Ranting geekery...
... maybe ranting's too strong but some positive news about a few things I've complained about, my unfiltered thoughts on "intimate" moisturisers & bots' beauty recommendations, plus some skin TLC ...
Having committed to the drop cap at the start of the newsletter (which I do love, being an old school newspaper hack at heart), I’m now having to write a little intro paragraph so that it doesn’t look weird. But the newsletter probably needed that anyway so…. This week you’ve got a little update on some stories that have appeared in the newsletter over recent weeks. And they’re one of the reasons that I want to thank you for following / reading / subscribing / whatever you’re doing. Because in the past, these are little things would have annoyed me, I might have said something on my Instagram stories, and ranted on a WhatsApp to some friends, but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to expand upon them, and nothing would have changed. But because Beauty Geekery exists, some small things that I think / hope might make the world a bit better might change, so thanks.
Sadly it’s not all Pollyanna stuff this week because you’ve also got my take on “intimate” moisturisers (who knew? Not me until the release landed in my inbox this week, but apparently there are loads and they have been all over TikTok.) And I know other people have had their say on this but SheerLuxe’s new way of covering beauty (and fashion and travel) has not landed well with me either.
As ever, I’d love to know your thoughts on ALL of this, so do chime in in the comments below…
An update or two…
Last week I promised you an update on two stories that appeared in this newsletter in recent weeks. The first was the massive environmental abomination of a PR mailer that I called out in my Unearthed beauty geekery newsletter. Quick recap…
I did actually post an update to this one on Notes but I think it’s only fair to pop it in the newsletter too as I think Notes can get lost.
After I’d flagged it with the PR, they told me that they took my point, that it was something that they were mindful of, that they would be discussing it with the brand and would keep it in mind in the future. They then forwarded me the brand’s response…
As a brand, we take this very seriously and will be more vigilant moving forward, particularly in limiting PR mailers that involve excessive packaging. It was quite surprising to see our products featured in that context, and we’re taking this as an important learning.
Regarding the XXXX PR mailer kit, the concept was rooted in offering a Korean gifting experience. The acrylic component was intentionally designed as a reusable beauty/vanity drawer rather than a single-use PR element. It was meant to reflect a meaningful cultural reference - drawing inspiration from how women in the XXXX dynasty stored their most personal and treasured items. We had positioned this as a keepsake gift for editors to highlight our heritage as part of the brand introduction.
That said, we completely agree with the concerns around packaging. Internally, we had already been discussing ways to minimize this; however, we were advised by the production team to reinforce packaging due to risks of breakage during air shipment from Korea, which led to overpackaging. We will absolutely take this feedback on board and refine our approach going forward.
I mean some explanation of the context would have been good (there was literally a postcard giving me the names of the products), and there’s a certain naivety about just how many mailers editors get and the limits of our storage capacity if every single one of them includes a keepsake gift… but credit where it’s due for the response.
Similarly, some of you may remember my rant about Bioderma platforming the pseudoscientific app Yuka on their website, which I talked about in my Demonised ingredients geekery newsletter. Well here’s Bioderma’s response…
We have carefully read your recent Substack on YUKA scoring. Thank you for your feedback. We would like to reassure you that, the real proof of our products’ quality and safety comes from the clinical studies and rigorous testing behind them. These are the references we trust and prioritise when it comes to demonstrating the performance and safety of our formulations. YUKA’s evaluation method only considers the INCI list, which makes it incomplete for fully appreciating the complexity of a skincare formula and the importance of proper ingredient dosages.
That said, many of our consumers follow YUKA closely and often look for those scores. Mentioning the rating on our website is simply a way to reassure them and provide transparency, but it remains a very small part of how we demonstrate the quality and safety of our products.
We’re currently migrating our website and reviewing all content for the updated site. Some items were already planned for removal, so this timing aligns with our ongoing updates.
The PR confirmed that YUKA will not be on the Bioderma site going forward. So that’s a lovely little win on the pseudoscience whack-a-mole front.
Does your vagina need beautifying?
There’s a joke in journalism about headlines that are QTWTAIN — Questions To Which The Answer Is No. This is one of them. I’m not going to mention the brand here because, honestly, I don’t want to give them the oxygen of publicity, but I got a press release the other day for “naturally dissolving melts designed for intimate self-care.” (i.e. pessaries that you stick inside your vagina. Also, medical fact of the week: pessaries are for your vagina, suppositories are for your anus. In case you were wondering.) I tried to take a moment to work out why it angered me so much and tried to think reasonably about how maybe I just wasn’t the target audience but maybe there would be some people who would be. And I just kept coming back to the same thing. This is a product designed to harness shame and present it as self-care.
