Like We're Gonna Die Hot

Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! I spent most of April waiting for the weather to warm and the Prozac to kick in, and at least one of the two has improved my mood enough to round up this month’s beauty news without cackling maniacally and/or weeping! And so, onto the links… IN THIS ISSUE: Wedding weight loss! Looksmaxxing as life-minning! Death plays a joke on Bryan Johnson! “Beef!” Commodifying the clouds! Cuteness & violence! Facelift slippage! Marilyn Monroe! Beauty as a source of power! Cosmetic class performance! The smell of MAGA! HoleTox! Flavored asswipes! Fruit-scented vaginal suppositories! Phallic lip gloss! Foreskin aesthetics! & more! 🎶 Here comes the semaglutide… 🎶 I spoke to Sara Radin at Vogue about “The Rise of GLP-1 Wedding Weight Loss.” Wedding culture has historically centered on the bride’s appearance. Yet increasingly, grooms and partners of all genders are also participating in pre-wedding body modification—whether through weight loss, cosmetic treatments, or elaborate grooming routines. For DeFino, that shift says less about progress than about the expansion of the beauty economy. “The beauty industry’s version of equality over the past decade has often been equal pressure for everyone,” she says. “Instead of reducing the pressure on women, it has extended it to men.” The result is a kind of bleak parity: now everyone is subject to the same scrutiny. Read the whole thing here. Does looksmaxxing = life-minning? After declaring that he has “no regard for [his] own happiness” and cares only about the “work” of looksmaxxing — which, for him, includes doing meth to stay trim — influencer Clavicular overdosed while livestreaming on April 14. A 16-year-old aspiring looksmaxxer recently told CNN, “If I have a heart attack at 30, I have a heart attack” re: his illegal cattle steroid regimen. Not that this is anything new! It’s Debord’s Society of the Spectacle — “the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing.” It’s “I’d rather die hot than live ugly” for men. It’s “the morbid lifelessness of modern beauty.” It’s the Morgue Gaze. (I wrote more about the pervasive conflation of beauty and life — and averageness/ugliness as “a kind of death-in-life” — for The Guardian a while back.) On a more somber/less theoretical note, Danielle Crittenden’s Atlantic essay, “On Losing A Daughter,” destroyed me. The author’s eldest child, Miranda, was found dead after possibly skipping medication for a chronic health condition, in part due to its aesthetic side effects: “Lately, Miranda had been fighting what she assumed was a stubborn cold. When she was ill, she was supposed to take more cortisol, the stress hormone that her body could no longer produce. But cortisol came with a price: It bloated her face, thickened her waist, and made her feel unlike herself. I knew she’d been playing with her dosage to minimize these side effects.” It reminded me of the concept of “sororal death,” which I first learned about in Emmeline Clein’s book Dead Weight. Susan Sontag wrote about sororal death as “women dying for each other,” while Anne Boyer, “writing a theoretical framework for breast cancer, defines sororal death as dying of being a woman.” Clein expands on this to include “deaths from eating disorders,” “deaths from botched plastic surgeries,” and “dying of the demands of womanhood, the fascism of femininity.” Andi Zeisler went long on necrocosmetics — i.e., fillers made from cadaver fat — for Salon, and included a tidbit I cannot believe I forgot to mention in my last Ask Ugly column: