Jessica DeFino: Beauty Beyond the Bottle

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

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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