Beauty Is $$$: How to Hop Off The “Hot Girl Hamster Wheel”

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Today’s episode throws it back to a concept I first wrote about several years ago: The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. It refers to the expensive maintenance that “traditional female beauty ideals” prescribe: haircuts, manis/pedis, spray tans…the list goes on. But why is this never covered in personal finance sector, despite how much these costs add up?

We dig into the numbers, the effects beauty has on our self-esteem and the world around us, and how to do a Hot Girl Detox to reclaim your time (and wallet). I’m joined by Jessica DeFino, a beauty culture critic, author of The Unpublishable (https://jessicadefino.substack.com/), and journalist who’s been called “the woman the beauty industry fears.”

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Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is President of Morning Brew content and additional fact checking comes from Scott Wilson.

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Mentioned in the Episode

• How ‘Empowerment’ Became Something for Women to Buy by Jia Tolentino, from The New York Times

• The average American woman spends $3,756 on her beauty and personal care regimen

• Self-Care Culture is Making Us Broke, with Chelsea Fagan

• Studies on “Pretty Privilege”

• The Age of Instagram Face by Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker

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Katie: Welcome back to The Money with Katie Show, Rich People. I’m your host, Katie Gatti Tassin. And today I have a little treat for you. Today’s episode throws it back to a concept that I first wrote about several years ago, so some of you may have seen the title and been like, aha, “the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel” returns. And indeed it does. But today’s episode is also reflective of the very first chapter of the book that I’m working on with Penguin Random House Portfolio to be released sometime in 2025. So I suppose you could also consider this a bit of a sneak peek, too.

The Hot Girl Hamster Wheel is how I refer to the never-ending litany of expensive maintenance practices that traditional feminine beauty ideals prescribe. And yes, that was a lot of jargon, but the metaphor felt incredibly fitting a few years ago when I was starting my financial journey and I was looking under the hood of my own spending habits for the very first time. The reason I think this conversation matters for a personal finance show that’s hosted by a woman is that it’s a money-relevant topic that I never heard discussed in financial media, despite how much of my budget it comprised. These expenses were not as simple to cut out as brand-name cereal or takeout binges, because they were fossilized in my self-esteem. I had to chip away at a lot more than just dollars and cents in order to unpack my financial decisions in the beauty realm. 

Now, of course, it’s not only women who engage with the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel, but they’ve historically been the primary intended audience of glossy advertising campaigns the world over. Our guest today is Jessica DeFino, a beauty culture critic and journalist who’s been called “the woman the beauty industry fears,” which makes her the perfect guest for this episode, and her work has appeared in Vogue, the New York Times, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, and Marie Claire. Since we received some listener feedback recently that y’all like to hear the more wide-ranging conversations in their entirety, in that spirit, I’m gonna give you my two cents first, and then we’ll get to the full conversation with Jessica. 

But as a former capital H, capital G Hot Girl, I am all too familiar with the financial trials and tribulations of attempting to maintain some semblance of an acceptable female appearance. So this is how my monthly rotation on that Hamster Wheel would begin. Number one, feel bad about myself for some generalized reason, and then notice in rapid, horrifying succession that my roots were growing out and my ends were split and my gel nails were peeling off and my legs were pale and hairy, and oh yeah, I was stressed.

Number two, panic-schedule a full day of back-to-back primping appointments, and add two points if taking PTO to accommodate in the middle of the week. 

Number three, attend said appointments in this order: massage, facial, eyebrow threading, cut and color, manicure, pedicure, spray tan, and chill. 

Number four, feel increasingly uncomfortable calculating the accumulating tips at each and every vendor, and swiping my AmEx with less and less enthusiasm. 

And number five, the final step. Can’t skip this one. Go home, sit on the couch, bask in the glory of retaining Hot Girl status for another two to three weeks, and then quickly realize that, hmm, I don’t really feel any different, and that I’d have to repeat the process soon.

Now, I knew taking a microscope to every single recurring expense in my life was a necessary part of my financial independence journey, but I felt a lot of reticence about examining this particular arena of spending more closely, because it didn’t feel optional to me. After a very harrowing deep dive into my Discover statements, though, I calculated that I was spending, on average, about $3,840 per year, so over $300 per month, on maintaining the fidelity of my Hot Girl disguise. At the time, this was equivalent to roughly 10% of my take-home pay—and that, my friends, was the realization I needed to wield the most powerful phrase in personal finance: I cannot afford to keep up with this. We’ll be right back to our jaunt on the Hamster Wheel after a quick break. 

So before we start number crunching, let’s back up a step. The beauty industrial complex is confounding for feminists everywhere, because people have conflicting opinions about what it symbolizes. On one end of the spectrum, there’s a perspective that traditional feminine beauty ideals are staunchly oppressive, and that participation in things like bleaching your hair or wearing mascara are inextricably linked to conforming to what’s considered conventionally feminine and attractive. It’s the “male gaze” argument, that it all serves to further objectify a woman. There’s an element of this conversation that involves the way in which encouraging women to obsess over their appearances is a pretty convenient way to reinforce a system where men are ultimately in charge. Because every hour spent comparing night creams and rolling your hair into heatless curls is an hour that is not spent on things that might disrupt the status quo. 

And if all of that sounds overly serious and sinister to you, you might fall on the other end of the spectrum, which argues that no, in fact, all of these things are a form of self-expression. And when you degrade things that code as “feminine,” that is also misogynistic, that women should be free to choose how and when they engage with traditional beauty standards.

