Show Notes
Jessica DeFino is not your regular beauty journalist. After finding her pieces were regularly rejected from newspapers and magazines for being too incendiary, or dissing beauty brands who advertised, she founded her newsletter, The Unpublishable, where, in her own words she “dismantles beauty standards, debunks marketing myths and explores how beauty culture impacts people”. It now has 40,000 readers. The Huffington Post once described her as “giving the middle finger to the entire beauty industry”.
Jess and I discuss why clear skin isn’t a health objective but an aesthetic one, the evolution of a tan, the explosion of celebrity makeup and skincare lines and why we’re at a tipping point in beauty. Subscribe to The Unpublishable Follow Jess on Twitter and IG @jessicadefino_
Hosted & Exec Produced by Pandora Sykes Production by Joel Grove
More from Doing It Right with Pandora Sykes
So many women experience a postpartum mental disorder after having a baby. For me, it was postnatal depression. For Catherine Cho, it was postpartum psychosis.
Feeling demotivated? Aimless? Without meaning, or purpose? According to sociologist and psychologist Corey Keyes, you could be languishing.
What does the term ‘sociopath’ mean to you? Serial killer? Social outcast? Or wait - is that a psychopath?
The homogenisation of popular culture is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. In my 2020 book, How Do We Know We’re Doing It Right? (which spawned this very podcast), I wrote an essay called Get The Look - inspired by a wildly successful Zara polkadot dress - about how internet culture is encouraging young women to dress as facsimiles of one other.
I’m really interested in talking about the gnarly parts of the beauty industry - where things like tanning and hair removal actually come from. In the last series, Jessica DeFino debunked many myths about make-up and skincare. This season, I talk to journalist, author and broadcaster Afua Hirsch about beauty’s colonialist ideals and how she sought to break up with them.