Reflections on Beauty with Jessica De Fino

I spoke to "The woman the beauty industry fears", here's what came out of our heart-full conversation.

De Fino in her home - courtesy of Jessica De Fino

There is a scene from my childhood that I remember very vividly. I am in front of the mirror, about four years old, and my mother is brushing my hair. When a hair pulls and I complain, my mother kisses my head and says

“You know what grandma used to say? Chi bella vuole apparire, male deve soffrire”

The sentence translates as: if you want to strive for beauty, you must accept pain. A thought ingrained in many minds.

Someone who has done a lot of research on our perception of beauty is Jessica De Fino, a journalist and writer from New Jersey, who went from working in the beauty industry to exposing its darkest secrets. She lives in a house by the water and she tells me that what lights her heart is the swans swimming to her porch in the morning. I immediately resonate with the excitement of close encounters with nature and how nourishing they can be.

When I found her work I was fascinated by the way she so gracefully exposes the lies that the beauty industry sells us, I was also fascinated by her awareness of how the systems we inhabit are so intrinsically connected to how we perceive beauty. 

But how did it all start? I ask her.

“It started with my own vanity. I was going through some skin issues. Dermatologists had always told me that I had “problematic skin,” and I've been on every prescription you could imagine since the age of 14,” a classic thing to do is to prescribe birth control to teenagers with acne (as ridiculous as this may sound).

“I was put on birth control really young to help with my acne. Then in my mid-20s, I developed something called dermatitis and I was put on topical steroids. Over time I had a bad reaction. I had to stop, and then I went into something called Topical Steroid Withdrawal, where your skin essentially atrophies. It stops functioning as an organ. So my skin was peeling off of my face. I couldn't use skincare or wear makeup. I had to be out in the world like this!” She discusses her story with a tone devoid of trauma, and the deconditioning work she did transpires.

Chloe Cocoran

“I felt like a monster like people were asking me if I was contagious before stepping onto an elevator with me. It was a shock to the system physically and socially. And I realized I simply didn't understand my body, or what was happening to me. I didn't understand why my body was having this reaction to this drug that was supposed to have helped me, or how my skin worked” This lack of understanding about one’s own body is something I resonate with because the world we live in doesn’t give enough importance to understanding our body and its messages, especially for women.

Driven by this, De Fino started digging deep into research, “and the more I researched, applying my lens as a beauty editor and a beauty journalist, the more I realized that my whole life I thought I knew about skincare but I didn't know anything about the skin!” she says with fervour. This realisation made her understand the difference between industrialized skincare and the skin. “It awakened an obsessive longing to know more about actual beauty, the human body, rather than how products can manipulate it.”

We begin to speak of people removed from the bodies they inhabit, and how the beauty and health industry also play into that. Basic things like period products being tested with actual blood instead of liquid is one of the many examples. “It's not shocking that we have so little research on how beauty products affect the body, or how beauty standards affect the psyche because we don't even have the basic research,” says De Fino.

But what is it that removes us from this body and why? I bring into the conversation the influence of Euro-Christian culture and the idea of ascension, how the ultimate arrival is a removal of the soul from the body, but also how much capitalism and patriarchy affect that. “Yes! And when you think of removing yourself from the body as the goal of capitalism and patriarchy, it's so easy to see this in beauty” says De Fino. “It's so normalized that we don't realize that to adhere to even the most basic beauty standards takes a level of dissociation, because of the pain.”

The beauty industry encourages that escape from the body in service of beauty standards, there are so many incredibly painful treatments, and we often think that the pain is a sign that it is working. It is baffling to think how far we have been brainwashed. “The beauty industry has encouraged this disconnection where our body is giving us the message: ‘this hurts’, and we've changed how we interpret that message,” she tells me.

I tell De Fino what my grandmother used to say, and she tells me that a version of that exists in almost every culture. Ironically, an article I read for this research tells almost the same story I did at the beginning, and the writer is Bulgarian. Other examples are foot binding or neck stretching. We are plagued with the idea that beauty involves pain.

A capitalist society breeds the rejection of cycles, beauty itself becomes linear and must be preserved. “The most obvious example I can think of is the natural skin cycle, which the skincare industry has completely rejected,” says De Fino. Our skin cycle is a 28-day cycle, she tells me. “That's how long it takes for a new skin cell to be born in the deepest layer, make its way to the top layer of your skin, and then start shedding off in the body's natural exfoliation process, which is called desquamation.” She continues “all modern skincare completely rejects this and encourages manual or acid exfoliation, or other things to expose the inner layers of your skin on the surface. That is a rejection of a natural cycle”

And then of course, we think how the beauty industry disregards the fact that it is normal and healthy to age and have your body change over time. “Women are disproportionately affected by this narrative. It goes back to what society values men for and what it values women for. And so the things that men are valued for, like intelligence or wisdom. All of those things increase with age,” she says, and I think of the Dad Bod trend.

“Traditional feminine qualities, in many cases are actually childish,” says De Fino. She brings up Susan Sontag who said that anti-ageing is infantilizing and that encouraging grown women to spend so much of their time, money, energy and attention on physically changing their bodies to appear younger encourages an infantilization of the mind.

This conversation is not to encourage that we don’t spend time taking care of our physical body, but to understand what this serves is key. If it is yourself, it is one thing, if it is the beauty industry, it is another.

What I admire deeply about De Fino is the way that she respects nuances within the work, she is capable of holding her love for beauty-related things, whilst questioning the problems behind this. I resonate with this because it has been at the root of all my writing, and is why I speak mostly of deconditioning and questioning with tenderness.

“I'm still very interested in physical manifestations of beauty. I don't mean to discount them. I love the idea of adornment. I love fashion, I love jewellery. In my mind, it's been helpful to just ask myself of when is something adorning me and expressing myself and when it is rejecting myself or manipulating my body to appear a certain way to adhere to a preset standard that doesn't suit me or my body.

And when it comes to beauty, there is also a very individualistic way of portraying beauty, as if we are alone in the creation of beauty in the world. But beauty is a communal concept.

“So much of beauty emerged out of a desire to connect with other people around you, or to connect with the divine,” says De Fino. “The earliest makeup was used to recreate what people thought their gods might look like, or to communicate something to the god.” In ancient tribal makeup, she tells me, different members of the group had different makeup that they would wear. Tribal elders would adorn themselves in different ways than shamans, or children reaching puberty. And this is what De Fino strives to help her readers understand, that beauty is not about consuming product, or changing natural processes, but it is a communal and spiritual effort of observing ourselves within the context of our world, and infusing it in ways that give us pleasure. Beauty should not feel like a chore, it is a pleasureful act.

Below, find an exercise called “Moisturising with breath”, to bring your body into the reading of this piece, curated by me and Jessica, plus the usual weekly recommendations and reads that inspired this piece.