And this discussion doesn’t just touch gender politics, but racial politics too. It’s a real doozy, because most of our beauty standards are fairly Eurocentric and they’re based on ideals of white beauty or quote unquote “exoticized” versions of Black or brown beauty, which can help explain why a Black woman wearing her natural hair might face discrimination in the workplace. 

Whenever I read comments on articles that explore these dialogues about the implications of the beauty industry, there’s never a shortage of comments that don’t actually fall on either side of the spectrum, but instead basically say, “All right, this is a bit of a reach. It’s really not that serious. Just let me wear my lipstick and leave me alone.”

Then of course there’s the economic angle, which is what we are primarily concerned with today, that explores the way this $50 billion industry mostly laser-focuses its marketing efforts on women. And regardless of Sephora’s intentions, it’s hard to dispute that exploiting insecurity is an incredibly profitable business model. The average American woman spends $3,756 per year on her beauty and personal care regimen. Her male counterpart spends roughly 22% less, or around $2,900 per year, but that actually still feels high to me. 

And making matters stickier, women contend with something called the “pink tax,” which isn’t a literal government tax, but according to Bankrate, refers to pricing that inflates the cost of goods and services that are marketed to women. The term was popularized around the mid-1990s, when the Gender Tax Repeal Act of 1995 passed in California, which prohibited price discrimination on services. 

And to be perfectly clear, my feelings about this are mixed. I still get highlights. I still feel better when I wear my Nars light-reflecting foundation. I’m wearing it right now, as a matter of fact. A fresh manicure is, in my mind, a special little treat that makes watching my own hands type approximately three times as fun for at least the next week. But I know on some level that the reason these things make me feel good is not because they’re helping me express my unique sense of self, but because they’re allowing me to better meet the ideals of what is considered beautiful. Because if it were only about self-expression and not about normative gender expression, you probably would not see most women contouring their nose and face the exact same way. And my husband could casually throw on a full set of falsies or like a French manicure and it would not raise any perfectly threaded eyebrows. And as Chelsea Fagan pointed out in our popular self-care episode last year, we just so happen to be a part of a culture and a species wherein the way you look influences how people treat you. 

Still, when I was undergoing my financial awakening, I noticed something about my boyfriend, now husband, who was also trying to make solid financial choices as a law student without an income. He was not traipsing to the Aveda salon down the road to get his color refreshed, or schlepping it to the pedicure chair every two weeks to have his big toes buffed until they shined like the top of the Chrysler Building. And I had this weird sense of injustice that these were expenses that I felt obligated to uphold, as natural as taking a shower or brushing my teeth, while my male partner didn’t. I was wielding a five-step skincare regimen and he wasn’t even using soap to wash his face. 

But of course, implicit cultural pressure to uphold appearances is not the same thing as being literally forced to uphold them. And I knew that I needed to take a closer look at my own beauty spending. So this is how I began my Hot Girl Detox, and how you can, too.

Because feminist theory aside, one thing was clear to me: I straight up could not afford to keep up appearances, literally, at least not if I also wanted to hit my financial goals. And I knew that any gender wage or wealth gap that I may have been up against was only being exacerbated by the fact that I was choosing to shell out $1 in every $10 I earned to present as beautifully as possible. I decided to quantify what my beauty habits would cost me in the long run. So I whipped out the compounding returns calculator to see what would happen if I were investing this money instead, for a 7% average rate of return, and I immediately regretted it.

The opportunity cost of my current habits, a lifetime of conventional beauty standard adherence clocking in at $320 per month, was $1,001,728. Now the mental gymnastics began…checks notes…immediately. I was like, oh, well what if being attractive makes me more likely to succeed at work? Isn’t quote unquote “pretty privilege” a thing? Could this be considered an investment in, I don’t know, my career? And as much as I hate to concede that there’s actually probably something to that line of reasoning, because there are studies that show “pretty privilege” is a quantifiable benefit in the workplace, I figured there was a happy medium I could probably strike that would allow me to feel confident and comfortable without tossing a million dollars in the trash alongside all of my used beauty blenders and empty tubes of Cloud Paint. The truth is, at the time, I just did not make enough money to justify those habits. And at the end of the day, I think that’s what it comes down to. I needed to determine the highest ROI beauty spending I was doing, and then ditch the rest. 

Now if this resonates with you and you’re interested in reassessing your financial relationship with your appearance, let’s dig into the detox framework. And yes, I’m intentionally using the detox rhetoric that the beauty and diet industries use, so we can reclaim it as our own. Here’s the important part: It’s not about quitting everything cold turkey. It’s just about experimentation and curiosity and figuring out which of these practices makes you feel more like you, and which feel coercive or unnecessary. Money is the transferable manifestation of your life energy, assuming you had to work to get it. So it is worthwhile to explore these choices and what they’re signaling to your subconscious with a little thoughtfulness. 

First, list every expense you can think of that pertains to upholding your appearance. Some of it’s gonna feel really basic, like face wash, for example, while others might feel a little more extreme in both cost and commitment, like Botox and other injectables, as 90% of Botox users are women, and the average cost is between $300 and $500 per session.

Then you’re gonna list the frequency of those expenses. How often are you doing it? What’s the all-in cost after things like tip or travel? If the service is especially time-consuming, the way my old lash extensions were, consuming an hour of my time every other week, note that too. ‘Cause as we know, time is money. 

