the myth of inclusive beauty

podcast episode 19 🦋🌺📝🎧

hello darlings!

i’ve missed you! I come bearing fruit! today we are talking about the myth of inclusive beauty. it’s a dominant myth in beauty culture and the beauty and entertainment industries today.

this film is so inclusive! this brand is so inclusive! sounds suspicious to me.

luckily on this plot of the inter webs, we love unpacking social myths rooted in the colonial imagination.

we love waking up from the matrix, and realizing we were still asleep. and we love learning, unlearning, and relearning about our social conditioning. I hope this will be at least one of those for you.

you can watch my podcast episode on Spotify or YouTube and read a summary below. promoting my work is my least favorite thing but here we are, we are doing it, we are continuing to proceed to keep going… in service of you, the collective, and my offering to the flea market of life (I discuss this in episode 18: Overcoming creative resistance).

The myth of inclusive beauty

it’s dishonest to call something exclusive inclusive. today to be seen as beautiful, you must be or have proximity to the Eurocentric beauty standard. whiteness or proximity to it, thinness or being “slim thick”, and the appearance of wealth are all central to the beauty ideal. this handpicking of individuals is not actual inclusion. and the fact that it gets away with being called that proves how deeply manipulative this industry and culture is.

perhaps what is most terrifying is how these standards exist among and between each marginalized group. the beauty hierarchy never feels far away, with little to no safe space from the pressures of beauty and desirability politics.

this diagram was something I first created in a Tiktok a year or so ago. even as the beauty ideal appears to become more “inclusive” (the arrows of expansion), it is a selective inclusion that prioritizes proximity to the original Eurocentric ideal. this creates an illusion of inclusion, but the underlying logic has not changed to become radically (ie at its root) inclusive at all.

I always say this (narrator: I had not heard her say it) but in the colonial matrix, dominant ideals are labeled the opposite of what they are so as to escape culpability and make it psychologically confusing to diagnose social conditions. who has imposter syndrome? is it us, or is it the criminality that is dressed up as legality? the barbarism dressed up as “civilizing” native peoples? the war and violence dressed up as democracy and freedom? hmm…

similarly, inclusive beauty is an imposter! it is really exclusive beauty with different rules to get into the club, but rules nonetheless, and OG invitees (ww that are the beauty standard) with prime seating.

I said I would talk about Euphoria in the podcast and proceeded to forget. But essentially it perfectly demonstrates the algorithm of selective inclusion, ie of exclusion. proximity to whiteness and thinness are always prioritized. anti-Blackness reins in the form of colorism, erasure of dark-skinned women and femmes, and anti-fatness (to learn the connection between anti-Blackness and anti-fatness read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast). ablism is always the case. there must always be mostly white women — and they must be thin. if anyone is fat, they cannot be dark-skinned, and they cannot be very fat.

Barbie is an example of how inclusive beauty is a false inclusion because of the rules or price of inclusion which are often rooted in Eurocentricism, but even more so because of how power operates in the film. Taking as a measure for power air time and interior life explored, the power of whose story and interiority deserves to be known has not changed and remains with the thin, white, Eurocentric representation of the beauty standard. this is because…

this is the classic Black best friend trope, where the deeper interiority of Black (especially Black fat) characters is erased in service of the white lead. this is usually true for supporting characters of color and fat characters. it’s not that surprising that this ideal upholds the power of the white main character, because…

we can’t have inclusion in a fundamentally exclusive system. the beauty industry has no interest in including us. it would be more accurate to claim its goal is to destroy us. destroy our sense of self, destroy our self-worth, destroy the love that can exist between us as people are picked as friends and lovers based on their beauty capital rather than their personhood. with respect to capitalism specifically, all of us here know that…

The heading of the above chart is: “These 7 companies control almost every single beauty product you buy”

CEOs of 6 top beauty conglomerates. L’Oreal, Beiersdorf, Shiseido Americas, Johnson & Johnson, and Kao. Source: Beautypackaging.com

“These executive leaders will help map the future of the worldwide cosmetics industry.” well, doesn’t that continue to be terrifying.

Source: Statista, 2021

if beauty were truly inclusive it would be (genuinely ie spiritually) additive to our lives rather than reductive and soul-crushing. inclusive beauty cannot exist under a logic of capitalism where growth and profit must be achieved at all costs, including the cost of our very Being. true inclusion would demand a world structured in an entirely different reality, where no one could make money off of producing and selling the solutions to our insecurities — solutions that do not work, by design. as such…

in what way do you think inclusive beauty is a myth? how has it impacted you?

i’d love to hear from you in the comments!

thank you for being on this journey with me! I overcame creative resistance in service of the collective today. I am on a GoogleMeet call with my best friend. we are body doubling. in community, we can <3 sending love to you and all my appreciation <3