The Brooklyn Rail

Beauty, especially for young women, operates as a seemingly unquestionably desirable virtue. Who wouldn’t want to be beautiful? What could be wrong with aspiring towards beauty? People are rewarded for being beautiful and also punished for not trying to be more beautiful. The many levels at which beauty’s hegemony is enforced are so powerful that merely exposing them doesn’t mitigate their forces. You can tell someone they’re beautiful as they are a million times, but only they can choose to believe it. In the meantime, a multi-billion dollar industry is spinning up new ways for you to spend your money and time striving for an ideal version of yourself.

Sable Yong, in Die Hot With a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity, examines a variety of ominous vanity-orbiting nouns that can be semi-jokingly, semi-seriously capitalized and trademarked—Beauty^TM, Wellness^TM, Perfume^TM, Hair^TM, among others. Some of Yong’s overarching points are familiar critiques and considerations of vanity: the way “you but better” and “no-makeup makeup” is an effort concealed as effortlessness, the squishy nature of pretty privilege, and how wellness seeps into our culture via the gaps left by our country’s failing healthcare system. While there were moments I wish she had expounded more on her ideas or delved deeper into the history and her research, the fun of the book is in the journey. Yong shines the most in her recounting of her personal and professional stumbles and adventures as an adolescent fascinated with beauty (and briefly a model) turned professional beauty editor.

From feeling “soft little lumps squidging around” after receiving complimentary lip filler to microneedling (“Imagine getting staple-gunned in the face over and over while a big machine attached to the gun sings friendly R2-D2 beeps throughout its progress…”), Yong is well aware of the reality-warping privilege of being able to easily access all kinds of products and treatments through being a part of beauty media. She is clear-eyed about the search engine optimization incentives that motivate content and the narrowing divide between beauty editors and influencers.

It is hard work to parse the glamorous, equanimous claims of beauty marketing from the brutal monetary realities of why companies spend so much on marketing. In “No Fun in the Fun House,” Yong analyzes how the inclusivity and accessibility of beauty that representational politics has won is flimsy. Promising a beauty just out of reach, brands have only sought to target a broader consumer base in order to sell more and more products. That’s the catch when it comes to beauty as a business—companies only want to make consumers feel a little more beautiful, and fleetingly so, because ultimately the profit is in making sure the customer comes back.

Rather than failing the monoculture’s white, thin, archetypical standard and moving on, there are now a million points of comparison and new flaws to ameliorate. Technology has democratized and accelerated beauty trends at an overwhelming pace, with special assistance from social media’s emphasis on being perceived. It dovetails nicely with other pressures to always be optimizing, streamlining, smoothing, appealing to others. Yong points out that, “Living in a surveilled society is not to be confused with a sudden obsession with vanity.” Is vanity simply the rational response to constant surveillance? Women have long been trained and incentivized to closely monitor their image, which is why women are the primary participants in both beauty consumerism and social media influencing.

Women are not completely inseparable from the infinite content being hurled at us. Ultimately Yong’s prescription for how to proceed is a non-prescription: take stock of one’s own preferences and desires and treat beauty as a mode of connecting with and adorning the body that can be stepped into and stepped out of. Two consecutive essays, “Even E-Girls Get The Blues” and “Smoother Operations,” attempt to disentangle complex feelings regarding hair, on our heads and elsewhere on the body, respectively. Hair in particular is rife with cultural significance and gender assumptions. The outsized reactions to both Yong’s blue hair and her armpit hair are excellent examples of how entrenched beauty expectations are, and how personal, not-that-deep choices can be read by others as subversive. It’s also unsettling to immediately see how people interact with you differently when you alter your appearance as Yong experiences when she is catcalled more frequently when wearing long, flowing hair extensions.

While it can feel like we are so heavily conditioned to work towards beauty that it is the path of least resistance to buy in, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t discipline, exploration, and literal, visceral pain involved. To suggest that beauty does not demand all this is to deny the vast machinery that makes beauty an industry. To ignore all this ignores how women often carry the burden of intensely managing others’ perceptions of them, which are inevitably mediated by their outward appearance. There is no simple moral framework where we magically divest from capitalist, self-optimization focused ideas of beauty, but there are more pragmatic worlds to live in. Throughout Die Hot With A Vengeance, Yong emphasizes the practicalities of beauty, because in the end beauty is not a moral imperative, not a rulebook, not a winner-takes-all competition. It should be whimsical, personal, and never anchored to just one ideal, much like this book itself.