The website talks about it being indulgence for “an area that's been left out of the beauty conversation for way too long.” Do we really need to talk about why your vagina does not need to be a part of the beauty conversation? Do you even know what the inside of your vagina looks like? Does anyone except your gynaecologist actually know what the inside of your vagina looks like? The inside of your vagina does not need moisturising with plant oils, vitamin E and fruit extracts. Especially when the different fragrances are called “Ripe Cherry”, “Sweet Strawberry” and “Soft Peach”. This is like “intimate deodorants” and “yoni steaming” all over again. Your vagina doesn’t need moisturising, deodorising or detoxifying. It’s an amazing self-cleaning, self-regulating part of your body that can quite happily look after itself without intervention. And if it does need intervention, it should be medical, not beauty.
But don’t just take my word for it. I spoke to Dr Clare Spencer. She’s an NHS GP who initially trained in obstetrics and gynaecology, and a registered menopause specialist.
“If you’re experiencing vaginal dryness in menopause, for example, then it’s far better to use a vaginal oestrogen and/or a lubricant that are matched in acidity to the vagina,” she says. “My worry about using melts like this is that they are unlikely to be as evidence-based as vaginal oestrogens or the non-hormonal moisturisers that we can prescribe, and we don’t know what they do to the vaginal bacterial balance, which is really important for vaginal health.”
She also points out that because the vulval tissue is really delicate, shoving anything up there can cause irritation, itching, and excessive vaginal discharge which can further irritate it.
And, she says, products like this can mask underlying health issues.
“If there’s a change in odour, that needs checking out to make sure you haven’t got bacterial vaginosis or an STI or thrush. If there’s sudden dryness, why is that the case? Is it a sign of the menopause or other hormonal disruption? If so that can be managed more effectively by treating the root cause.”
Also let’s get really real here. I have not tried these particular pessaries, but I have had IVF which entailed using progesterone pessaries and even if you rebranded them as “dissolving melts designed to deliver medication to your most intimate area” they’d still leave you feeling sticky and unpleasant with waxy gunk in your underwear. TMI? Sorry but if you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about.
Let’s be really honest, this feels like a product that is designed to make women feel that what they are naturally is not enough for men. It’s an extension of the pornification of women and sex that we’ve seen happening for a long time. Just like it’s not enough to have normal sex, you have to have porn filmworthy sex, it’s not enough to have a vagina, you have to have a moisturised, fruit-flavoured one. Oh do me a favour.
I think the reason that this bothers me so much is the framing of it as “self-care”. This isn’t self-care, this is the very definition of “other-care”. It’s not for your benefit, it’s entirely for someone else’s.
Emma Gunavardhana writes really well on the way in which the beauty and wellness industries have reframed certain products as “self-care” as a particularly insidious and privileged form of marketing, and this feels like that but to the nth degree. Rant over.
Tell me which retinoid your microchip is loving this week
Sometimes things happen and they just make me feel really old. So last week online magazine SheerLuxe posted a reel with four new AI influencers. For clarity, these are not influencers that talk about AI, they are “people” (avatars) who don’t really exist. They’re generated by AI and will each be “bringing their own perspective on fashion, beauty, travel and careers.”
Wait WHAT? I know, I know, we’ll get to ALL that. If this story sounds a bit familiar, it’s because this isn’t the first time that Sheer Luxe has done this. Back in July 2024, they introduced their first AI avatar, “Reem” and there was a huge outcry. People accused them of depriving real people of jobs and called it weird, disturbing and performative. At the time, Sheer Luxe responded in a statement that said:
“Since the start of SheerLuxe, innovation has been central to what we do - and as we enter a new era of tech and AI, we wanted to stay at the forefront. It is clear we didn’t explain it properly and we’re sorry.
Reem was born entirely from our desire to experiment with AI, not to replace a human role. She is an AI generated image only, and is not able to create content or articles. No jobs were compromised in any way as a result of her creation and we would never publish any content that hasn’t had human involvement.
We’ll keep innovating and, as ever, are always keen to hear from people - we are listening and in future we will explain such newness better to our readers.”
Well they may say they’re listening but flash forward almost two years and they’re not just doubling down, they’re quadrupling down, with three new AI avatars joining Reem.
The one that obviously caught my eye was Gigi, “the beauty obsessive of the group.” In “her” intro vid, she says “Think skincare routines, makeup discoveries and the products actually worth adding to your routine. I love testing new launches, sharing glow-boosting skincare and finding those every day beauty staples that make getting ready feel a little more special”
This is just MAD, right? I get that “Gigi’s” opinions are going to be an amalgamation of those of the beauty team at SheerLuxe but then why are they not giving them to us direct? Because that is SheerLuxe’s schtick, making stars of their editorial team. It’s the first person thing that I feel like Jane Pratt really seized and ran with with xoJane and continues to do with Another Jane Pratt Thing here. And while I get that there is a place for it within media, as I’ve said before, I don’t think it should be the only way that stories in the lifestyle space should be told. Although you might think that I’d love this — after all it was only a few newsletters ago that I was wanging on about not wanting to show my own face. Maybe the solution is Ceecee, my own personal AI avatar who can be the mouthpiece for everything I want to say about beauty? Or maybe not. Because aside from the “pay real women” argument, it’s weird and it’s creepy and we don’t have to be able to articulate what it is about publications using AI avatars rather than real people that makes us really uncomfortable, we just know instinctively, in our guts, that it’s not what we want.
