Culture – Page 2 – Beautifaire

5 Aug

Wellness culture is making us nervous sick

Hypochondria has been around for hundreds of years – but is the expansion of the wellness industry fuelling an increase in ‘the nervous well’ and making us all anxious? 27-year-old Cecily* has all the time struggled with “debilitating” health OCD. “It can make me feel like I continually need reassurance on a regular basis that I’m not going to die,” she says. While Cecily has grappled with these feelings since being diagnosed with a chronic illness at 15, she feels as if society’s mounting obsession with ‘wellness’ has exacerbated her existing anxieties. Notably, at one point she became fixated on tracking all of the health data available on her Apple Watch. “I used...

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4 Aug

How AI cat memes saved me from toxic gym

by Beauty Tips

Beauty, Featured

How AI cat memes saved me from toxic gym

As toxic ‘gym bro’ content on social media fuels a self-esteem crisis amongst young men, AI-generated cat memes helped change the way in which I take into consideration my body The Christmas before last a member of the family asked me to talk to their son. He’d turn into obsessive about going to the gym and getting a six pack. Why? Because that’s the way you get girls, he told me. He was 11. Sharing a room with him that 12 months, I saw first-hand how innocent Minecraft videos on YouTube auto-played straight into toxic fitness content...

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2 Mar

James Charles, Tati Westbrook and the Chaos of Cancel

by Beautifaire101

Beauty, Featured

James Charles, Tati Westbrook and the Chaos of Cancel

It began with a video — or was it an Instagram Story promoting vitamins? James Charles and Tati Westbrook — and Jeffree Star, who inserted himself into the fray somewhere along the way in which — have publicly put an end to the virtual maelstrom that moved thousands and thousands. The highly publicized back-and-forth between 20-year-old Charles, who shot to Web stardom in 2016 when CoverGirl named him its first male spokesmodel, and 37-year-old Westbrook, Charles’ mentor who's credited as one in all the primary beauty influencers, centered around a social media post promoting vitamins and mushroomed over allegations of sexual harassment. The exchange took off on May 10 with Westbrook’s “Bye Sister” video and snowballed online for a full nine days...

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22 Jan

A popular culture timeline of the rise (and fall)

by Beauty Tips

Beauty, Featured

A popular culture timeline of the rise (and fall)

From ‘sexy’ on ‘Marlboro Man’ Tom Selleck within the Eighties to ‘subversive’ at Art School’s AW20 show “Nice wig Janice, what’s it made from?”…“Your mum’s chest hair!” This iconic one-liner (from the now-canonical 2004 film, Mean Girls) is indicative of just how far chest hair, be it your mum’s or your individual, is loaded with cultural connotation. Relating to body hair, a type of ‘all or nothing’ politics abounds and chest hair is not any different. In fact, there was a time when humans were completely covered in body hair but, as our ape-adjacent ancestors migrated to warmer climes, and eventually indoors, we began to shed this coating through a technique of natural selection....

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