If you’ve been looking for the right answer to your skin-care needs, it’s finally here. Simple, just be rich! Amanda Mull of The Atlantic breaks it down in this interesting piece.
Here are few excerpts.
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The general folk wisdom of skin care has two simple steps. Step 1: Do healthy things. Wash your face, avoid the sun, stay hydrated, wear sunscreen, and get plenty of sleep. Step 2: Apply the right goop to your face, in the form of creams and serums. This advice is repeated time and again in women’s media, with an almost religious authority. If you find the right product and live the skin-care lifestyle (No alcohol! No dairy! Don’t enjoy anything!), then you will be rewarded with the glow of the youthful and righteous.
In this advice is a little sleight of hand. The guidance usually comes from the wealthy, who have all the access in the world to the best skin products and treatments, and it tends to overemphasize the importance of lifestyle while sweeping under the rug the actual cost of tinkering with your facial chemistry. Celebrities wouldn’t be as distractedly beautiful without dermatologists, estheticians, and the women behind the beauty counters at Bergdorf Goodman. You can drink as much water and wear as much sunscreen as you want, but the most effective skin-care trick is being rich.
Maybe that’s why the wealthy models and actresses and the media who exalts them are so dedicated to the idea that those results must be earned through actions, when in reality, they’re usually bought with money. Regular people are hungry for intel on how the rich and beautiful became that way, which means that almost all beauty media regularly publishes tips-and-tricks lists from models and actresses. It’s no mystery to beauty editors and writers, as well as the famous women surveyed, that the answer is a combination of youth, genetic luck, and access to expensive products, treatments, and cosmetic dermatology procedures that few people outside their world could ever hope to experience. But a dozen 20-somethings telling you about their expensive laser treatments would be too depressing for women to read about and too embarrassing for the professionally beautiful to admit.
For example, in a 2016 Elle magazine article surveying 17 Victoria’s Secret models, eight of them praised lifestyle habits such as drinking water and exercising, with several more crediting low-cost fixes such as drugstore pore strips. None of them mentioned Mzia Shiman, who tends to the skin-care needs of Victoria’s Secret models. The facials at her New York spa start at $200, and more advanced services offer tightening and plumping via LED light bed or electric micro-current.
Which is not to say that a diet of fresh foods, plenty of water, and eight hours of sleep every night don’t affect how your skin looks; studies have demonstrated links between all three and physical appearance, and they’ll help most people achieve the modest goal of looking totally fine. Unless you’re very young and even more genetically gifted, though, self-denial won’t get the results it promises. What its constant recommendation in place of expensive beauty products belies is how closely tied those factors also are to wealth. Only some people have access to a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables. Only some people have the kinds of jobs with steady schedules that allow for a good night’s sleep. Only some people can drink the water that comes out of their faucet.
Read the full article here.
Source: The Antlantic
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