Author: Beauty Tips
The girl in my phone is pulling a small piece of black tape off her lips, smiling as she wiggles it in front of the camera. She undoes the clasp of a chin strap fastened in the back of her head. She peels off glistening overnight masks: one on her brow, and one under each eye. She shakes free a mass of curly hair from a baby pink silk bonnet, rubs an oil into her roots, tells her audience she’s about to have an “all the things shower”.
That is the ‘morning shed’: the strategy of removing beauty products and coverings which have been worn overnight. On TikTok, videos in regards to the morning shed have racked up tens of millions...
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“I'm in a bar in Brooklyn, listening to 2 men, my friends, discuss whether my life is price living.”
So begins Easy Beauty, the debut book and genre-bending memoir from philosophy professor and Pulitzer Prize-finalist author Chloé Cooper Jones. It’s not the primary time her body – its autonomy and inherent value – has been discussed in front of her. Not the primary time it’s been discussed as if separate from her, the person sat right there, listening as friends, colleagues or strangers evaluate her existence, dismissing her perspective within the name of “objectivity”. It also won’t be the last.
Weaving together aesthetic philosophy, art history, travel writing and private narrative, Easy Beauty is a confronting and eye-opening exploration of beauty from...
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Body horror in The Substance18 Images
As Sue (Margaret Qualley) is plunging a needle into an infected wound, consumed by a single-minded pursuit of perfection and unable to stop herself, despite it destroying what’s left of Elisabeth’s (Demi Moore) body and life, it becomes clear she is hooked on chasing beauty and ‘fixing’ her every imagined flaw.
Coralie Fargeat’s satirical body horror film The Substance follows Elisabeth’s journey as she experiments with an unregulated injectable drug that guarantees to make her a “younger, more beautiful, more perfect” version of herself. As Elisabeth is shoved out, Sue is ushered in, and while, at first, the 2 uphold the foundations, soon the characters’ actions spiral uncontrolled, starting to exhibit classic signs of substance dependency...
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