Now here’s the part that’s gonna make you curse my name and unsubscribe, but please don’t. Annualize the costs. Something that happens twice a year is probably less problematic budget-wise than something that has to be maintained every two or three weeks, because the sheer frequency means you’re probably spending a lot of money and time. Add up what a full year of that service or product costs you.

Now contextualize all of the costs with respect to how much you earn. You can use your gross salary if that’s easier, but you wanna divide your all-in costs. So add ’em up or go category by category if there’s anything that really stands out to you, by your salary, your annual income, and see what percentage of your life energy is being devoted to these practices. 

Now I wanna take a pause here, because if you’re like “Begone, podcast wench—the pedicure chair is the only place that I feel God’s peace, and you’ll have to pry the pumice stone out of my cold dead hands,” then please, by all means, rock on with the foot bath. This is not intended to be a moral judgment of these choices. In fact, I actually was getting a pedicure a few weeks ago and I met a Rich Girl sitting next to me in the pedicure chair. She leaned over and she was like, “Are you Money with Katie?” And I said, “Please don’t tell everybody I’m here.” This is merely a framework that’s gonna help you decide what’s worth it to you and what’s not. You may be a high earner who also has quote “high maintenance habits,” but your beauty costs might only be 2% of your income. And at that rate, you may not wanna change anything. Or you might find, like I did, that you’re spending an inordinate amount of time and money and that your financial goals should take precedence right now. 

So assuming you have decided to continue this exercise and you have not sworn off Money with Katie forever, rank your beauty expenses from most important to you to least important to you. For me, my blonde hair was the “you’ll never take this away from me” item. So that really came first. While things like regular nail appointments and fake eyelashes and tans, that all felt less important to me than retiring with an extra million dollars. 

Now, starting from the bottom of your list and working your way up, begin removing products or services one by one from your schedule and financial obligations. Test the waters. You may find you don’t miss them at all. Or you might find that your initial prioritization was wrong. You might decide it’s less about a “yes or no” binary, and more of a “maybe I’m gonna do this one thing less frequently, or I’m gonna find a lower-cost option.” Even if you’re just a little on the fence, simply experimenting with dialing it down can help clarify your priorities, and it doesn’t have to be forever. 

After I had stripped my schedule of everything, I felt more comfortable dabbling with my natural hair color, and I experimented with letting it grow out. I tried something called balayage. It’s a little more expensive, but it’s a color treatment that has a lot less upkeep, so it had a lower annual cost overall. Eventually, though, once my income surpassed a certain point, having my preferred blonde shade was a beauty routine that I chose to reinstate, because Katie Gaga must live on. All right, we’ll be right back to the numbers after a quick break. 

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Katie: All right, so let’s talk general numbers. When it comes to frameworks for what’s reasonable and what’s not, I think it’s hard to pinpoint any hard and fast rules. For example, I could say, oh, anywhere between 2% and 5% of your income is reasonable, but that doesn’t really scale up or down very well. Someone who earns $500,000 per year could spend $25,000 per year on beauty, but that would probably be extreme. And likewise, someone earning $40,000 per year probably should not be spending $2,000 of it on Juvederm and chillin’, because at $40k per year, there are far more important priorities for two grand, like housing or food or building an emergency fund. 

That said, I think other financial frameworks do offer some helpful context. So spending a maximum of 28% of your net income on housing is one I like to use for right-sizing shelter costs, or no more than 10% of net income on all transportation-related expenses. That’s another. These numbers which represent necessities can help us see why my spending 10% of my take-home pay on getting pieces of acrylic adhered to every visible surface of my body was probably a little bit out of whack financially. Comparing your beauty expenses either pre- or post-detox to these other major areas of spending in your life, and importantly, the amount you are saving, might help you determine whether you are on the right track or not. 

So for example, if you find that the tolls you are paying on Hot Girl Hamster Wheel Highway each month actually amount to more than what you are saving, do not pass go, do not collect $200. Your future self is officially being imperiled by the chokehold that unrealistic beauty ideals have on your checking account. 

In conclusion, I think there are just seasons of your life when your own financial well-being really just needs to come first. And while the allure of feeling conventionally attractive was very strong, I was ultimately able to cut out the majority of my expensive self-maintenance pit stops a few years ago because the allure of financial security was stronger. The superficial cuts felt nearly ascetic at first, but getting to lob hundreds of dollars more per month toward my goals of building up an emergency fund and contributing the maximum amount to my Roth IRA for the first time, it gave me a sense of self-assuredness and confidence that was truly unmatched. I had never felt so powerful or determined, which is something that a regular mani could not give me. 

Shortly thereafter, the idea of Rich Girl Summer, which was a play on Hot Girl Summer, was born, which is actually where we get the Rich Girl theme in Money with Katieland. It was really a reclaiming of sorts. It was a way to make hard financial choices feel as truly empowering as they are. 

Now onto a very thought-provoking conversation with Jessica DeFino. Jessica, I’ve read enough of your work by now to think I know how you feel about this, but I do wanna hear from you directly. Where do you land on the “beauty is empowering” discourse? Because sometimes I feel like we conflate pure self-expression with the things that being beautiful can provide to us. In many cases, that means power, influence, love, acceptance, things like that. So I’m just curious how you think about this. 

Jessica DeFino: Yeah, I mean, my view is that “beauty is empowering” is sort of like this feel-good, warm, fuzzy, pop feminist way to say the truth, which is that beauty confers power. Beauty is a power hierarchy, especially when we’re talking about standardized, industrialized beauty, you know, which isn’t actually beauty at all, but really a very strict standard of physical appearance alone. It’s like this one-dimensional standard of how your physical face and body look. “Empowering” makes it sound really nice. “Confers power” makes it sound like what it is—a system of oppression designed to siphon women’s time, money, energy, effort, headspace in service to a sort of very stifling standard of a physical appearance. 

Katie: Yeah, because I think the common pushback, and I think what I probably would’ve said five years ago if you had said that to me is, “Oh, well, no, I do this for myself. This is for me,” which is kind of a loaded phrase, right? And I really struggle with that because for example, I like to have blonde hair, to the point that I’ll spend $250 every three months to make it blonde. But do I like it because I like it, or do I like it because I feel like it makes me more attractive? And when I think about it critically, if you told me, hey, you’re about to be stuck in a room alone for six months, I’m not gonna be like, oh god, I gotta get to the salon before this starts to make sure I’m gonna have blonde hair for those six months. I’m not gonna see anybody, right? Which probably tells me that it’s not really for me, right? So I’m almost, I just wonder how you make sense of those types of dynamics for yourself.

Jessica DeFino: I think there are so many layers to this. I love to cite one of my favorite writers on the topic, Tressie McMillan Cottom. She has this quote: “‘I like what I like’ is always a capitalist lie.” And I think that is so important to just always have in my head and remember our cultural conditioning is so, so strong. Of course it influences what we like. Of course it influences what we find beautiful and what we want to embody or emulate. I think an easy way to kind of understand this in terms of beauty is to think of beauty culture the way we think of diet culture. Diet culture has obviously been a huge force in cultural conditioning to elevate this idea that it’s better to be thin, it’s beautiful to be thin, it is healthy to be thin. And we know that all of that is not true. These are culturally conditioned ideals to prefer thinness. It’s the same with beauty. Beauty is diet culture’s face-focused fraternal twin, I like to say. So a lot of what we think we find beautiful and we want to emulate and we think we like is not necessarily something that’s coming from this true place within us, but is coming from these culturally conditioned ideals. And a lot of the times, like you said, the aesthetics that we adopt, we don’t love the aesthetic so much as we love what we think it symbolizes, or what we think it says to other people, or what we think it says about us. And I think that’s a very human thing. 

The other thing that I like to bring up in this conversation is, it’s not bad to do things for other people. We are communal creatures. And if you look at the origins of beauty, the first ways that makeup was ever used, going back to like ancient Egyptian times when it was used in spiritual ceremonies, or African tribes when it was used to signal your place in the community, like a tribal elder would have one way of doing their makeup and an adolescent would have another and the shaman would have another. These were developed as ways to communicate about the self to others. It was a community-building thing, it was a religious-building thing. And I would like us to get over some of the stigma of doing things for other people. It’s kind of fine if you want to communicate with other people. What we have to examine is what we’re communicating and why. 

Katie: There are so many layers to that. So two things. When we think about cultural norms and what’s considered beautiful, I think initially my first thought is like, well, it must be biological, right? These preferences must be innate because otherwise why would we all share them? But to your point, that’s socialization, that’s conditioning. I think when you go back a few hundred years and you think about what you were conveying in the past with different beauty standards, or when the ideal body was not rail-thin or curvy, even in my lifetime we’ve seen that evolve from the nineties, what was it called? Heroin chic?

Jessica DeFino: The heroin chic aesthetic. Yeah. 

Katie: Where you’re like emaciated. That was the look, and now it’s curvy, right? It evolves over time. So that in itself should probably tell us these are not innate preferences but rather cultural norms. The other thing that you said, though, is paying close attention to what it is that we’re conveying. And I think it’s really interesting that you mentioned, hey, it’s actually not a bad thing to want to do it for someone else. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. But I think that there’s this theory, and I’ve heard you talk about this before, that is quite full circle for this episode, which is that beauty is valued because in some ways it connotes wealth, and things that code as traditionally beautiful today are, the theory would say, actually attractive because they signal that you have resources. What do you make of this? I believe I’ve heard you call it the aesthetic of consumption. 

Jessica DeFino: Yes. I think that is one of the strongest beauty standards of today, is signaling that you have the money and the time and the leisure time to funnel it all back into your body and show people, look what I have, look what I’ve done. And this is not anything new. Beauty has almost always been a class performance. Even if you go back to ancient Egyptian times, workers, slaves who were outside had tanned skin, you know, they were tanned by the sun. Royalty, people of the upper classes, were indoors, they were sheltered, they had lighter skin. For a long time, being as pale as possible was the aesthetic to strive for because it signaled wealth, because it signaled power, because it signaled royalty. We see this all the way up through Victorian times in England, when women were literally powdering their faces with arsenic and led to appear as white as possible, because this standard of whiteness of wealth really was still enduring. 

We see this change with the industrial revolution, and the working class, the poor, were indoors now. They were working in factories, they weren’t outside, and we see this shift to the upper classes have leisure money, they’re going on vacations. Coco Chanel was kind of the first one to popularize the tan. And the idea was that she was on a yacht, tanning, because she was so rich, and we see this shift from what’s considered beautiful to be really pale because it signaled wealth to be really tan because it signaled wealth. And I think that’s one of the strongest examples. 

