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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This is Brooke Devard and you're listening to the Naked Beauty Podcast. Welcome back to a special mini episode on a topic I've been thinking a lot about. It seems to me that beauty treatments are getting more intense and more extreme. I'm hearing about facelifts constantly and that's great for transparency. And it's also maybe a function of my age because now at 36, it seems as though all of the beauty content that I'm being served is increasingly more about serious intervention and less about skincare. It's more about, like, what heavy duty measures can be taken for extreme results, for turning back the clock. So I've always been on the skincare addiction subreddit. That was one of my very, very early, early loves on Reddit, just talking to people in the skincare community about formulations and what they were discovering and seeing before and afters. But recently I joined and by recently I mean maybe in the last two years I joined the 30 plus skincare Reddit group. And it's so interesting to see the stark difference between the posts in the skincare addiction subreddit and then the 30plus skincare Reddit. In this Reddit group you hear from all sorts of people, men and women, and they are asking what can I do to eliminate my jowls? Or I hate the under eye bags that I have. I think that they just make me look tired and worn out and I want them gone. Am I a good candidate for a lower bleph or am I a good candidate for an upper bleph? Or what CO2 laser do I need to get to resurface my skin? It's almost as if a simple moisturizer is no longer enough. People want these extreme results and they want them quickly. Now I I want to talk about blepharoplasty specifically because I feel like again, it's something that I've just been served with over and over again. But it's the surgical procedure that removes excess skin and muscle and fat from either your upper or your lower eyelids to correct any drooping or sagging or under eye bags. And it does feel like, at least for me, I've been hearing about them so much more recently than I ever have been before. I'm seeing more women in their 30s talking about facelifts that they've done or just lower facelifts that they've done and why they're so happy that they invested in getting a facelift now. And I think, of course we can kind of track this from Kris Jenner Being very open about her facelift or her, you know, second or third facelift. But I'm seeing more and more people, you know, below the age of 50, below the age of 40, even talking about getting, getting facelifts. Now the conversation that you all are going to hear is a conversation between me and Charlotte Palermino who is the co founder of the Dew, a fabulous skincare line friend of naked Beauty. She's just a very deep thinker about beauty. And we're talking about the morning shed which if you haven't seen it before, the morning shed is this viral TikTok beauty trend where people basically remove numerous layers of skin, skin care, hair care and wellness products that they've applied before bed. There's a kind of motto in the morning shed community that's like the uglier you go to bed, the hotter you look when you wake up. But you put on mouth tape to snatch your jaw over time. You put on facial patches to tighten skin. You put on face masks so your skin is very glowy when you wake up in the morning. You put in heatless rollers to reveal a perfection affected hair look. In the morning. People put castor oil in their belly button and put on overnight lip stains. It's kind of several trends mixed together. I think there's a lot of over consumption core. It's like quite literally how many products can you buy? K Beauty still going very strong with a lot of these overnight masks being from K beauty brands. And I think there's also just looks maxing which is a trend that we continue to see across all age groups. I will say as a black woman, it has been fun for me to see women discovering the benefit of wrapping their hair at night, protecting their strands with a silk bonnet. Something that we've been doing for centuries. But I also developed two years ago these overnight heatless rollers, the naked beauty retro rollers. I will link to them in the show notes. They're fabulous. But I developed them so that I could sleep with rollers in my hair overnight. I would do this on a silk press on the ends of human hair braids or even synthetic braids to dip in hot water. But I designed my overnight heatless rollers to wear overnight because the idea of doing some sort of treatment before bed, I'm not against. Do you know what else I do? I put lotion on my feet every night I slip on socks and in the morning my feet are much softer in addition to wrapping my hair. Now someone may say that's just doing too much that's just doing too much. Like, I could never, you know, put lotion on my feet every night and put on socks and wrap my hair in a silk scarf that may be someone else's. Too much. It's hard to dictate what other people's lines are. And the idea of beauty treatments becoming too extreme is subjective. But I've also been thinking about the morning shed and the way that it becomes this kind of extreme dedication to external beauty. In some ways, the morning shed is just a more accessible version of a facelift. Something extreme that you're doing to look better. And I'm putting better in quotes, but it's something where you were investing time, money and energy towards looking like your best self. And who's to say that's not a good thing? Now, you all know how