There are very few things in my life I would classify as “religious,” but skincare is one of them. I first became a devotee in my early teens, and in the ensuing 12 or so years I have rarely skipped my twice daily cleansing and moisturizing. For the last ten or so years my skincare has been a steady mix of prescription products and drugstore favorites that do what needs to be done. In my early teens there was a span of two years where my routine was off the wall. I have ivory, rosacea-prone, sensitive skin, which several of my middle school classmates felt the need to point out to me. “Your face is really red,” one boy told me after gym class. Not a direct insult, but definitely not a compliment. I tried everything from Proactiv to a $40 bottle of rosehip oil, a Christmas present I begged my parents for. The rosehip was part of a distinct phase in my skin care journey, my all natural phase. With those products, I genuinely thought I was the most glamorous 15-year-old in the world, but when my skin started going South and I proudly announced my routine to my new dermatologist, I was met with the professional version of “Girl, what the fuck were you thinking?” And that is how my current skincare routine, chemicals and all, was born. Just because my skincare routine has been stagnant, doesn’t mean I’ve lost interest in the topic altogether. My wellness obsession reared its well-coiffed head last year after the pandemic struck, when my mental health went on the decline.
Have you ever been in a car that started making an odd noise and you think to yourself “God, I hope that doesn’t mean anything too bad”? That’s what it has been like to live in my brain for the past year and a half. Just a constant whirr of imminent self-destruction in the back of my skull, and I’m just riding along hoping I can make it to a gas station before everything falls apart. Well, desperate times call for desperate measures. To numb the pain of capitol rioters, the rise of fascism, and the ignorant ramblings of anti-vaxxers, I immersed myself in the beauty routine section of YouTube, which writer Sarah Hagi correctly called “the most brain dead place on the internet.” These videos feature celebrities talking you through their makeup/skincare routine and their beauty “philosophy.” An equally monotonous cousin of the beauty routine videos are “What I Eat In A Day” where more celebrities talk about what they put in their bodies to stay so hot. These quotidian “routine” videos have become so popular they’ve sparked a cottage industry of reaction videos from dermatologists and dietitians who comment on their merit and accuracy.
Watching the reaction videos gave me a sense of moral superiority. Doesn’t Olivia Rodrigo know that you shouldn’t put a serum wand on your face because the mixture will go bad due to bacteria? Jesus could never be me. Despite originally relying on these videos for a light escape, I noticed a growing darkness behind them. Not only did they forever ruin the phrase “on the go” for me, they showed me that all of the social ills I was hoping to escape, and thought myself free of—distrust of science, misinformation, culty thinking— were actually right in front of me the whole time. With a reliance on influencer/celebrity endorsements and the rise of clean beauty, the most pernicious, pseudoscientific parts of the wellness industry have filtered up into the mainstream and (probably) your medicine cabinet.
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For those already initiated into the world of celebrity beauty routines, former Disney Channel star Bella Thorne’s routine is a classic. Thorne received flack online for her “all natural, DIY” routine in Harper’s Bazaar which included a lemon sugar and olive oil facial scrub (a big skincare no no) followed by a coconut oil mask (another no). Rather than get into the insanity of these “products”, the thing I find most worrisome about Thorne’s routine comes in her intro. “I think so many times we’ll think the chemicals will work because it says it works,” she says, explaining her shift to all natural. “But what about if you stop using that product? Is your skin reliant on that product?...That’s one thing chemicals will really never fix.” Comments under the video range from horror to derision. “Every aesthetician is literally screaming and having a panic attack right now” said one commenter. “Guys, I think I found something worse than Kylie Skin” said another.
Sure, Thorne’s skincare methods are profoundly odd and out of line with scientific understanding of skincare, but plenty of other celebrities have parroted the same talking points. Olivia Wilde said in her “Go To Bed With Me” video that when she was struggling with adult acne dermatologists told her to use “harsh chemicals,” which she thought at the time “surely can’t be right.” According to Wilde her skincare savior was True Botanicals, where she serves as chief brand activist. True Botanicals, a “clean and sustainable” beauty brand whose products cost between $28 and $140, is featured heavily in Wilde’s routine. She praises the smell of their Clear Nourishing cleanser, equating smell with safety. “If it smells like crazy chemicals, it is crazy chemicals,” she concludes.