I think another great example of this that’s a little bit more modern is Kylie Jenner’s lips. I think when she first started filling her lips, the reaction was, she got made fun of quite a bit; she was really put down for what she was doing to her body. But over time as this sort of behavior was normalized and it became something that people with a lot of money, celebrities, the wealthy did to themselves—get fillers, get Botox—we see it slowly becoming normalized, slowly becoming accepted and slowly becoming the beauty ideal to strive for because of what it signals: I have the money to change my body. It’s everywhere.

Katie: It reminds me of the Jia Tolentino article about “Instagram face” and how everyone’s kind of slowly morphing the ideal face; it’s almost this cat aesthetic where you’re very youthful but there’s a very specific look to it. We’ll put the article in the show notes for anyone who hasn’t read this before, but it was a pretty interesting deep dive into how this has evolved. When we think about “investment” into beauty culture…probably the wrong word, but I wanna talk about the investment of wealth and time and energy into beauty culture, as opposed to divestment. So for example, obviously we were all fine for zillions of years. We didn’t have three-step skincare routines, we were not applying retinol, we were good, the skin was fine. My husband, he still doesn’t wash his face and he has better skin than I do. 

Jessica DeFino: Probably has very healthy skin. 

Katie: He does. But obviously it’s hard to know where the ideal balance is. For example, we are all very happy toothpaste was invented, right? I don’t think that nothing ever is necessarily the quote unquote “best” or optimal solution. But as I try to taper back my own involvement with traditional beauty standards, I just wonder how you make sense of those choices in your own life.

Jessica DeFino: I think there are two sort of systems that I tend to use and I think have been helpful for other people that I’ve talked to. And one is this idea of function versus form. So something like bathing and washing your hands, that’s functional, that’s contributing to health. Something like form is plumping your lips or getting Botox, freezing your wrinkles. These are not health choices. They’re all aesthetic and no functional use. Which brings me to the other system that I use, is life-enhancing versus life-diminishing. Obviously brushing your teeth is life-enhancing. That is keeping your mouth healthy, it is saving you a lot of pain. Life-diminishing is, I mean wow, when you look at the data around all of beauty culture, the large majority of beauty culture is life-diminishing. And I’m not even talking about the potential physical health effects that come from some of the topical products we use. The medications we’re on in service to purely aesthetic standards, the potential physical harms of injectables and cosmetic procedures, the potential harms of cosmetic surgery, which do include death, which is something that’s just not talked about enough. I think in the past two months we’ve seen two celebrity deaths from cosmetic procedures. There’s this woman Jackie O, who died after complications from a full mommy makeover plastic surgery thing. And then Lisa Marie Presley got a bariatric surgery to lose weight, and apparently what just contributed to her death, allegedly, is complications from that. 

Katie: Wow. 

Jessica DeFino: So I do think that’s something we need to talk about when we talk about beauty culture, ’cause it’s not just all “I feel so good.” There are serious consequences that deserve to be highlighted. But beyond all of those physical things, if you look at the data, this all-consuming focus on our physical appearance is contributing to skyrocketing cases of appearance-related anxiety, depression, facial dysmorphia, body dysmorphia, disordered eating, obsessive thoughts, self-harm, even suicide. So there is a huge life-diminishing aspect to the beauty culture behaviors that we are sort of conditioned to participate in. And that, I would say, has been the most helpful thing for me to focus on personally when I’m deciding what behaviors I wanna engage in and what behaviors I don’t. 

I think a lot of my interest in the beauty industry stemmed from the fact that I had a really bad reaction to a topical prescription. I couldn’t wear makeup, my skin was peeling off of my face in chunks. People wouldn’t get in the elevator with me. They were like, are you contagious? And it had a profound effect on my sense of self and my sense of self-worth. And I was miserable. I gave up huge portions of my life. I stopped dating, I stopped going out with friends, I called out of work ugly. You know, my whole life was turned upside down because I had invested so much of my self-worth in what I looked like. And when I didn’t have that anymore, I didn’t have anything. And I think so many women in particular go through the same thing, probably on varying scales. I’m sure my own obsession with beauty was on the high end of that. But the data bears all of this out, that our mental health is at stake when we participate in and perpetuate beauty culture. 

Katie: I wanna get your thoughts on how counterintuitive, though, some of these trends are. Like you wrote a piece recently about quote unquote “dewy skin,” which is very in right now. And your point was that no, actually if your skin looks glazed and it looks wet, that’s a sign that the skin is injured. It’s not actually a sign of health. And I think that’s a very powerful case against overcommitting to crazy six-step routines and this cabinet full of products that are actually not making us any healthier or are not actually helping the skin, but are getting it further and further away from its natural state, and that you’re actually probably paying more money for worse results in the long term.

Jessica DeFino: I think you captured it so well. I think a big part of this problem is that the industry serves us the science of aesthetic manipulation, and we receive it as the science of skin health. The industry gives us the science of how products work and we assume that that’s how they should work. And one of the most illuminating things for me was I was someone who was obsessed with skincare. I could tell you how any ingredient worked, what it did, how it made you look: hyaluronic acid, retinol, ceramides, peptides, all of it. I was an encyclopedia of knowledge about skincare products. When I started researching the science of the skin instead, and how the skin functions and what it needs in order to function, it blew my mind, because the science of the products were completely counter to what the skin actually wanted to do and how it was actually trying to protect me, protect all of us. Like that’s the skin’s function on a human body is it’s 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. 