recent guest Jameela Jameel feels about it and how it plays into the patriarchy. But I also think about all of the trans folks that get facial plastic surgery to feel closer to their gender identity. I think about all of the men that we see flying to Turkey to get hair plugs. And I very rarely hear critiques of men going to do these hairline surgeries. It's kind of just seen as like, okay, good for you. You did it. They're not seen as vain or vapid or interested in the wrong things, as Charlotte talks about in this episode. There is a very real halo effect to being beautiful with very material impacts on your life if you are perceived as beautiful. And I'm excited for you all to hear her take on this. There's also a visual element of this trend that can't be ignored. When you see this come across your feed, women look absolutely mummified. They are wrapped up. It's a bit grotesque. They have the chin strap and all of these patches on their face. It reminds me of Pedro Amodovar's film the Skin I Live in, which, if you haven't seen it, is fabulous. But there are all of these kind of recent body horror films as well, like the Substance with Demi Moore and Margaret Qualley. Ryan Murphy has a new show called the Beauty in which they're really examining how far will people go to be seen as beautiful. So I do think that there is something that we are grappling with in culture around these extreme beauty treatments, both on the very expensive, quite frankly inaccessible end, like getting a facelift, to wrapping yourself in several products to go to sleep at night. The part of this convo that you won't hear, but I'll summarize it for you. So, you know, the starting point is me telling Charlotte that I am reluctant to post this video that I have sitting in my reels drafts. I'm going to paint the picture for you all. It is me. It's a green screen video. So I am reacting to a video behind me of a woman. I did cut off her face, but it's a woman doing her morning shed and she's taking. Taking off all of these different layers. And I'm basically saying direct to camera. Is this how far we've gone? Have we lost the plot? Do we need to be chasing perfectionism even in our sleep? Ultimately, Spoiler alert. I didn't post it because it did feel a little bit holier than thou. It felt a little bit judgmental. So I wanted to hear Charlotte's thoughts on the morning shed and our quest for perfectionism. That does seem unrelentless. And that's where we pick up. All right, let's get into it.
- [08:08]
B
Well, so I feel like we are. We've optimized to the point now where we can't enjoy anything. Like, I'm like, how do you fucking that? I'm serious. I'm like, what?
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A
You don't. You don't.
- [08:22]
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I do. Like, I don't know. Like, I don't know. I'm trying to have a baby right now. And I'm just like, I can't even imagine that. But I do think that it's almost this logical conclusion of these ever rising and ever strict beauty standards. Because now we've hit a beauty standard that's not even found in real life.
- [08:40]
A
Right.
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B
The beauty standard is like, people are getting. Are under the knife and we're talking about young celebrities, and people aren't even disclosing what they're having done. And so it's like this weird. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, because if you do, then you're upholding these unrealistic beauty standards. But then if you don't disclose it, then you're a liar. And oh, my God, she's aging so gracefully. And so I think that I just.
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C
Want to pause there for a second because is it. Who's the actress? I love Emma Stone. I saw this, like, before and after of, like, her work. She looks incredible. But here's my thing. Let's say let's pretend I'm Emma Stone for a second. This woman's not on Instagram. She never talks about her personal life. She just shows up and does her job.
- [09:16]
A
Part of her job.
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C
Whether we like to admit it or not is, like, looking beautiful and young. And so she has made an investment.
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A
And I don't know what type of.
- [09:24]
C
Disclaimer do I need to make here? I don't know what this one's done to her face, but it appears she's done, like, a little micro facelift. And she looks great to me. I don't expect her to come out to the world and be like, I've done a facial surgery, because why does.
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A
She owe us that?
- [09:37]
C
But I also hear what you're saying, but for me, if I'm Emma Stone, I'm not saying anything. Would you say something if you did?
- [09:43]
B
The thing is, if I was an actress like that, I don't know. Like, I think it's, like, it's because it's my brand to say things. I also think. I think for me, what's sad, though, is, like, she doesn't have hooded eyes anymore. And so what she is signaling is that hooded eyes are not okay. And that's more the thing where I'm like, but I don't have hooded eyes, so I don't know what it's like. And some people are just born with it. So what's the difference between buying it, being born with it? Because in the United States, in particular, something called the halo effect. And it's. When you are beautiful, people associate traits with you that you did not earn. And so who are. Who is anyone to tell anyone to buy their way into that? You don't get mad when people buy their way into an education.
