too much is never enough

the business of buying beauty

Karen Kilimnik, Me as Isabelle Adjani in Ishtar, Part II, 1994

I was 13 the first time I shaved my legs. It was the beginning of high school, eighth grade, and I went to Rexall and bought a disposable men’s razor and fumbled in the shower to shave my legs and arms. I barely had body hair then; I barely have body hair now. But somehow I’d become convinced by the age of 13 that body hair was disgusting and I needed to get rid it as soon as possible.

I’ve been fascinated by the rituals and routines of womanhood for as long as I can remember. My mom didn’t wear makeup when I was young, but I was still obsessed with her makeup drawer—she had this one Lancome purple eyeshadow, probably a sample from a department store, that I would swatch onto my wrist and pretend was a bruise. When we went over to our family friends’ house, I would inspect all the bottles and tubes in their teenage daughter’s bathroom. It was annoying to be a girl—it seemed so unfair that periods and pregnancy were in my future—but it was also incredibly pleasurable and interesting. I couldn’t wait to grow up and do all the mysterious, glamorous things that other women did.

What I didn’t see growing up, and what I see everywhere now, is what I call the “not enoughness” of womanhood. For instance, growing up as a girl in the 2000s, you could never be thin enough. A while ago a friend’s girlfriend mentioned to me that she had a huge appetite, but she almost never met other women with normal relationships with food. And it made me think: as a teenager, probably every single other girl I knew participated in some sort of disordered eating. Because how could you not, when it was impossible to be thin enough?

And then there is the eternal thing of women never feeling pretty. Even women who are professionally good-looking are constantly insecure about their appearance. It’s like, you might feel really pretty on a particular night or in a particular photo. You might receive constant validation that you’re attractive. But I still know almost no women who walk around in their daily life feeling incredibly secure about their appearance. Because of course the first thing our culture teaches you as a woman is that you can never be pretty enough, and if you are pretty enough you’ll age out of it in about three years. Of course, the Gen Z obsession with aging has replaced the Millennial fetishization of skinniness: Tiktok comments are rife with teenagers accusing 24-year-olds of looking 32. And it’s like, okay, what does that even mean? Do 19-year-olds now have to spend their entire 20s worried that they’re “aging too fast?”

There are, of course, a few thousand products you can purchase to make yourself feel better. You can: shave your legs, wax them, get your hair lasered off, highlight or balayage or otherwise bleach the hair on your head, Olaplex it to restore the moisture after it’s been bleached to death, buy fancy shampoo or conditioner or a volumizing spray or hair oil that smells like flowers, also dry shampoo, also a Dyson, acquire a 12-step skincare routine, of course you’ll probably buy multiple iterations of every step to figure out which works the best, sunscreen is the most important so you’ll probably have eight different sunscreens but only one you really use, body wash, body scrub, body moisturizer, body oil, everyone does Botox nowadays, filler but a conservative amount did you know it doesn’t dissolve properly, red light mask, facials, PRP injections, brow lift, lip lift, buccal fat removal… oops, I haven’t made it to makeup yet.

Sometimes when I look at my cluttered bathroom counter I’m filled with despair. Especially when I think about my guy friends, the fanciest of whom have a five-step skincare routine courtesy of their girlfriend. The median washes his face with shampoo and only wears sunscreen when he’s hitting the beach. If you’re a guy, owning Aesop shampoo is the height of luxury. If you’re a girl, it’s like, doesn’t everybody know the thing to buy from Aesop is not shampoo?

It’s really only in the past couple of years that I’ve gotten over my weight. As in, I’ve just accepted that I weigh what I weigh. I work out pretty frequently and I eat pretty well and my current weight is where my body wants to be and that’s fine. I no longer constantly think, It’d be nice if I were somewhat thinner. This might make it sound like I have crazy body issues but I think I’m about exactly 50th percentile self-conscious about my body and 50th percentile for girls is, “I’ve been weird about my body my whole life and now I’ve sort of given up.” Do you see what I mean? As a woman if you don’t draw the line, nobody will draw the line for you.

Again: you are the only one who can draw the line. So many famously beautiful women inject Juvederm into their face until they look like swollen cats and nobody comes to save them. In fact, people call them botched, and laugh at them for their vanity, as if they are not victims of a culture that has told them their whole lives: your beauty is the best thing about you. Your beauty is your primary source of value. Without it, you are nothing.

Everyone draws their line at a different place. I have a vivid memory of a writer I like posting about how some horrible guy called her ugly because she had pronounced eyebags. And she was like, what am I gonna do, get them surgically removed? I don’t want to do that. As an insecure teenager, I hadn’t yet learned that you can just do that—just say, listen: I don’t want to change this thing about myself. I am okay as I am. I was talking with a friend about the ickiness of substantially older men dating very young women and I tried to articulate something to the effect of: it just feels gross because I know firsthand that when you’re young you’re literally willing to swap out everything about yourself to become acceptable to other people. And I don’t think that when you’re 20 you know how vulnerable that desire to be loved makes you.

I still wear makeup, every day. The truth is, I like wearing makeup. I have about 15 different red lipsticks, and I probably will acquire more. I’m still not immune to the magic of wonderful objects, the way a perfume or a lipstick can reassure you that magic and beauty exist in the world. But I also understand now that too much is never enough.

One of the big themes of Bookbear Express is balancing control with acceptance. For a while now I’ve been trying to square the importance of feeling at home in my body, the joy of caring for it, with an awareness of how girls grow up inculculating a critical gaze that can never be satisfied. How your vanity can become a monster devouring itself. And the need to really internalize that throwing things into the void is never going to fill you up.

On social media I am constantly inundated with product recommendations, makeup reviews, vintage clothing hauls. Some of these things I am interested in, some of them I am not. Basically none of them are going to make me feel better or change my life or self-image and that’s okay. We can appreciate objects without expecting salvation from them.