So basically what I found is the skin has the inherent ability to self-cleanse, self-moisturize, self-exfoliate, self-protect, self-heal. This is where beauty brands get their ideas, by the way, like who came up with the three-step system to cleanse, to exfoliate, to protect? The skin. It’s built in. And a lot of the products that we use to ostensibly help the skin perform these functions are actually weakening the skin’s ability to do it, and causing a lot of the issues.

I think glazed skin is kind of the most timely and perfect example of this. It’s essentially injuring the skin by inundating it with aggressors. Really, that is how the skin interprets the things that we put on it most of the time, causing an injury and stimulating a healing response. Exfoliation is a big part of this. So basically what you’re doing is you’re injuring the skin barrier. The skin sends all of these nutrients up to the surface to heal. Hyaluronic acid is part of the healing process. Collagen is part of the healing process. All of these fatty acids and nutrients are part of the healing process. So we get that on the surface of our skin temporarily and we think, oh my god, I look so good. But the only way to keep that going is by re-injuring the skin again with the intense exfoliation, with the intense product development. And what we’re doing is just engaging in a cycle of injuring, and we see how dewy and glossy that looks and we say, oh, that’s beauty. But really, I mean injury is one of the most enduring beauty ideals of all time. 

Katie: It reminds me of the Chapstick myth, where if you put on Chapsticks, your lips will stay hydrated. But if you do it enough and you need the Chapstick for your lips to be hydrated, the thought is that they stop hydrating themselves because you’re just consistently putting this barrier on top of them.

Jessica DeFino: It’s true, because the skin exists in a feedback loop with the environment. The way that we conceive of skincare is very individualistic and unnatural and sort of like cut off from the environment. But the skin has to interact with what is outside in order to know how much moisture to produce, how many dead skin cells to hold onto or shed. 

Katie: Oh, so if you’re covering it, it doesn’t know? 

Jessica DeFino: We’re creating all of these barriers. I mean, there are different degrees to which different products and ingredients create this barrier and interrupt this feedback loop, for sure. But yeah, that’s part of it. When you are consistently covering up your skin and shielding it from the environment, particularly when you sleep. A lot of the skin’s inherent mechanisms happen during sleep, because the skin can kind of shut off and not have to defend you from sunlight, from environmental aggressors, yada yada yada. We’re interrupting this feedback loop that the skin needs in order to best protect us. 

Katie: So what is your functional skincare routine? How do you care for the skin without inhibiting its natural functions but just to support it in its job? 

Jessica DeFino: Yeah, I mean this will be different for everybody, because I definitely don’t want to imply that if you stop using all products, your skin will be perfect. Maybe a more true statement is when you stop using products, you can see which of your skin concerns were caused by the products, right? And which still need to be addressed. And then the other thing is the way to address a skin concern is not always a topical product. The industry has obviously focused on that because that’s profitable. But there are other things in terms of stress management and sleep management and diet.

Katie: Like the boring stuff that doesn’t come in a cute jar where they’re like, oh, you mean I actually have to sleep more and drink more water? Yeah, well, that’s not fun. I’d rather use a toner. 

Jessica DeFino: Yeah, yeah. You don’t get that like “Ooh,” that feeling of a new Amazon purchase. But it is overall going to be supporting your skin. So for me, I typically cleanse with water in the morning, just splash my face with water. If my skin is particularly dry, I’ll use a little bit of jojoba oil. Jojoba oil is a 97% match to human sebum. So the skin really responds well to it. And that’s just because I have kind of inherently dry skin. So not everybody might need that. If I’m going outdoors, I’ll use SPF, and then at night I cleanse using that same jojoba oil again, as an oil cleanser. And then I will wash my face with honey, because honey is, I mean it’s got all of these amazing protective properties. It’s a prebiotic, it’s full of antioxidants, it is not harsh or stripping and yeah, I’ll wash my face with honey, splash it with water, and then go to bed bare-faced. 

Katie: I really wanted to ask you about the gendered element of this. ‘Cause it does feel very inherent in these trends, but I think the tendency to equate beauty with goodness, and I think this is typically known as the “Disney princess versus the witch” dichotomy. We tend to assign moral value to people who are nice to look at. I think the similar extension, or one element of this, is the anti-aging strain of beauty culture. It’s one of those taglines that is I think marketed almost exclusively to women, and the way that we obsess over youth, but not overall, particularly in women. Like a man over 50 is a silver fox. He’s distinguished. But a woman who’s older than 35, it’s like, ugh, past her prime. We’re moving on, we’re looking for the next hot young thing. What do you make of this? Why is youth so valued in women, but we don’t really see that in men? 

Jessica DeFino: I think you really hit the nail on the head with the comparison to goodness, and beauty functioning as an ethical ideal. This is all tied up in our ideas of what’s beautiful and in our ideas of womanhood. So I think, you know, according to patriarchal values, which permeate through society, these are some of the cultural ideas we get. A “good woman” basically is a girl. A girl who doesn’t have the voice to stand up for herself. The ability to fight back, the strength to push back on some of these ideas. Anti-aging is very infantilizing. And I don’t think that it’s a coincidence. 

Katie: Oh, this gets into such creepy ground so quickly. 

Jessica DeFino: It’s so creepy. A “good woman” is someone who is in service to the status quo. Because I think you could say that a lot of men feel their obligation is to be in service to others. Even, you know, men in my family, men that I’ve dated have felt this obligation to be providers, to provide for their family, to serve the family. And women are under, you know, obligations toward the same goal. Even though it shows up differently. It actually does a disservice to all of us. And so I think we can sort of come together under that regardless of gender and just be like, is anybody fulfilled here? Are any of us feeling good and fulfilled? Something is wrong. 