Thorne and Wilde’s use of the word chemical has a crude edge to it. Susan Yara, a former beauty journalist who now runs her own YouTube channel, hit the nail on the head with her analysis of Thorne’s video. “When people start throwing out the word chemical it really bothers me because they use it as a term to scare you,” she said. Wilde and Thorne’s comments exploit popular assumptions that chemicals are something to clean your floor with, not apply lovingly to the most visible part of your body. Their claims gloss over the major point that chemicals are a broad category, encompassing everything from Arsenic to Glycolic Acid. By contrast, as Yara notes, “natural” can encompass stuff like poison ivy, which you don’t want near your face. What really irks me is that the “harsh chemical” claim mars an otherwise innocuous story about finally solving a skin issue, turning it into a not-so-subtle dig at an entire science and medical profession. This is not to say that the medical industry is above critique or dermatologists can’t be bad at their jobs. But without grounding the critique and instead relying on buzzwords like “chemical,” the attempt at criticism loses its integrity and sets the stage for more complicated (and intentional) deceit.
Enter the natural deodorant industry. Anyone who has existed adjacent to the health and wellness industry is probably familiar with the logic of: if you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it. That seemingly modest, reasonable maxim is probably not so terrible when you’re trying to pick out marinara sauce at the grocery store. However natural beauty and wellness brands have been trying to apply the same logic to their products. A recent advertisement for Native deodorant featured women attempting to read the back of a deodorant label, stumbling over big words. But hand them Native and suddenly the task becomes easy. Coconut oil? Shea butter? All pronounceable words, the ad suggests, ensure that a deodorant is safe, reliable. Like Wilde and Thorne, the shallow logic the ad casts doubt far and wide, with an implication that if any ingredient is too medical or chemical sounding it’s immediately suspect. But worse, it assumes that knowledge is static. If you’re truly invested in knowing what’s in your products you could buy a product that has a list of ingredients you already know. Or, wild idea, you can just Google the ingredients in your current deodorant and expand your knowledge from there.
Native’s manipulation of language is by no means unique. Natural beauty companies regularly rely on terms that spark an emotional pull rather than reason and serious investigation. What’s worse is that advertisements for these products prey on fear in order to feign consumer empowerment and sell more products. Take “free of '' labels, ubiquitous in the beauty world. My Shea Moisture coconut oil body wash proudly proclaims “No Petrolatum'' on the label. A cursory Google search of petrolatum reveals that it’s actually petroleum jelly, which you might know as Vaseline. Unsurprisingly, there are claims petroleum jelly causes cancer though experts have serious doubts about their veracity. According to chemistry PhD and science educator Michelle Wong on The Eco Well podcast, it’s actually pretty common for “free of '' labels to be misleading. Some brands use labels to claim their products are “free of'' ingredients which would never be used in the first place. To use medicinal and pharmaceutical chemistry Phd Dr. Anke Ginzburg’s example from the podcast, there would never be a foaming agent in a lipstick, so a company saying their lipstick is free from SLS, a foaming agent, doesn’t mean much. Other times, like with my body wash, companies say their products are free of ingredients that actually aren’t that dangerous to begin with. Either way these companies rely on consumers not having an in-depth understanding of ingredients, using their fear of “harsh chemicals” as a way to make them feel safe and compelled to buy their products. If a foundation proudly notes on its label that it’s “free of parabens”, a common low-allergen preservative, I’m probably going to assume parabens are bad, and become suspicious of products that don’t make the same comforting but meaningless claim.
A deeply profound irony I’m compelled to point out is that words like clean and nontoxic—the foundation of the entire “natural beauty” industry—are unregulated. This means that brands can use these labels without meeting any prior standard. Even stickers by NGOs like the Environmental Working Group certifying a product's cleanliness don’t mean much since the EWG has been accused of “selling” these labels to brands and failing to base their messaging around actual science. Vacuous as it may be, the Native deodorant argument works. Behentrimonium methosulfate may be a mouthful, but it's an actual thing — a chemical compound found in the very popular CeraVe Hydrating Cleanser. Terms like clean and non-toxic don’t even have standardized definitions. Yet, they have stuck around because they pull on the centuries old association between cleanliness and virtue. Who is going to walk into a CVS and ask for the dirty, toxic beauty section? No one.
