writer jessica defino on the appearance industry and our founder's whitney biennial recs
monthly recs #39
Each month, we ask a writer to speak about what’s on their mind and share their tabs for our monthly recommendations. This June’s guest curator, , is a former editor for the Kardashian-Jenner Official Apps turned award-winning beauty journalist and founder of
, a reader-funded publication that covers what traditional beauty publications don’t, won’t, or can’t — from the beauty industry’s war metaphors to dating while divesting from beauty culture.There’s a podcast I like to listen to in the car sometimes — the Naked Beauty podcast from Brooke DeVard. DeVard is an incredible host. Her guests include all kinds of professionals in the cosmetics space, from behind-the-scenes makeup artists to Alicia Keys. They chat about using beauty products, producing beauty products — beauty products as portals to care, love, identity, acceptance, and transcendence. And yet! When DeVard asks her guests when they feel most beautiful, their answers almost never involve the exports of the beauty industry.
Usually the answer is something like, I feel most beautiful when I’m in nature. Or when they take their lashes off after a long, hard day and sink into a deep, hot bath. For lots of interviewees, beauty is the feeling of success (the realization that they’ve accomplished something difficult) or connection (the post-sex whispering of sweet nothings) or community (working with others toward a common goal). I asked DeVard about this somewhere around episode 125. “It’s extremely rare for women to say they feel their most beautiful after a blowout or with a full face of makeup,” she told me, estimating that fewer than 10 guests had ever referenced beauty products in this particular segment.
Respectfully: What are all these beauty industry people going on about, then? If we feel most beautiful without beauty products, what is all this stuff we’re buying?
I have a theory that what the beauty industry sells is not beauty, but the tools of physical appearance. Appearance can be a facet of beauty, sure, but it’s not beauty in and of itself. Beauty is a metaphysical concept. An inherent human longing. (Beauty, freedom, truth, love!) It is multi-dimensional and immortal; it connects you to something outside of and larger than yourself. You simply cannot assembly-line-squirt that into tiny tubes of retinol.
Since this realization, I’m making an effort to de-center my own physical appearance and re-center beauty in my life. It is everywhere, and I find it every morning in my garden. Beauty is the flowers; it’s the rainbow in the stream of the hose as I water them. Beauty is the scratched beak of the duck that lives in my backyard, and her tan and brown feathers — a pattern so intricate it makes me dizzy if I stare too long. It’s my sister’s face when I pick her up from the airport, her voice when she cries, “Jessieee!” Beauty is my mother’s head after chemo: improbably smooth, awe-inspiring in its perfection, an objectively flawless skull (who knew it’d been hiding under all that hair?). It’s Bruce Springsteen’s moan eight minutes and 57 seconds into “Jungleland.” It is, as many a Naked Beauty guest has said, slipping into a hot bath after a bad day, being held by the water, the tub as return to an amniotic state.
Anyway, I’m still working out my thoughts here. But I suspect we’d all be better off if we called the beauty industry “the appearance industry” and fulfilled our innate, necessary, and life-affirming desire for beauty elsewhere.
jessica defino’s
1. I just donated to the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund and am happy to comp anyone who donates $50 or more a free one-year subscription to my newsletter. Just email me your PCRF donation receipt (jessicadefino@substack.com).
2. The cosmetics industry is in the midst of a perfume boom — and L’Oreal and Estée Lauder have used child labor to produce some of that perfume, according to a new BBC investigation.
3. This definition of taste from Simon May’s Love: A New Understanding Of An Ancient Emotion deserves to be read, reread, printed, framed, and consulted every time you consider buying something new in the name of style: “Taste — that total sensibility of our being, that ordering of the soul, which governs all our decisive choices and responses — is the background of any action and thought that is genuinely ours. From taste flow those ultimate ends and values that speak most distinctively of us — of how, like everything we feel, fear, desire, do, and value, we have been forged by our heritage, our character, our choices, our life circumstances, and a myriad of external influences. From it flows what we affirm, reject, fasten onto, and fail to fasten onto, in all we encounter, which is perhaps related to what Thomas Mann means when he speaks of ‘style’ as the ‘mysterious assimilation of the personal to the objective.’”
4. Everyone’s talking about the end of merch lately — GQ, Business of Fashion. I’ve been a loud and proud anti-mercher since 2021 when I told Beauty Independent, “Consumers should realize that branded merch is brand marketing that you foot the bill for. When you wear the merch, you are transformed into a walking advertisement.” The antithesis of style, I think.
5. The symbolism of filling one’s lips with a long syringe of wet, juicy gloop has always been vaguely phallic, I guess? But filler is for actual phalluses now too, according to this piece on penis injectables in the Cut.
*paid subscribers can scroll down for more recs from Jessica, including the memoirs at the top of her to-be-read pile — one a mother’s death after botched plastic surgery and one about being a war survivor and a child refugee — and the results of a pubic hair poll.
more from us
6. In case a beach trip isn’t in the cards for you this month, we just discovered that you can book a hotel day pass to score a day by a nearby pool. Some essentials that would pair well include these from new swimwear brand Amul3tto (we are big fans of the founder’s band SoFTT and have their recent NTS mix to our poolside playlist) or this bikini from Arket. For when you’re not sunbathing, this set from Paloma wool paired with this waist chain and these jelly flats (taken from
’s recent dispatch). We also spotted this Prada beach bag on The Real Real where you can toss everything, including our favorite pocket comb.7. For those opting for more sightseeing this summer, you can use the Touring app to find info about landmarks, restaurants, and more as you wander through a new place (you can also always ask for recs in the passerby Discord or check out our founder’s favorite places on AmiGo, message us for a code if you don’t have one!).
8. We’re also making sure we’re stocked up on sunscreen. Delaney Rowe told us she likes the sunscreens from Versed and True Botanicals and we have more passerby-favorite sunscreen recs here. We also like this sun hat and this one, and you can find our most recommended sunglasses here.
9. It’s the beginning of music festival season — Glastonbury is, as always, the main event, and we’re especially looking forward to Kelly Lee Owens’s DJ set and to seeing bar italia live (we have their new EP The Twi*ts on loop). We’re also scouting other European festivals, like Lowlands in the Netherlands, Les Siestes in France, and Arti Vive in Italy.
10. Our latest passerby, artist Mary Enoch Elizabeth Baxter, is featured in the documentary Paint Me A Road Out of Here, alongside the legendary artist Faith Ringgold. If you’re in D.C., don’t miss this screening on June 14th, where Mary will participate in a post-screening discussion.
paid subscribers receive access to our Discord — a community of like-minded readers ready to recommend a hotel in Marseille and a restaurant in Buenos Aires, help you pick a wedding dress, debate the new Shelia Heti, or find an apartment. join our private discord server through our passerby club membership here.
#ask-a-passerby “I use InShot for all the marketing content I create for my job. It’s a free app (if you can stand the annoying ads) or there’s a paid version for pretty cheap. You can install your own fonts, sounds, etc and it’s very easy to use.”
#recs “I am also extremely scents-itive and I used Geranium oil as a deodorant/body scent for years and years. BUT I found that many boutique perfumes are ok for me. I use DS&Durga mostly without problems and a lot of the other new, small producers also. Byredo and Serge Lutens are also good quality.”
I personally find it hard to connect with traditional or contemporary art. I will very rarely ‘feel’ anything coming out of a museum or gallery opening (even despite us creating an entire guide on how to experience a museum on passerby). The white space and traditional exhibition setting make it hard for me to feel the experience resonate, and frankly pushes a more shopping-like mindset for me: would this look nice on my white walls?
All to say, that changed for me for the first time —
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