Divesting from beauty culture, doing my best to not perpetuate these ideals and these behaviors as an act of collective care. Also considering that I am a member of the collective, like what is best for the collective is ultimately best for me. When you’re thinking, not in terms of power, which beauty culture confers, but in terms of just fulfillment, in terms of the human spirit. I don’t mean that in a religious or spiritual way, but just this human will to live and exist and be in communion with other people. So yeah, I do think it’s a good thing to be in service to others with their highest good in mind, and not necessarily a great thing to be in service to the status quo. 

Katie: I had not drawn that connection before to youth is beautiful in women because it almost signals immaturity and subservience…like, you’re not too powerful yet, you’re easier to exploit. 

Jessica DeFino: And that’s why we see this real push for anti-aging crop up in the late twenties, early thirties. This is a moment traditionally when a woman is stepping into her power; she is more comfortable in her body. And it’s no coincidence that this really exploitative and confidence-siphoning messaging starts becoming louder and louder and louder. It is absolutely a way to steal that power back from us and funnel it back into the economy. It’s also just like the ultimate capitalist ideal. Anti-aging is an unmeetable goal. You will never anti-age. You’re going to keep…

Katie: You have to keep throwing money at it ’cause you’re never gonna be…

Jessica DeFino: You have to keep throwing money at it. Once you are convinced that you should be anti-aging, you are a consumer for life. There’s no point at which you can stop. You will always be buying the products, getting the Botox, looking into the new hot surgeries, whatever it is for your investment level.

Katie: That’s why I called it a Hamster Wheel in my initial assessment of my own financial relationship with the beauty industry, was because I would do all these things and feel good for a few days and then, oh, well, what do you know? My body is rejecting all of this. The hair’s growing out, the nails are growing out, the tan has worn off. It has to be constantly upheld. 

Jessica DeFino: Exactly. 

Katie: It almost reminds me of how, I think it’s Hinge, one of the dating apps that talks about how the perfect customer, their goal is to get someone off the app. It’s like, well, if we’re successful, you don’t need this anymore. Which, hell of a business model. But the beauty industry is on the other end of that spectrum, where the whole point is to keep you needing it forever. It makes you the perfect consumer of the product. So I think that’s really interesting. I’m struck by this idea of what’s best for the collective, and maybe this isn’t actually good for anyone. We’ve spoken at length about how this is bad for women in particular, but that this collective emphasis is kind of hurting all of us. 

And I think there have been well-meaning movements in the past to redefine and expand what we consider beautiful. Oh, well, “all bodies are beautiful, every person is beautiful.” But I wonder if that still misses the point a little bit because it’s still making beauty the ultimate thing that we should all be aspiring to. And I wonder where that assumption comes from, that that is a very important thing. Like is there a, “let’s see through the matrix” option or is that purely human nature to be enthralled with this idea? 

Jessica DeFino: There’s so much there. I personally hate “everybody is beautiful” marketing. And I think it stems from how much we have been conditioned to associate beauty with value and worth. If you look at any instances of someone saying “everybody is beautiful, all bodies are beautiful,” the actual meaning is “everybody is valuable, everybody is worthy.” And we have been so conditioned to see beauty as the ultimate embodiment of that value and worth that the pushback to beauty culture basically stops it, like, you are beautiful anyway. And I think you’re exactly right—that keeps the focus on beauty as part of our value system. So it’s really not helping us in any big way, especially when we’re still bombarded with cultural messaging from the media, from politics, from social media, from friends, from family that communicate beauty as this physical standard. So I think, yeah, that is a huge part of it that I wish we could push back on a little bit more.

It is very human, though, to see beauty, to crave it, to want it in your life, to want to embody it. And that is kind of the evil genius of the beauty industry. The beauty industry should really be called the appearance industry, because beauty and appearance are not the same thing. And I think what most of us are reacting to on a human level when we are buying into the beauty industry is this sort of innate human longing to engage with beauty. I see beauty up there as like “beauty, freedom, truth, love.” That’s what we’re looking for. And we’re sold these tools of physical manipulation and we’re told that it’s beauty, and we keep buying and we keep trying and we keep applying. And none of it is fulfilling because it’s not beauty, it’s physical manipulation, and we want beauty. It’s human nature. We should have it. I think maybe the first step is acknowledging when something is truly beautiful and when it is purely one-dimensional physical appearance. 

Katie: Hmm. I think whenever I engage with this type of discussion, part of the criticism that I’ll see is, “Ugh, this is just taking things too seriously. We’re just making something out of nothing. Just let me wear my lipstick and leave me alone. This is not that big a deal.” What do you think when someone is saying, Jessica, you know, it’s not that serious. You’re reaching here. How do you respond to that? 

Jessica DeFino: I would say it is that serious. It’s very serious. I know it can feel a little corny to take beauty so seriously, but beauty culture shapes the entire world. It determines who has access to power and who doesn’t, who gets to lead the life of their dreams and who doesn’t. Yeah. It just seems wild to me that we wouldn’t take that seriously when beauty is defined pretty much by discrimination. I would also say it’s a pretty privileged take. If you have the privilege to just wear lipstick and like it and live your life, there are globally more women in the world who don’t have the resources to dedicate to the beauty industry, to beauty culture, to manipulating their bodies in order to get a leg up in the world.