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Circa 2017, when I was in college, I went through a hot lemon water phase. Each night I juiced a lemon into my ice-cube tray, left it in the freezer, and popped a cube into my hot thermos in the morning. Normally, I’m a black tea/chai latte kind of a girl but the amount of professionally good-looking people on the internet telling me that drinking hot lemon water was their “beauty secret” was too overwhelming to ignore. I have since ditched that trend, but it is very much alive. In actor Ian Somerhalder’s 2019 “What I Eat In A Day'' video, he extols lemon water saying it “goes into your adrenals.” After watching dietitian Abby Sharpe’s reaction to the video, I learned that this “adrenal effect” has to do with changing your body's pH levels, which lemon water doesn’t do in any significant way. To paraphrase Sharpe, if our body’s pH was sensitive enough to be seriously altered by lemon water we would all be dead. For all the homegrown lingo of the natural beauty world, “adrenals” is a million dollar science word that most laypeople, myself included, don’t automatically understand. It’s a solid example of the natural beauty industry making strange, antagonistic bedfellows of science, co-opting its language to bolster misunderstanding and pseudoscience.
Natural beauty gurus regularly cite studies to back up their beliefs about wellness, often without paying attention to the substance of the research. This results in outrageous assertions that spark frenzied media coverage. Non-natural deodorant causes cancer! Sunscreens contain chemicals that are absorbed into the bloodstream! The reality, as always, is much more complex. According to the National Cancer Institute, the link between deodorant and cancer is unclear. Frequent application of deodorant could have estrogen-like effects on the body which could contribute to the growth of breast cancer cells, though the science is inconclusive. The claim about sunscreen entering your bloodstream falls prey to a common lack of understanding about toxicology. Wong wrote on her blog that while it’s true that some sunscreen ingredients do end up in your blood, “absorption does not mean harm.” She added that some studies focus on “maximal use conditions,” meaning the subjects are applying more product than the ordinary person would. But when reading these studies health gurus don’t account for this, blasting the talking point that applying sunscreen leads to toxic levels of chemicals in your blood without noting that you would have to be applying unrealistic amounts of the product to reach those blood levels.
In addition to ignoring dosage size and widespread doubt about links between ingredients and disease, some wellness influencers base their claims off of studies that aren’t even done on humans. This includes Moon Juice, a popular supplement/food/skincare brand, which describes itself as “bridging the world of alchemy and biology for functional benefits.” One of the brand’s most talked about products is Sex Dust, designed for “igniting creative energy, in and out of the bedroom.” Per a footnote on their website, the FDA has not evaluated these claims. A jar will set you back $38 and, like several of Moon Juice’s products, claims to be “informed by Traditional Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda.” Moon Juice includes Chinese medicinal ingredients like fruit extract Schisandra and desert plant Cistanche. According to a Splinter article, Schisandra is said to help with energy, immune function, blood flow, and PMS to name a few, while Cistanche is supposed to treat impotence and female fertility. The studies that back up some of these claims, however, were done on animals, including rats.
While I am hard pressed to defend Amanda Chantal-Bacon, the rich, white lady behind Moon Juice (fun fact: she’s a graduate of the NYC private school I attended K-8th grade. Go Owls!), her products bring a thorny reality into discussions about natural wellness quackery. Many products in the wellness industry are appropriated versions of actual cultures, traditions, and non-Western realms of knowledge. In writing this piece I don’t want to convey broadly that those belief systems are foolish and not worth your attention or to leave you feeling like Western medicine is its own holy scripture. Ditch a doctor you don’t think suits you, read those ingredient labels, and ask questions about anything that may concern you. Hell, if squeezing $200 worth of essential oils on your face at night makes you happy, you do you. What I’m against is the way companies and celebrities’ claims about an ingredients’ effectiveness filter through the social media ecosphere until they lose all cultural and scientific context.
A bastardized example of this is a man named Anthony William, aka The Medical Medium. William claims to converse with a spirit who tells him secrets to wellness that doctors haven’t even figured out yet. The message from above? Celery juice. The Atlantic reports “it promises to relieve inflammation, improve your microbiome, alkalize the body, kill mold in your gut, cure chronic mystery illnesses, and banish toxins.’” Bear in mind, William isn’t just advocating for people to consume more celery. He believes celery juice in particular is a superior way of consuming celery and must be drunk in the morning on an empty stomach. As described in The New York Times, celery juice is not unhealthy for you, but it’s not the cureall William promises. And yet, William has numerous high-profile celebrity followers. The trend has permeated through wellness culture so broadly that I was aware of the celery juice trend for a full year before knowing its “mystical” origins.
When celebrities discuss their love of celery juice, they don't necessarily mention William. In his “What I Eat In A Day” video, Derek Hough and his girlfriend promote their celery juice habit by saying it “flushes out toxins from your liver” without elaborating where they acquired that knowledge. This lack of context cuts to the heart of irresponsibility in the wellness world and its celebrity practitioners. When you cater to a Western audience, as many of these celebrities and YouTube channels do, you cater to an audience that has been taught to see claims through the filter of science. If someone assures me celery juice flushes out my toxins, my first instinct is to assume they’ve reached that claim through the consensus of Western medicine and science. Public figures who don’t indicate that they are talking about a spiritual practice or fail to recognize the origins of their claims risk opening the door to, at best, confusion, and at worst, misinformation.
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Perhaps raising the alarm about this natural beauty culture seems futile or even irrelevant. Is anyone really going to get sucked down a pseudoscience rabbit hole by watching Olivia Wilde cleanse her face or Derek Hough drink some juice? Probably not. But for me the rhetoric employed in these examples is uncomfortably close to some very scary shit. These videos represent the tip of the iceberg, a visible, palatable, watered down version of a much more dangerous line of thinking that lurks beneath the surface and goes beyond bullshit advertising. A hop, skip and a jump away is the world of anti-vaxx skeptics and QAnon where an innocuous “I’m just asking questions” facade acts like a trojan horse making these ideologies passable to well-intentioned open minded people. A Harper’s Bazaar article on the link between wellness influencers and QAnon touches on this. “‘The Great Awakening’ and the hashtag #savethechildren, two highly effective viral QAnon campaigns, do not scream far-right extremism,” writer Hayley Phelan notes. “‘Do your own research,’ the rallying cry of conspiracy theorists everywhere, is a misleading logical fallacy. Facts and data do not have meaning in isolation.”
The link between conspiracy theories and wellness is so tight that the term “conspirituality” was invented to capture their intersection. An article in Quartz noted that Gwyneth Paltrow and right-wing personality Alex Jones sold the same products on their platforms. Breaking down the similarities between the two for The Cut, Ethan Sapienza noted that “both are certain everything is killing you.” He continued, “Goop and Infowars often assure you that the world is dangerous and you’re probably going to die soon, unless you buy into their products and ideology.” In other words, Goop and Infowars are closed ecosystems, manufacturing a problem and a solution simultaneously. I think you could expand this claim to broad swaths of the natural wellness industry and its anti-vaxx, right-wing counterpart. The natural deodorant industry, for instance, created the problem of toxic, unpronounceable, cancer causing “chemicals” through fear mongering advertising and then used that fear to push their “solution” to this problem. NPR reports anti-vaxx influencers have been selling their own “cures'' or treatments for COVID-19. The piece paraphrases Kolina Koltai, a researcher studying the anti-vaxx movement at Washington University. “[Koltai] believes that money is a major part of a feedback loop that continues to drive vaccine misinformation on social media,” the piece reads. “The extended public health crisis has created a marketing opportunity that ‘just gives you more and more followers and more and more money.’”
It makes sense that the fine line separating innocuous wellness culture from anti-vaxx and right-wing extremism has blurred over the past year. The same Harper’s Bazaar article detailed the transition of wellness influencer Christiane Northrup from a natural medicine advocate to QAnon supporter over the course of the pandemic. Northup gets most of her information about COVID from Carrie Madej, a “discredited osteopath whose outlandish claims about the vaccines’ supposed ability to rewire our DNA.” Others, like Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai (who holds a PhD, not MD in biology), tie their anti-vaxx views to the “deep state.” So-called “science” is plastered all over Ayyadurai’s Instagram account. In one video he discusses how cumin seed oil boosts immunity. Another promises to reveal “the Science of Masks and Oral Health” in which Ayyadurai uses, what he calls, “rational science” to preach that masks are bad for your health because they supposedly give you cavities or swollen gums. All these “videos” on Ayyadurai’s profile, by the way, are iPhone recordings of videos playing on a laptop computer. No, that doesn’t affect their content, but it sure does feel relevant.
Both natural wellness and anti-vaxx ideologies are flexible enough to contort into broad mistrust of an amorphous “other” (dermatologists, the deep state) or embed itself in pseudoscientific specifics like misunderstood studies or claims of “warping DNA.” But cumulatively these deceptions feel like window dressing for the main lie, which touches our most human impulses. Amanda Montell explained in her book Cultish on the linguistics of cult and cult-adjacent organizations that the people attracted to cultish thinking aren’t the bitter, chewed-up-and-spit-out masses we’d assume. They are idealists in search of a better world. Anti-vaxxers and modern wellness brands take advantage of peoples’ desires for a cleaner, better, safer, more sustainable world and exploit them.
While it can be hard to feel empathy for anti-vaxxers at the moment, one mother, Sarah, told Phelan that anti-vaxx rhetoric was so effective on her as a new mom because, overwhelmed with protectiveness she thought ‘‘I’ve got this perfect child, and I’m going to do what to him?’” In a way, I empathize with her concerns, and most importantly her skeptical relationship to American medicine. Without universal healthcare the expense and bureaucracy around just going to the doctor is almost too much to bear. The opioid epidemic also exposed the callousness of drug companies, who put out studies that duped some doctors into thinking opioids were safe and non-addictive. In a certain sense, Sarah’s story reminds me of my thirteen-year-old self dousing my face in expensive oils and frantically rubbing in supermodel Miranda Kerr’s Kora Organics exfoliator, hoping that if I scrubbed hard enough an unblemished, porcelain layer of skin would emerge underneath my bumpy red exterior. I was looking for the same thing Sarah was—control, assurance. I wanted the feeling that I was doing things right, smarter, better. If I couldn’t save myself from the inevitability of aging and dying, maybe I could at least save myself from the chemicals that threatened to hasten my demise.
Escape from capitalism is the underlying lie of both the wellness and anti-vaxx world. The pretext of profit is an effective way to evoke mistrust in an institution without providing substantial critique. Just look at Ayyadurai who preaches against “Big Academia,” which he says is only after grant money. The implication here is that Ayyadurai has no conflict of interest and is therefore trustworthy. On the wellness side, turning away from “chemicals” and toward nature can be read as turning away from the modern capitalist world towards a more simple world focused on the spiritual self as opposed to the material one. It’s why the East and Eastern practices like yoga and Ayurveda are so easily co-opted into the wellness movement. In New Age Capitalism: Making Money East of Eden, author Kimberly J. Lau explains that consumer choices that might be seen as taking a stance against capitalism like shopping for organic foods, aren’t actually revolutionary but just feeds another health conscious free market beast, which she calls “New Age Capitalism.” Lau argues that by pitting Eastern spiritualism against Western industrialization New Age Capitalism serves a stereotypical vision of the East as “nations of spiritual peasants” as opposed to “contemporary world economies.” She concludes “Ultimately the ideology of the alternative is a powerful form of popular Orientalism thus making for very attractive options in the global marketplace of New Age capitalism.”
Anti-vaxxers have made a living selling alternative “cures.” Goop is now a $250 million company. New Age Capitalism by no means offers an escape from consumerism, just like it doesn’t offer any real spirituality. It imagines a world that is, at the very least, tinged with libertarianism where every person must act as a consumer vigilante against a big, malicious bureaucratic institution. I’m not going to come to your house and wag my finger at your prescription shampoo nor will I wag my finger at your True Botanicals collection. If I did that you would be free to come to my house and tell me I overpaid for my rose quartz face roller. I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes this ‘clean’ beauty stuff is pretty fun, and some things (like my rose quartz face roller) actually makes a positive difference in peoples’ lives. I just want you to hold your moisturizer in your hands and know that it’s probably not going to kill you, but it won’t save you either.
Photo sourced via Unsplash