Reflections On Caring Too Much: The Beauty Paradox

I Care Quite a Bit

Beauty, vanity, and the trouble with looking good

Reflections on Sable Yong's Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity

I am a huge fan of audiobooks, especially the kind with spicy opinions. Romance and historical fiction have their place, but I am usually happier listening to cultural criticism or creative nonfiction that leaves me staring at a wall afterward, mildly inconvenienced by a new thought. That is how I found Sable Yong's Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity.

I was not looking for another book that would sort beauty neatly into empowerment or oppression and then hand me the correct answer. I was tired of verdicts. Vanity interested me precisely because my own relationship with it is not very tidy. I consider myself a little vain, although not in the conventional sense. I enjoy taking care of my skin, doing my nails, wearing makeup, and putting on clothes that make me feel put together. Looking good does not make me think I am better than anyone else. It gives me a little more weight in my step when I enter a room. It says: I am here, I am a person, and I am ready to do what I came to do.

What I appreciated about Yong's book was its refusal to shame that impulse. The essays are sharp and funny, but they do not arrive with a finger already pointed. Yong examines the machinery around beauty without pretending that enjoying beauty makes someone foolish or morally compromised. She notices the contradictions and lets them remain contradictory. Unfortunately, she left me with a great many questions and absolutely zero useful answers. I have decided to extend that same service to you.

Beauty as power, then rebellion

Yong begins with childhood, including her experience as a child model and the early lesson that beauty could function as a kind of power. Children absorb that lesson long before anyone explains it to them. It lives in cartoons, television, music videos, advertisements, and the older girls who seem to move through the world with some mysterious authority. Beauty is not presented merely as decoration. It is presented as leverage.

Then, for many of us, beauty becomes rebellion. Makeup was not approved of early in my house, but I negotiated my way into concealer and eyeliner around thirteen. This was the era of emo and scene kids, so my mother occasionally had to deliver a child to school wearing black eyeshadow, black nails, puffy hair, and glasses she did not need. Questionable? Certainly. But underneath the questionable styling was something serious: autonomy. I could decide what my face communicated. I could dye my hair because I had feelings too large to leave sitting quietly inside my body.

That is the version of beauty I still love. My emerald-green hair and dramatic false lashes are not an attempt to approximate an Instagram model. They are part of my chosen visual language. Beauty can make the exterior more fluent in the language of the interior. It can be fantasy, punctuation, costume, mood, and authorship.

Somewhere along the way, however, self-expression became obligation. Beauty stopped being only one way to invent ourselves and became one of the ways the world decided whether we were acceptable. Stray too far from the standard and you may be called unkempt, unprofessional, lazy, or careless. Follow it too enthusiastically and suddenly you are vain, artificial, desperate, or trying too hard. You are expected to put in the effort while hiding all evidence that effort occurred.

The no-makeup makeup look may be the cleanest little portrait of the problem. I like it. I wear it. I also find it objectively funny that we buy several products and carefully apply them so that our faces can announce that no products were applied. We must try, but not visibly. We must care, but not too much. I do not care. I do care, actually. I care quite a bit.

Scent and the pleasure of invention

Fragrance is where the book brushed especially close to my heart. I have loved scent since I was young, and buying fragrance subscriptions as an adult expanded my idea of what a person could smell like. A fragrance does not have to be simply floral, sweet, clean, or sexy. It can be atmospheric. It can smell like wet stone, a salty bag of kelp, a rainbow of white flowers, or a very specific memory that belongs to no one else.

Saint Julep from Imaginary Authors is one of my favorites. Black Salt from Heretic Perfum is another: salty, oceanic, strange, and somehow sophisticated. Neither fragrance is trying to make me smell generically pleasant. They let me choose an aura for the day. Scent can define how I want to enter a room before I say anything at all.

That is not so far from what makeup, hair, clothing, and jewelry can do. They allow us to rehearse a version of ourselves and sometimes become her. Confidence does not always come first. Occasionally the strange plaid pants, clownish shoes, or impossible eyeliner go on before the confidence arrives. That is fine. We can invent ourselves while we are still getting acquainted.

The difficult question is where invention ends and correction begins. When am I choosing how to be perceived, and when am I quietly trying to prove that I deserve to be perceived at all? I do not think the answer is hidden in the amount of makeup, the brightness of the hair, or the extravagance of the perfume. Bare-faced does not automatically mean authentic, just as glamorous does not automatically mean false. The same ritual can feel like play one morning and compulsory maintenance the next.

You are flawless. Here is a lip gloss.

The grayest part of beauty culture may be its current habit of selling correction through the language of self-love. A campaign tells us that everyone is beautiful, every body is worthy, and no one needs makeup. Then, just before we can leave, it offers us a lip gloss for $4.99 to finish the thought.

