My junior year of high school, my formerly sporadic, mild acne that had been contained through measures like consistent courses of antibiotics and hormonal contraceptives bloomed into a case so severe that my dermatologist took one look at the constellation of painful, purple lumps dotting my jawline and declared it was finally time for Accutane.

Accutane, also known as Isotretinoin (my generic was called “Claravis,” and we bought it at Sam’s Club during our monthly bulk trail mix and paper towel hauls), is the Big Daddy of acne treatments. It’s so intense that you have to be on birth control while taking it (because an “Accutane baby” is so severely deformed that it’s inhumane to give birth to one, according to the March of Dimes) and agree to monthly blood draws to closely monitor your liver health, as it can seriously damage your organs.

Given these major risks and side effects, you’d think I would’ve been a little apprehensive about going on the medication—au contraire, my friend! You underestimate the superficiality that reigned supreme in my teenage girl consciousness. 

The day Dr. Eisner agreed to write that magic prescription was the greatest day of my young life. I practically skipped to the pharmacy counter. What did I need a liver for? As long as my skin was clear, everything else came second. 

A skincare menace

After suffering through puberty and the resultant overly active oil glands, my love affair with skincare products—exfoliate! cleanse! tone! moisturize!—became a persistent feature in my life. 

Raised on a steady stream of Jessica Simpson’s relentless Proactiv infomercials, I was the kid at 7th grade sleepovers spending 20 minutes in the bathroom before bed, carefully applying layers of serums and lotions and spot treatments. I was constantly on the hunt for the “best cleanser for oily skin” or the “perfect primer,” chasing the elusive dream of having “good” skin. 

The idea that my skin’s issues should be money-responsive was a given; every piece of advertising I consumed on MTV and VH1 told me as such. If you had skin problems, you bought something to fix it.  

The Claravis, which runs anywhere between $185 and $360 per 30-day supply, was the final, unglamorous stop on the winding road up Mt. Epidermis. It was dangerous, clinical; it didn’t come in pink packaging. It came in a small box with tiny, cartoon pregnant women stamped with large red “X”s on every single pill’s perforation, warning—a dozen times!—that getting knocked up while taking these little orange Vitamin A bombs would ruin your life. 

I remember my mom being floored by the price, but similarly hopeful that it would be the last thing we’d need to do to solve this problem once and for all.

Miraculously, the product worked (and my liver didn’t fail; bonus!), and my obsession with skincare subsided in the aftermath. I felt as though I had seen through the matrix: The aisles of pastel products with punchy branding and bold promises that roped me in so effortlessly before seemed quaint and cutesy compared to the medical-grade treatment I’d just endured, the skin on my lips and ears flaking off repeatedly along the way. 

Real results don’t come cheap

A few years later when I was in my early twenties, I went to a plastic surgeon for a consultation to “remove” the remaining scars from the acne cysts. “Ah, yeah,” he said, knowingly, zeroing in on my imperfections before I had even pointed out the areas I was insecure about, “I can see why that would bother you.” 

The cost to laser away my flaws under anesthesia? Between $3,000 and $4,000, followed by two weeks of indoor recovery time (because the skin on my face would be peeling off in sheets). There were no promises that one treatment would do the job; it would probably take a few. 

I left his office in tears, realizing that the self-inflicted acne scars from picking at my face for hours in AP European History were, for all intents and purposes, permanent. I wasn’t going to subject myself (or my checking account) to his recommendation.

Again, I learned: Achieving the type of results you see in Kerry Washington’s flawless, air-brushed Neutrogena ads in Seventeen magazine aren’t achieved via a fun stroll through Sephora. The idea that being perfect should be fun is the beauty industry’s masterful sleight of hand. In reality, perfection requires brutality; distinguished by needles, blood, and lasers, not creams, essences, and sprays. 

New “concerns,” new marketing

But somewhere in the 10 intervening years, the intensity of this lesson waned. I found myself more frequently perusing the aisles at Ulta for a scrub that would promise to minimize the appearance of aging, or gelatinous under-eye patches that would make me look less tired. My obsession with curing my acne went away with the acne, but it was replaced by an acute awareness of (the very normal) fine lines appearing around my eyes and forehead.

Did I look overworked? Overburdened? Surely there was a cream for that. 

I was drawn to these products like a moth to an open flame, unable to pass by the cosmetics section of Whole Foods without seriously considering a new “organic” nighttime mask. 

My spending on skincare—now the target of “anti-aging” marketing, at the ripe old age of 28—began to tick up again.

Sometimes, we just need an intervening force

I interviewed beauty culture critic and journalist Jessica DeFino for The Money with Katie Show this week, and we talked about skin health. She told me, “The [beauty] industry serves us the science of aesthetic manipulation, and we receive it as the science of skin health. The skin’s function on a human body is to be a layer of protection. And what we’re doing with skincare, much of the time, is bombarding it with the things it’s designed to protect us against, and wearing away that level of protection. The skin has the inherent ability to self-cleanse, self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-protect…self-heal.”

She described the way our skin needs to communicate with its surroundings to know what to do: whether it’s time to shed old cells, produce more oil, respond to aggressors in the environment, or something else—but by smothering it with products, we interrupt the feedback loop, and create a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy.

