Jessica DeFino: Beauty Beyond the Bottle

Mar 28, 2024

Award-winning beauty reporter Jessica DeFino discusses exposing the manipulations of the beauty industry and challenging beauty norms. She shares insights on skincare dependency, societal pressures, Madonna's appearance, and reframing beauty standards. The discussion also explores the intersection of beauty and diet culture, advocating for a shift towards self-acceptance and authenticity.

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ANECDOTE

Jessica's Beauty Journey

Jessica's love for beauty began with product obsession and working on Kardashian-Jenner apps.
Her disillusionment started as she witnessed beauty standards being manufactured and suffered skin issues from products.

INSIGHT

Skin's Natural Self-Sufficiency

Skin naturally self-regulates cleaning, moisturizing, exfoliating, and healing.
Overusing skincare disrupts skin's ecosystem and fosters product dependency rather than true care.

ADVICE

Try Skincare Hiatus

To understand your skin's true needs, stop using skincare products for at least 28 days.
This allows the skin to re-regulate and reveal areas requiring genuine support.

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Today, our guest is an award-winning beauty reporter and critic whom you might have stumbled upon while reading her super popular newsletter, The Unpublishable, which, as HuffPost says, "basically gives the middle finger to the entire beauty industry." Writing about what the beauty industry won’t tell you, Jessica DeFino has built an identity as a reporter on a mission to reform it.

It all started, however, in a place as opposite as it could be: a few years back, Jessica was a product-obsessed editor for the Kardashian-Jenner Official Apps, embedded in the core of the beauty industry. This exact "behind-the-scenes" angle and her own beauty-product mishaps led her to start bravely and compellingly writing about what she experienced: mass marketing manipulations, pseudoscience, and consumerism that have become endemic to the beauty industry. Her fearless truth-telling on topics such as the politics of appearance in the Barbie movie, or why Madonna’s plastic surgery is not as subversive as she claims, makes her one of the most beloved analysts and writers on beauty culture out there.

Jessica doesn't reject beauty. Instead, she seeks to reveal the industry and culture built around it. Beauty remains an essential force we all crave as humans, but in order to reveal its roots, we have to dismantle the boring, mass-produced thing that beauty has become.

Recommended by Jessica:

Disobedient Bodies by Emma Dabiri

The Book of Ayn by Lexi Freman

Recommended by Caitlin and Ben:

Happy Fat by Sofie Hagen

Chatter by Ethan Cross

Try Blinkist for free for 14 days by going to [https://www.blinkist.com/simplify\][2], tapping on Try Blinkist at the top right, and entering the code beauty.

Let us know what you thought of this episode, or just come say hi on Twitter! Find Caitlin at @caitlinschiller https://twitter.com/caitlinschiller [2], Ben at @bsto https://twitter.com/bsto [3]. You can write us all an email at podcast@blinkist.com [4].

This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, Maria Levacic & Stephane Obadia at Blinkist