- [10:26]
A
That's true.
- [10:27]
B
And I'm not saying it's the same thing. I'm not saying it's one for one. But I find it really frustrating when people critique beauty but then don't recognize the very real impact it has on people's lives. And in Korea, it's so fascinating because I was talking to a lot of Koreans, and they're like, oh, yeah, you can go into a totally different, like, social class with a different face, and you can have better jobs. You can better. And so I feel like it's like they are more the quiet part out loud. Like, zero bedside manner when you're there. Like, everything that makes you ugly in society because, again, beauty standards are made up. Beauty actually, like, it's so subjective, and it changes constantly. Like, my nose would have slayed during, like, the Roman era.
- [11:09]
C
Your nose slays now.
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A
I love your nose.
- [11:11]
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I think it slays now. But there are plenty of people who tell me it doesn't. It's like, it's really. It's interesting. And so I guess what I would say to the mummification is that ultimately, if you like doing it, if it's your sport, right? Beauty can be a contact sport. I can't. I have my own people think what I do is ridiculous, right? Everyone has a different scale. For me, when you stop enjoying your life, when you feel like you're trapped by it and you have to do it, feel like you're ugly without doing it, that's when I start to be like, ah, I hope you can find a way out of it. And I hope that AI doesn't get too far ahead of us because already the augmented reality has fucked with our heads. And so now I feel like AI is going to be another level.
- [11:56]
A
And of course, the conversation ends at AI because we can't talk about the future anymore without talking about AI Now, I will say that there is this push away from perfectionism that I'm also seeing. I think we've had just so many years of snatched perfection. Facetune filters, Snapchat filters. And because of AI, these kind of poreless faces that have been engineered to look perfect. The real future of AI I mean, some of the really interesting AI work that I'm seeing shows skin texture in pores because they're already recognizing that this backlash is happening. But I do think the pendulum is swinging backwards towards the real and the raw. Sarah Radden wrote a really interesting article for Marie Claire talking about this, where she interviewed some cultural critics that had a point of view about this overall trend, this move towards imperfectionism. Gen Z despises being cookie cutter, especially in the wake of trad wifery and rising conservatism. There was this viral TikTok that this creator says, basically, ladies, keep your lower bleph. She speaks direct to camera and she talks about the fact that puffy under eyes, the kind that are either genetic or kind of come from bad sleep or crying or just worrying about the world. She talks about it being this kind of ultimate French girl flex, right? Like this idea that having these under eye bags or dark circles under your eyes is actually kind of a cool look. It's like you haven't gone out of your way to conceal your way around what you're actually feeling the night you had before or just how you were born. Emily Carmelli pointed to this as a bigger beauty moment. She says, quote, the keep your lower bleph moment isn't just about under eyes. It's about exhaustion with the performance of flawlessness Literally, in an era where perfection is purchasable and we're firmly in the undetectable facelift era, authenticity is becoming the last scarce commodity. Now within this, there's also an idea of privilege that can't be overlooked in terms of who gets to be imperfect, who gets to rebel outside of the confines of traditional beauty. Black women haven't traditionally been included in that, but I will share how much I loved Corey's approach to hair. Now, Cory Moreno, who was on last week's episode of Naked Beauty, he and I talk a lot about having that kind of imperfection when it comes to even the way black hair looks up. It doesn't have to be every strand in place, everything laid. And if you looked at Chase Infinity, walk the red carpet at the Golden Globes, Corey did her hair. He did such an amazing job as he always does, but she had this very fluffy kind of blown out afro look. It wasn't uniform. Every single curl wasn't the same. It wasn't super sleek. It was just bare, beautiful, like a cloud of beautiful natural hair. And so I am encouraged by seeing more imperfectionism being embraced. As with all things beauty, our relationship is ever evolving and I'm curious to hear from you all in the comments. Leave a comment on Spotify Tell me if you think we've gone too far, if you think we are chasing perfection to a degree that is just not sustainable over time, where you're at with your own personal relationship to beauty. In the end, I'm very glad that I did not post that reel criticizing the morning shed because with all we've got going on in the world, whatever makes you truly happy, I support it. I really do. All right, thank you all so much for listening. Take good care of yourselves and I'll be back next week with a new interview.
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D
You can look inside you find out who am I to be in the position to make me feel so damn unpretty?
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E
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