The moment I heard this explanation, I felt a deep, intuitive knowing that it was true. The ghosts of a thousand empty St. Ives Apricot Scrubs visited me with visions of the ridiculously aggressive way I used to try to beat my skin into submission, assuming that it was too dirty, too shiny, or too dull on its own. 

Seeing through the quick fix matrix

I have the benefit of hindsight and context as I reflect on the cystic acne flare-ups that landed me in the Sam’s Club pharmacy line, searching desperately for a cure.

It was an incredibly tumultuous time in my life: I had recently experienced a personal trauma that I was trying to overcome by repressing it. I was applying to colleges and managing the workload of several AP courses. I was in the midst of a hormonal tidal wave. I was drinking alcohol every weekend and lying to my parents about it. 

Of course my skin was freaking out—I was a walking bundle of nerves. 

But at the time, I didn’t understand the connection between my mental health and physical health, or the way our bodies react when we’re under duress. To me, the acne was just another problem to be solved, not a symptom of a larger root cause. 

This is, I think, common: We don’t notice the way our struggles might be interconnected, so instead, we self-medicate them separately (with alcohol, or drugs, or shopping, or food, or escaping into TikTok for hours), and then wonder why things aren’t improving. 

And it’s precisely when we’re in the depths of our search to placate some of the uneasiness inherent to the human condition that marketing departments the world over welcome us with open arms! 

It’s those moments of vulnerability, mid-TikTok scroll (the 2023 version of being pummeled with Proactiv campaigns on MTV), when we’re feeling burnt out and low energy that the undisclosed influencer ad for AminoLean swoops in to “save” us. 

This is the natural human tendency that marketing—particularly marketing in the beauty industry—appeals to. Who among us wouldn’t prefer the easy way out? If only it were that easy.

If I really wanted to improve my skin health, the most impactful solutions to try—in order—were probably:

1. Drink more water

2. Eat more healthy fats

3. Get enough sleep

4. Manage stress

But who wants to do those boring-ass, difficult things? A $78 Vitamin C serum from a company called “Drunk Elephant” is so much more appealing.

Despite evidence to the contrary, I’m not trying to be the Sephora Fun Police (though hiring a squadron of my own would’ve saved me a lot of money and frustration over the years). There’s nothing wrong with spending money on fun stuff—but oftentimes these purchases are attempts at solving a problem (and more often than not, an invented problem; like the way the aforementioned serum’s commitment to “firm, brighten, and improve the look of photoaging” implies your skin should be firmer, brighter, or…less photoaged?).  

Things go from light and amusing to, “Wait, are these crow’s feet getting deeper?” awfully quickly, which is, of course, deliberate. Trying to meet these unmeetable, artificial standards focuses women’s time and money on chasing the impossible fountain of youth, beaming their energy inward like a Fraxel laser, rather than radiating outward on the world around them.

So much of impulse spending is, at its core, a search for little more than a quick fix: to make us feel powerful, or more attractive, or more connected. The problem—by design!—is that these fixes are temporary, and usually create a new need for another purchase in the future. The financial consequences of this negative feedback loop don’t take long to reveal themselves, as money itself (or the lack thereof) is a leading cause of anxiety in the US. 

These are all, of course, entirely natural human desires—it’s not shameful to want to feel attractive, or connected, or powerful. What’s new is the way hyper-targeted marketing algorithmically zeroes in on those needs, and serves us a message perfectly calibrated to exploit them. 

Sometimes it takes seeing through the matrix to zap these messages of their power, realizing that the real solutions to our problems, in most cases, aren’t going to be easy ’n breezy: In my teenage self’s case, it wasn’t Clinique and Bioré pore strips, it was doctor’s offices and blood tests. (Which just goes to show: Even if a quicker fix is going to be effective, it’s still probably painful and unpleasant.)

When I’m feeling overwhelmed at work, it’s not a trip to the satisfyingly predictable Container Store, with its acrylic organizers and perfectly labeled promises of an orderly life—it’s taking 20 minutes to move around outside in the sun, drink some water, and lie down (the magic trio of human biology). 

For me, the best antidote I’ve found to succumbing to the promise of a dopamine hit from “adding to cart” is identifying the dopamine providers in my life that are life-sustaining and time-tested (even the cavepeople got a little neurological boost from being in sunshine and getting enough protein, you know?). I would list them here again, but they’re probably the boring things you’re already aware of (sleep, hydration, exercise, journaling, time around other humans). The stuff that resists commodification and leans more “fix” than “quick.” 

The other impactful thing is—and this is a little harder to change—your social circle. I have a few close friends who embrace aging, rarely wear makeup, and focus the vast majority of their energy on interests and goals outside of themselves. Spending time with them almost always reorients me accordingly, building up the areas of my psyche that have been eroded by an onslaught of cultural messages attempting to direct me to the nearest Juvederm specialist. 

This highlights the way in which the beauty industry (and marketing more generally) might be a broad, far-reaching system with its tentacles puppeteering societal norms, but individuals have the power to influence one another with their choices to abstain. A system is only as strong as its participants.