a natural human impulse to want to be seen as attractive to other people, although the standards for attractiveness are hugely variable across culture, time and place. And it is true that when my skin looks good, I feel better about myself. But I feel better about myself not because there is something inherently morally superior about the absence of wrinkles, pimples or pores. It’s largely because I live in a society that overvalues the appearance of youth, at least in women, and being perceived as attractive is rewarded socially and financially. But this exchange – spend a lot of money and do a lot of work to get yourself closer to an ever-changing cultural ideal so that you aren’t rejected, ignored, demeaned and cheated out of money you’ve earned – does not make for particularly sexy branding.
If your skin doesn’t look like a 26-year-old model’s, it’s probably not because you failed to adequately use her personal line of skincare products. And on the list of all of the problems women face in the world, engaging with, or feeling like a bad feminist for engaging with, beauty culture should rank somewhere down in the thousands. But it’s always worth turning a skeptical eye toward new iterations of the same tired old demands that women perform the endless work of trying to be ever more beautiful, while pretending it’s no work at all.
Jill Filipovic is the author of the The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness
