From diet culture to the curse of skincare

To the diet culture We have known her for decades. I am referring to that hygienic norm that equates thinness with good health and that means that all of us who live in this century have been on a diet at some point. That we have all related our weight to our self-esteem on some occasion and that we have distorted the image of food, to the point of turning food into the body's enemy. Today we know that diet culture is not only unhealthy, it is dangerous for mental health. Well, now that we began to condemn the body shaming [burlarse de alguien por su figura], the curse of the skincare [cuidado facial] to make our lives and gestures bitter.

If the diet culture triggered anorexia, a disease with clear gender bias, the culture of skincare has prevailed among younger women, who are already beginning to suffer from cosmeticorexia, the new disorder that links the purchase of cosmetics with anxiety. Today, millions of girls practice a “facial care” routine—known as skincare— from nine years old onwards. He hashtag #SephoraKids has accumulated 400 million views on TikTok and shows girls prescribing cosmetics as if they were toys. Although, the worst of all is that adult women have fallen into the trap. We have thought that something that begins with the word “care” must not be bad. That starting to “take care of your skin early” could be a good idea for our daughters. That's why, when you step foot in the Primor on Gran Vía or the Sephora on Fuencarral Street in Madrid, you have to elbow your way through the consumerist fury of the teens, poor girls dedicated to facial sacrifice, sponsored by their mothers and fathers.

So we have gone from sculpting the body to sculpting the gesture, an exercise destined for failure and disappointment that we have masked with the word care. Beyond acne, expression lines, open pores and the dozens of new ghosts that darken our soul, skincare It is the last promise of externalizing who each one wants to be. On the rebound, the diet culture He has relaxed a little. Now it is possible that a teenager can eat when she is hungry without guilt, but she will have to adapt her face to the ideal that she has of herself. An ambition doomed to failure.

Because when a teenager (or an adult) looks in the mirror, she is not seeing herself but rather we are seeing ourselves as we believe others see us. The problem is that what our face and our gesture say about us is a bottomless psychological well, since people, neither as children nor as adults, fully know who we are. And the worst way to find out is to look in the mirror. The problem with cosmetics is that it is ceasing to be a cover-up to hold the promise of a revelation. The face, you know, is the mirror of the soul. But the fact that this discovery has to be granted by a cosmetic product or aesthetic habits is crazy. The skincare It is therefore, from my point of view, synonymous with illness. The unfortunate thing is that, once again, we have fallen into the trap. We thought it was a form of care, but it was a curse, typical of us.

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