Maybe it’s that we’re actually scared by the idea that the nature of what it means to be a person, to be real, is threatened by the existence of bots who almost look and sound convincing. (I’d love to get Laura Kennedy’s take on this.) Maybe it’s the far more prosaic inability to trust the recommendations that are being made, as makeup artist, Lan Nguyen-Grealis (@lanslondon) pointed out. “With no practical experience an Ai avatar cannot or should not be recommending anything as we all want to know who’s behind the button.” Or, as comedian Ellie Taylor put it, “Would love to know what retinol a hard drive uses. You ok Hun?!” Then there’s the fact that every single one of these avatars is conventionally beautiful and catwalk model sized — “You made these people from scratch and not one of them could have been midsize or plus size?” asked Mimi. This is clearly, transparently, if you go by the comments on the post, not what anybody wants.
So why are they doing it? I can’t see this being the sort of “any publicity is good publicity” stunt that will pull people towards the brand. So they must genuinely feel like this is the future. If you take the emotion out of it, and take at face value the fact that, as they claim, nobody’s being done out of a job, and these are just mouthpieces for the SheerLuxe staff, it sort of makes sense, right? I mean, you can understand the utility of creating a generic person who you think your readers will relate to, the perfect blend of the aspects of various members of staff that are shared with your readers, and none of the bits that aren’t.
After all archetypes are not new. Politicians think about voters in terms of White Van Man and Centrist Dad. And, in the past, when I’ve done copywriting for brands, they’ve often given me a pen sketch of their consumer (“Brenda is 52 and lives in the Midlands. She works in a bank, has two grown-up children who still live at home. She buys most of her beauty products with the weekly supermarket shop but might be tempted by something on a promotion in Boots etc etc”)
These can be helpful when you’re thinking about policies, or how to write something that will engage someone. But when you meet the actual people who these archetypes are meant to represent, for all that they may, collectively, have shared values and things in common, they’ll also have quirks, aspects of their personality that don’t fit your pre-conceptions. Maybe White Van Man listens to opera, or Brenda has a past as a heavy metal roadie and has a load of tattoos you weren’t expecting. People are multi-dimensional, that’s what makes them interesting.
And I think that (among many things) is the issue here. We mistrust someone who is always completely on message. And I love that we do. I think it’s healthy that we can tell that something is off. The same is true with all the A.I. word slop that I keep seeing being churned out. It just feels off, even if we can’t pinpoint why, it lacks heart, personality, emotion. It’s all the words, put down in a way that makes sense, but nothing that interrupts the monotony to excite us, engage us, shake us up.
I do realise I may be a dinosaur in thinking like this, and that this is the future and SheerLuxe are just ahead of the curve. But I sort of hope it isn’t. Let me know what you think in the comments below.
TLC
After all that ranting, something a bit more calming…I’ve had a few dry patches on my face this week and so I’ve dialled back the prescription tret in favour of some serious soothing and hydration overnight. I love to use something that’s going to put some moisture into the skin layered under something that’s going to hold it there. So a humectant, followed by an occlusive, or something watery followed by something oily.
My go-to combo for this is Reome Active Recovery Broth (currently from £35.20 at Space NK with the code FIRST20 if you’ve not shopped online at SpaceNK before) followed by Skin Rocks The Support Oil (currently £52 with that SpaceNK code). Both are brands set up by women who I know and respect when it comes to skincare and these two products are TOTALLY worth it, although I realise that neither are exactly budget.
This week, I grabbed a couple of other options (Reome and SR were in the bedroom, I was in the bathroom) and layered the Belif Aqua Bomb Sleeping Mask (£29) under Trilogy’s Rosehip Oil (£14.62). Did that two nights on the trot and the dry patches have disappeared. I have to say that the Belif mask doesn’t have half the brilliant actives in it that the Reome broth does and so while you definitely get the hydration, you don’t get the soothing — and the same is true for the Trilogy oil vs Skin Rocks. So, if you’ve got some sort of stress or irritant reaction going on, the pricier ones would be my recommendation. But if you just want a bit of hydration, Belif and Trilogy have you covered.
That’s all for this week. Cannot WAIT to hear your thoughts on all of the above so please do not hold back in the comments. Until next time…
Note: I only enthuse about products I really rate, but I can earn commission on products I mention here. If you hate the idea of this, please let me know, as this is very much a work in progress and nothing is set in stone.
Using an AI avatar for beauty recs is … unhinged. What is their skin type!!!!! 🤪
I feel like grown women aren’t interested in hearing from computer generated versions of us harping on about products or anything else. Where’s the value in it? I like humans. I feel the same about ridiculously short TikTok-style videos that barely tell you anything and have stupid voiceovers. Aren’t these for children? It’s insulting our intelligence.