Sable Yong was formerly a beauty editor at Allure and is now a freelance writer. Sable’s extensive work has appeared in Vogue, GQ, The Guardian, the New York Times, and many other outlets. Her career in beauty began as a writer and editor at xoVain. She writes primarily about beauty, culture, and identity and co-hosts a podcast about all things scent-related called Smell Ya Later.
Below, Sable shares six key insights from her new book, Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity. Listen to the audio version—read by Sable herself—in the Next Big Idea App.
1. Beauty is for everyone. Beauty culture, however, can make beauty feel ominous.
If you live in a body, you are subject to appearance politics, for better or worse. Of course, it doesn’t define who you are as a person, but the way we feel about our looks is very much influenced by an entire global history of established social value systems.
Beauty is valuable because it has always been a conduit to power. That’s something to keep in mind when parsing what parts of beauty culture and labor you choose to validate for yourself or for others.
2. Beauty standards are absolutely made up, but they are influential.
As a beauty editor and journalist, a lot of what we cover in the industry revolves around trends, habits, and innovations driven by consumer demand or social media. We’re given a generous amount of liberty in deciding what’s worth covering, which means that what you read in magazines is determined by humans with biases and advertisers to please. Social media also amplifies the message of beauty’s importance through its perceived rewards and attention logs. Whether you subscribe is your choice.
“What you read in magazines is determined by humans with biases and advertisers to please.”
I think it’s a good idea to go ahead with a healthy amount of skepticism and critical thought because most beauty standards historically weren’t made with most people in mind.
3. Self-optimization is a double-edged blade.
Being your “best self” in an age of hyper-individualism, meritocracy, and #wellness is an easy way to play yourself when you staunchly follow messages from self-professed experts or gurus. Or the social media noise about virality and brand marketing speak that’s trying a little too hard to be your friend.
Taking care of your health is a positive habit to commit to, and it’s really easy to get caught up in a self-care current when it looks like everyone is performing their glow-up at you.
There’s only so much we can do to take care of our bodies when they’re functioning as they should. So, it’s important to remind yourself that endlessly improving your exterior, or trying to bio-hack your way to optimal performance, can often be in service of a capitalist-minded lifestyle rather than an actual life well lived.
4. Beauty should not be taken any more seriously than you take yourself.
For many people (women and women of color especially), beauty feels like a mandate that we have to strive for to be seen as valuable in society. The truth in that sentiment should make you mad at the entities doubling down on pressuring you to perform femininity or participate in diet culture.
“When you engage with beauty as a form of creative expression, it becomes a way to connect with yourself and your true desires.”
It bears reminding that beauty can be a tool for self-expression, creativity, and identity exploration. Beauty can be an emotive outlet or an experimental one. Also, a lot of it is just pure comedy. I cannot take myself seriously when wearing a sheet mask or trying to do anything with wet nail polish on my fingers or putting a star pimple patch on my face. When you engage with beauty as a form of creative expression, it becomes a way to connect with yourself and your true desires, as well as with others who appreciate beauty the way you do.
5. Beauty’s strength is in its community.
The importance of beauty in cultural and social mobility and relevance can make it feel fraught for those of us engaging in it. Beauty’s harmful casualties are well documented, and vanity’s stigma keeps us at odds with who we wish to be. Downplaying the labor involved in beauty’s makings obscures the resources and effort it takes to achieve certain ideals. If we’re all siloed, beauty just keeps us captive in perpetual competition with one another. That’s why I think beauty in community is where we can find healing and connection.
Hair salons and bathhouses have always been social places where we gather for beauty and service, but we’re also building community in the process. Caring touch from a massage or someone washing your hair can have beneficial effects on your emotional well-being, and participating in communal care can feel spiritually bolstering. Humans have always been social creatures, after all. Beauty and grooming are one of the last venues for caring touch and connecting with our bodies and others’ with the kind of simple vulnerability required to make these connections.
6. Perfection is a myth.
Whatever mantras exist to keep us participating in beauty culture—beauty is pain, blondes have more fun, aging gracefully—none of them are relevant to your connection with your body or even make you feel good about it. If you start to question even one, you begin to realize how none of them really make sense.
“Beauty is a living thing meant to express one’s inner emotions.”
Flawlessness is easily a sunk-cost fallacy. Revenge bod just weaponizes beauty against yourself in service of self-preservation in the face of heartbreak. And empowerment doesn’t come in a jar, a tube, or at the end of a syringe. You’re still going to age, no matter what you do to your skin.
Beauty is not perfection because perfection suggests that it’s done. Beauty is a living thing meant to express one’s inner emotions. It’s not just an aesthetic to be gazed upon. For what? Artistic value? It takes a whole lifetime to appreciate how you cultivate your inner spirit and energy. That’s what always pulls, where aesthetics or beauty can’t be defined.
To listen to the audio version read by author Sable Yong, download the Next Big Idea App today:
