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Influencer Trend We Are Here For: Real. Effing. Skin.
This generation doesn’t want your filters, tyvm. Feb 22, 2021
Take a quick scroll through your socials right now and I guarantee you’ll see what I’m seeing ultra-curated poreless selfies and Facetuned jawlines being quietly replaced by something much cooler: honest, unretouched pics that put acne on display in all its unpredictable glory. I m talking about content that s
genuinely relatable; like, just-crawled-out-of-bed, still-wearing-zit-cream, this-is-what-skin-looks-like relatable. And it s powerful.
It’s true that skin positivity has been around for a minute, but in a time when most of us don’t have the energy to care about getting “perfect” filtered-beyond-recognition skin (we’ve sort of had other priorities, you know?), the movement is blowing TF up. Hashtags like #FreethePimple and #AcnePosit
Why Normal Skin Is a Myth Jessica DeFino
where we’re going back to the basics with our skincare routines, and getting to the bottom of what really works for us from effective ingredients and affordable products to understanding how to protect our skin barriers and that having acne is normal.
Welcome to “
,” an op-ed column in which beauty reporter Jessica DeFino digs up the capitalist, colonialist, patriarchal foundation of the beauty industry and attempts to rebuild something better. In this installment, she investigates the emergence of “skin types” and the myth of “normal” skin.
Homo sapien skin has existed for approximately 200,000 years, but it wasn’t until the early 1900s that someone felt the need to classify skin into “types.” That someone was not a dermatologist. It was Helena Rubinstein, a master of marketing and one of the modern world’s first famous beauty brand founders. When Rubinstein decided to categorize skin as “dry,