I Broke Up with Skincare

Every time I open TikTok, interspersed between my cat videos and “easy” vegan recipes and corporate funnies, there’s a woman doing her skincare routine. Or her hair. Or her makeup. And she likely just took an “everything shower.”

And it makes me very tired. 

As Twitter user Horse_ebooks so sagely said in 2012, “everything happens so much” and there’s only been more in the last twelve years. What I’m saying is, life is exhausting. 

I mean, here’s the deal. More and more of us are working bullshit jobs (doing our clicky-clackies, as my TikTok girlies would say) that we live in terror of being mass-laid off from. Every day a new, nonsensical law is passed or ruling is made. Kids are being beaten to death in their school bathrooms for no reason other than baseless hate. Everything is really expensive and even people earning six-figures are now living paycheck to paycheck as the wealth gap widens. There are still Nazis. More Nazis, in fact. And that’s just the localized horror in the United States. 

So, we’ve all got a lot going on at the moment (and that includes keeping up with the collective consensus on Taylor, which is basically a part time job!) and I have decided that I simply cannot participate in beauty culture anymore.

Of course, beauty culture is very ingrained in all of us, particularly in women, so while I’d like to tell you I just got up one day and threw out every product I owned, the truth is that it was a very gradual evolution.

It started when I was 25 and started having the worst acne I’d ever had. This all felt cruel and unusual, because I was otherwise healthier than I’d ever been. I’d started running. I’d gone vegan (not inherently healthy, but I was eating more plants than I ever had before). 

So I did what most people do when they’re confronted with acne: Skincare. So much skincare. I never went full 10-step, but at one point in time I was using at least seven different products on any given day. And I was buying new products every week, desperate for a miracle cure that would clear up my skin. This sucked up both a lot of time and a lot of money. 

After a year or so of trying to troubleshoot my face and beat my skin into submission with cleansers, creams, serums, and oils, I tried Curology, and finally, something that worked! I ditched every other product and stuck to a simple routine of washing with a gentle cleanser twice a day, using Curology at night, and loyally moisturizing. In a matter of months, my skin was clear. 

Around three years later, I found Jessica DeFino’s writing, and she forced me to ask myself the question I’d been secretly wondering all along: Was it Curology’s medicated formula that cleared up my skin? Or was it just that…I stopped fucking with my skin so much? 

It was that one, the second thing. I canceled my Curology subscription more than six months ago, and my skin has remained clear. In fact, I’ve stopped washing my face so often—sometimes even going a full day without doing so!—and I’m as zit-free as I’ve ever been. The ugly (see what I did there?) truth is that skincare products do not exist to improve your skin. They exist for you to buy them, and then buy more of them, so that the people who produce them can make enough money for second homes. 

Through DeFino, I discovered the work of James Hamblin. He’s a big advocate of the microbiome—not stripping your skin by overwashing, getting exposure to all the good germs—but also not one of those crunchy-to-alt-right-pipeline people. (He, like all those who are not fucking morons, believes in vaccinations.) 

So, if performing beauty—be it skincare, makeup, hair styling, hair removal—is time-consuming, expensive, and not even beneficial to us in any meaningful way, why do it?

Maybe because you like it? Because it makes you feel good?

Okay, but…why? Why do you like it? Why does it make you feel good? 

And who actually benefits from you liking it?

Capitalism benefits when we spend our hard-earned money on products we never actually use up before buying the next thing some TIkTok affiliate influenced us to buy. Patriarchy benefits when we feel like we have to be attractive to be worthy of love or attention. White supremacy benefits when we perpetuate beauty standards that are, and historically have been, centered around whiteness.

I’m not casting moral judgment on anyone who wears makeup, or follows a multi-step skincare routine, or gets their hair laser removed. There are very real penalties for not performing beauty. DeFino says it best: “If you are trans, it's really hard to divest from very gendered beauty performance, because that puts you at risk. If you are older, you might not want to divest from anti-aging behaviors because you feel your job depends on it. There are obligations for women of color as well. There's so much racism and colorism tied up in ideas of cleanliness and how your hair should be worn. It's important to be sensitive to that and to also realize that there are little ways in which it is safe and healthy and maybe even good for you mentally, physically, psychologically, spiritually, to step away from a certain beauty product, procedure, or behavior and realize, okay, I'm actually fine without it.”

Realizing this, of course, helps us come to terms with the fact that we don’t participate in beauty culture because we like it or because it makes us feel good. Shaving my legs is fucking awful—a day or two post-shave, and it itches like I’ve got bedbugs—and if there weren’t situations where I felt too vulnerable to show up with an inch of fur on my shins, I would never do it again. And now that I’ve accepted that no, I don’t actually like doing this for any reason other than the social norm of it all, I do it less than I ever have.

And, freed from the scrape of the razor and the smother of the shaving cream, my skin feels better than it ever has.