And I do think it’s part of our obligation as people as part of the world to try and dismantle these systems when maybe they privilege us and we don’t have to think about it, but they really disadvantage others and determine who gets to live a good life in some ways. 

Katie: Do you mean because someone with wealth, resources, time, et cetera, has the option to engage and uphold, whereas someone else might not even have that option? And so through the choice to do so or through the upholding of those standards, it’s furthering and supporting the system? 

Jessica DeFino: That is what I’m saying. I mean, the way that beauty culture works, and again, acknowledging that this is primarily the result of systems and not individuals. But we are individuals who exist within a system and you know, paradox. So acknowledging that the way that beauty culture works is that the more people who opt into a standard and decide to try to embody that standard, the more normalized it becomes. When a beauty standard is normalized, it is incorporated into what you could call “pretty privilege,” what society expects of women in order to basically treat them with basic human dignity. 

So studies show that people who more closely adhere to the dominant standard of beauty are given more attention from teachers in schools and mentors. They are more likely to get the jobs they interview for; they are more likely to make more money at the jobs they interview for. They’re more likely to have positive legal outcomes in the justice system. And they have more option in the social sphere. They receive better social treatment, more options for romantic partners. What you look like does affect the type of life you lead. It’s of course not the main thing; I’m always very cautious when I’m talking about this to not make it seem like you can’t live a good life if you’re not beautiful. 

And that’s sort of my point, is just like millions and millions of women do. By definition, most people on earth are average, and a lot of people have love and joy in their lives. We don’t need to adhere to this oppressive system in order to find those types of fulfillment. But materially in the real world, buying into these beauty standards does have an effect on those systems. Strengthen those systems. And I think it would benefit all of us to think about how we can undermine these systems instead of buy into them. 

Katie: There’s a bit of game theory here too, where it’s better for everybody if everyone opts out, but if you’re the only one opting out, then you’re probably, your own self, you are potentially disadvantaging yourself in a system where others are not. So I think there’s quite a bit of game theory in life, but this is a place where I see it really strongly. Because you feel as though, well, yeah, I think we all agree it would be better if we didn’t do it, but unless we all decide together to not do it, then am I actually gonna be impacting anything? But I do think that there’s an element of that where you don’t exist in a vacuum. Your choices are gonna impact the people around you in your community. 

I have a very close friend who doesn’t wear makeup, and even just being really good friends with her, spending a lot of time with her, has impacted…when we went to the concert together, it’s like, I don’t need to put makeup on—what do I need to wear makeup for? And so I do think that we are able to influence the people around us, and that this collective action does have to begin individually.

Last thing that I wanted to talk to you about—it’s not even really a question, it’s kind of just an observation that I was like, I would like to open this can of worms with you. I have heard both you and Haley Nahman reference one another’s work. You both covered the… 

Jessica DeFino: Emily Ratajkowski?

Katie: Emrata approach to beauty or self-commodification, which is basically this idea that other people might objectify you, but if you objectify yourself for personal gain, well, now you’re benefiting from that objectification and you can exploit the way that you’re going to be objectified for personal gain. That that’s fair game; that’s a feminist act to do so. And I find that rabbit hole of what’s feminist and what’s not…some of those answers feel a little too convenient. 

Jessica DeFino: Yeah, it’s very convenient when you get all of the cultural cachet of having progressive politics and you don’t have to experience any of the discomfort of societal change. Yeah. That’s always a red flag to me. That’s always a warning sign that there’s something somewhere deeper to dig there. A hundred percent confidently, what she is describing there is not a feminist act. It becomes very clear when you actually define feminism, which is a political movement toward collective liberation. I mean, what Emrata is describing there is an aesthetic movement toward one woman’s feeling good in her own body and getting some money. That’s not collective liberation, and in fact, it strengthens the system that enabled that exploitation in the first place. 

What I like to say after that is not everything we do in life needs to be an explicitly feminist act. It’s going to happen because of the world that we live in and the systems we are entwined in. Not everything you do is going to be feminist. Some of it is not going to contribute to our collective liberation, and some of it is going to strengthen the systems that are oppressing us in the first place. And that’s sort of like something that we really can’t help sometimes. What we can help is being very clear with our language. So I think it’s really powerful to say “I’m doing this and it’s not feminist,” because I think the harm in recasting our every individual beauty behavior, cosmetic surgery, as feminist is that it waters down our collective understanding of feminism and it sort of minimizes the work. And for a lot of people it replaces the urge to do the actual hard political work of feminism, because we already feel politically active just by manipulating our bodies in service to the cultural beauty ideal.

Katie: Being hot. 

Jessica DeFino: Yeah. 

Katie: Being hot for women. 

Jessica DeFino: And we feel satisfied in that thinking. Like, “Wow, what a feminist act I just did because I feel good.” And that’s not saying, don’t ever do anything that’s not feminist. That’s just saying, that’s not feminist. If you want to be a feminist, do something else as well. 

Katie: I love that. Whether you have a beauty routine that rivals 2018 Katie, or this entire episode felt like a trip to Money Mars, I really hope you enjoyed your ride on the Hot Girl Hamster Wheel. That is all for this week, and I’ll see you next week, same time, same place, on The Money with Katie Show. Our show is a production of Morning Brew and is produced by Henah Velez and me, Katie Gatti Tassin, with our audio engineering and sound design from Nick Torres. Devin Emery is our chief content officer, and additional fact checking comes from Kate Brandt.