Black Market Beauty
Black Market Beauty
Why are we harming ourselves with beauty and cosmetic dupes?
In today’s post:
Q (not) A Beauty & Pop Culture Questions
The Full Beat Black Market Beauty: Why are we harming ourselves with beauty & cosmetic dupes?
Do we need another celebrity beauty line? No. Are we getting one anyway? Absolutely. We all love Rihanna’s style, and the FENTY brand consistently develops beauty/cosmetic products that we love. But if we’re bffr, with very little information about the products themselves, or their efficacy, there is little draw towards the product besides the mogul herself.1
Is it possible for a cosmetic brand to be revolutionary? Maybe? Initially, I thought, girl no, this is just good marketing. However, after reading about how difficult it was for Sarah Creal to convince investors that women 40+ wanted “education, age representation, and age-specific formulations,” I’m unsure. While the overall goal is (always) to generate profit, Creal’s mission counters traditional approaches to beauty consumption and the reality that the beauty industry is “built around courting, desiring and selling youth.” And that’s…something.
Now why would The Cut publish this? They titled the piece, “Nick Cannon Will Be Busy on Father’s Day” and then chronologically listed all his kids and their mamas. I love mess, and they are certainly earning my subscription.
Black Market Beauty
Upon my return to TikTok I was flooded by a series of videos discussing a dangerous new beauty trend, curing lashes with UV lights. Apparently, some lash techs were using gel lamps to cure their client’s lashes faster than usual. This particular service reflects a lack of knowledge about the dangers of misusing tools in the name of speedier service. The original video refers to this process as “girl math,” and explains that lash techs can increase the amount of clients they see, and make more money. The original video also shows the client jumping after she experiences a heat spike on her eye.
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This service reminded me of the Basement Braces trend from last year. If you recall there was an influx of videos of people getting veneers, fashion braces, and even permanent braces put on by non-medical professionals in their homes and grill shops.
In this visual essay I drew a link between a growing interest in veneers and “perfect teeth” to an obsession with celebrity. I argued that for many, having one’s teeth done was a prerequisite to having a career as an online personality. However, in the U.S. access to high-quality dental care and dental cosmetics is an expensive privilege that few can afford. Thus, many were turning to “Teeth by Tisha” to fill the gaps created by a healthcare system that is buoyed by medical racism and anti-poor biases.
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What is shaping people’s decision to pursue knockoff beauty treatments, specifically those that may be dangerous? Trends like curing lashes or getting at-home braces reflect a desire to “get prettier faster” and at a lower cost. Couple this desire with an attempt to meet ever-changing beauty standards, and some people’s motivations to pursue beauty at any cost are clearer.
In some cases, Black women are opting into these services and unknowingly being put at medical risk for the sake of beauty. If this sounds familiar, it's because we had a similar conversation about companies putting us at risk for medical harm without our consent in my three-part relaxer series.
Beauty standards are shifting at an alarming rate, and whether we like it or not, we cannot opt out of beauty culture. For Black women, adhering to or exceeding these standards ensures that our humanity is perceptible. During a recent conversation about Black women and beauty, a few of us talked briefly about how attractiveness is necessary to access social capital. Which we need to make economic capital to maintain beauty. For women who actively capitalize off their beauty, there is a return on investment (thanks Mbiye). However, for the rest of us there is only the expectation that we continue to meet the bar.
Meeting these standards is expensive and time-consuming. Black market tools and tricks make beauty more accessible but at a greater risk.
The types of harms we face when opting into backdoor beauty practices varies depending on our roles. For example, I wrote about Cardi B and Nicki Minaj’s choice to get illegal butt injections from unlicensed dealers. Cardi B’s choice was made so that she might appear more attractive to strip club patrons, while Nicki Minaj wanted to stand out among the many women surrounding Young Money in the mid-2000s.
The more marginalized our identities, the more at risk we are for these kinds of backdoor services. This is especially apparent when we consider the experiences of Black transwomen with limited access to the hormone injections and medical treatment they need.
In Optimal Beauty Standards I wrote,
Women’s access to beauty has always been a means of translating social capital into legitimate capital, necessitating their survival. According to Drs. Samantha Kwan, Mary Nell Trautner “Physical attractiveness is associated with a number of positive outcomes, including employment benefits such as hiring, wages, and promotion…”1 In this period of late capitalism, inflation, rampant unemployment, and stagnant minimum wages have made accessing innovative beauty technologies difficult. However, despite these growing economic issues beauty is still a requirement, so to meet its standard under these uniquely devastating conditions, we turn to DIY.
While each scenario is different, the thread that links them all together is that Black women, in pursuit of beauty often find our health at risk. And, for many of us, these risks are worth it if we can gain temporary access to the capital that our beauty and/or attractiveness may grant us.
For more on Black women's complicated relationship with beauty and the harms we encounter in pursuit of it, check out the following works:
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)
Paris Is Burning Dir. Jennie Livingston (1990)
Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature by Dr. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997)
Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America by Ayana Byrd, Lori Tharps (2001 & 2014)
Ain't I a Beauty Queen?: Black Women, Beauty, and the Politics of Race by Maxine Leeds Craig (2002)
Subjects of Desire Dir. Jennifer Holness (2021)
The Stroll Dir. Kristen Lovell (2023)
I’m writing this section about a week out from the launch and, there haven’t been, to my knowledge, a lot of examples of the products being used besides some Instagram stories.
Nothing turns me off more than a celebrity launching a product in a market that's already heavily exploited. More often than not, their marketing copy will be flimsy and overly reliant on ~vibes vs a singular focus on the consumer. Glad to see many aren't buying into it anymore. I've been over it for about a decade now.