I do not think the message itself is wrong. I enjoy seeing more faces, bodies, ages, and identities represented. I would much rather hear that people are already worthy than be told they are defective. But the commercial still wants something from us. Inclusion can matter and still be marketing. A message can be kinder than what came before and still be designed to move product. Apparently two things can be true at once, which is becoming inconveniently common in this essay.

Children do not understand that machinery yet. They see the beautiful hair in the shampoo commercial without seeing the lighting, styling, editing, and sales strategy behind it. They encounter a description of a heroine and may carry one detail for years. When I read Twilight in middle school, I remember Bella being described as roughly 110 pounds. I was thirteen, tall, and already carrying a little extra softness around the edges. That number lodged itself in my mind as a goal, even though 110 pounds would not make sense for my body. I did not choose to remember it. It simply stayed.

That is why polished messages about confidence can make me suspicious. A brand does not know us intimately. It does not know what a ten-year-old, a thirteen-year-old, or a tired thirty-year-old will hear beneath the copy. It may sincerely want to promote self-acceptance, but it also very much wants to sell a $79 face cream. I can appreciate the gentler language and still feel the sales pitch moving underneath it.

This tension follows me into my own work. I am a thirty-year-old woman who formulates beauty products and owns a small shop. I believe skincare can be pleasurable, useful, and worth paying for. I also do not want to imply that a jar can erase time, replace health, or repair someone's worth. A product may support the skin, soften it, protect it, or make an ordinary evening feel ceremonial. That is already enough. It does not need to rescue a person from being human.

Father Time, rose quartz, and pink eye

Aging is where the beauty paradox becomes almost embarrassingly obvious. We know there is no way to stop time. We know that remaining alive means continuing to age. Our bodies change because that is what living bodies do. There is even something beautiful in that reality, if I am feeling mature and philosophical.

Am I still terrified of looking old? Yes. Do I think I can stop it? No. Am I trying anyway? Also yes.

When I was younger, adulthood looked magnificent. Adults could drive cars, make their own decisions, and buy extra cereal at the grocery store without asking permission. Now I am in my thirties, fully authorized to purchase irresponsible quantities of cereal, and I have also noticed the tiny lines around my eyes. They are very small. They are not an emergency. Naturally, I treated them like an emergency.

I bought an eye product with a rose-quartz roller applicator. It was absurdly cute, beautifully designed, and completely unnecessary. Shortly afterward, I developed pink eye, so the universe has delivered a fairly direct editorial note on my vanity. I cannot prove the roller caused it, but I am currently choosing to blame it. That seems emotionally efficient.

The episode did not cure me of vanity. It did, however, expose the bargain I keep trying to make with time: perhaps if I buy the correct little object, I can remain recognizable to myself forever. Beauty promises control over a body whose entire nature is change. I know better. I still browse eye creams. Again, two things can be true.

No conclusion, unfortunately

I wanted to finish Die Hot with a Vengeance with a clean answer about vanity. I wanted to decide whether beauty is freedom or conformity, pleasure or exploitation, self-expression or self-correction. Instead, I finished with a larger knot. Beauty can be all of those things, sometimes within the same routine and the same person.

We want to be beautiful, but we are not supposed to admit that we know when we are. We are told we are already perfect and then offered products to become more perfect. We are judged for neglecting our appearance and mocked for caring too visibly. People who fit the standard may be granted power and then denied seriousness. People who reject the standard may discover that rejection has developed its own uniform.

Perhaps the useful question is not whether beauty is good or bad. Perhaps it is whether a particular beauty practice gives us language or takes language away. Does it help us inhabit ourselves, or does it make us feel that our uncorrected existence is an error? Can it be a pleasure without becoming a requirement? Can we admit that we care without surrendering the right to decide what caring looks like?

I do not have an answer. Go home; there is nothing conclusive for you here. But I think there is value in noticing the paradox rather than pretending we have escaped it. Most of us are living somewhere inside it, putting on eyeliner, washing our faces, buying perfume, ignoring a wrinkle, panicking about a wrinkle, and trying to decide which parts belong to us.

Maybe the kindest thing we can do is leave one another some room. Room to care. Room not to care. Room to be bare-faced, extravagantly decorated, unfinished, aging, uncertain, or delighted by a ridiculous rose-quartz roller. We are all people before we are beauty projects. That may not solve the paradox, but it is at least a decent place to stand inside it. 

Sable Young's Website: https://www.sableyong.com/

Buy The Book! https://bookshop.org/p/books/die-hot-with-a-vengeance-essays-on-vanity-sable-yong/5b5958da8c0d8923