Hey, did you hear? It’s hip to hate on clean beauty! All the biggest names in mainstream beauty media are doing it. Editors, influencers, dermatologists, everyone. And listen, I get what they’re saying. I said it myself two years ago: Clean beauty means nothing. That was the title of an…

A label-less product asks the question: Are you here for the brand, the bottle, or the oil blend inside? — The latest addition to my skincare lineup isn’t anything to look at. It’s an amber jar with a black lid. It has no other distinguishing features — no brand logo, no marketing lingo, no inch-high letters promising to smooth or soften. There’s no label at all. Inside is an unassuming…

Welcome to the inaugural Beauty-Critical Content Charcuterie: A snack-able spread of observations, ideas, and thought-starters that have taken over my mind! A sampling of stories I’m dying to write but don’t have the time to really write! The text equivalent of a photo-dump! Today’s Beauty-Critical Content Charcuterie is brought to…

Ask the average skincare enthusiast what causes clogged pores — otherwise known as acne — and they’ll probably answer “sebum.” There are aestheticians and dermatologists and all sorts of online experts who’ll say the same thing. But it’s not true. It’s one of the biggest myths in the beauty industry…

Introducing “non-aging,” the disguise du jour for anti-aging ideology. The groundbreaking term recently replaced “slow aging,” “preservaging,” “aging gracefully,” and “addressing mature skin” as the way to capitalize on women’s fear of living long-but-wrinkly lives while conveniently avoiding the ire of anti-anti-agers! Well, almost avoiding. When I read the words…

Honestly, fuck Goop. Fuck its appropriation of ancient, bone-deep wisdom. Fuck the way it positions holistic health as a high-end luxury. Fuck it for milking easy, accessible, affordable practices for profit. Fuck how it offers free healing tools — Breathwork! Meditation! Yoga! — next to $800 serums, making the former…

At the end of 2019, I wrote a retrospective of the… best? worst? just kind of there? celebrity beauty brands of the year for Fashionista. I guess it wasn’t so much a retrospective as a critique of all the ways in which celebrity culture has infiltrated our lives. It started: …

Every beauty reporter has a beat, a type of story they like to tell. I cover the end of things. The end of shelfies. The end of sheet masks. The end of products and practices that put an unnecessary burden on the environment, that feed us false ideas of empowerment…

The “fat-free” fad of the 1990s was born in the 1960s. That’s when the sugar industry paid scientists to “find” data that sugar didn’t lead to heart disease or weight gain, but fats did. The findings fueled America’s first dietary guidelines in the 1970s, the creation of the carb-heavy food…