In this bonus episode, writer and beauty-industry critic Jessica Defino returns to discuss the problems with skin products and skincare in general, why acne topicals aren’t long-term solutions, how to have compassion for yourself as you navigate through beauty culture and inevitably get sucked in, and more.
Jessica DeFino is an award-winning beauty reporter and critic (The New York Times, Vice, Vogue) and author of the newsletter The Unpublishable. She writes the Guardian's beauty advice column, Ask Ugly, and has been called “the woman the beauty industry fears the most” by the Sunday Herald. Find her at jessicadefino.substack.com.
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Resources and References
Contains affiliate links to Amazon and Bookshop.org, where I earn a small commission for any purchases made.
Christy’s second book, The Wellness Trap: Break Free from Diet Culture, Disinformation, and Dubious Diagnoses and Find Your True Well-Being
Jessica’s Substack newsletter, The Unpublishable
Jessica’s Guardian column, Ask Ugly
Jessica’s piece about acne creams
Christy’s online course, Intuitive Eating Fundamentals
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Transcript
Disclaimer: The below transcription is primarily rendered by AI, so errors may have occurred. The original audio file is available above.
Christy Harrison: Welcome to Rethinking Wellness, a podcast that offers critical thinking and compassionate skepticism about wellness and diet culture, and reflections on how to find true well-being. I'm your host, Christy Harrison, and I'm a registered dietitian, certified intuitive eating counselor, journalist, and author of three books, including Anti-Diet, which was published in 2019, The Emotional Eating, Chronic Dieting, Binge Eating & Body Image Workbook, which will be out on February 20th, and The Wellness Trap, which came out in 2023 and is the inspiration for this podcast. You can learn more and get them all at christyharrison.com/books.
Hey there. Welcome to this bonus episode of Rethinking Wellness. I'm Christy, and my guest today is writer and beauty industry critic, Jessica DeFino, who is my guest on this week's main episode of the podcast and who is back for this bonus to discuss the problems with skin products and skin care in general, why so many topicals are not good for your skin and are not long term solutions, how to have compassion for yourself as you navigate through beauty culture and inevitably get sucked in, and more. So without any further ado, here's my bonus interview with Jessica DeFino.
So, Jessica, welcome back. Thanks so much for joining me on this bonus episode.
Jessica DeFino: Thank you so much for having me again.
Christy Harrison: We had such a great conversation, so many interesting directions we went in the main interview. I'm curious to dig in a little bit more to the piece around skin care because you've talked about how, you know, your own personal history with skin care was one that kinda led you to start questioning skin care products and beauty products in general. And you've described yourself as a pro skin, anti-product beauty reporter. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about the problems you see with skin products and the and skin care culture in general.
Jessica DeFino: I love this question. I could talk about skin forever. My main problem with skin care industry and skin care products is that it seems that most of of the industry's devotees know a lot about products and ingredients and know almost nothing about their own skin. I think it's so important to start with just learning about your own body and how the skin functions and what it's meant to do and then questioning whether the the products that are popular right now are enhancing those functions or disrupting those functions. And in the large majority of cases, the answer is disrupting those functions.
Something I like to point out is, like, the skin is not there to look pretty. It's an organ. It's an organ just like any other, and it has, like, very a functional role in your overall health and well-being. It's part of your immune system. So it's the immune system's first line of defense. Like, anything that's coming into your immune system is coming in via your skin. I mean, or your lungs or eating, but your skin is a big one. So there's that. Like, the skin exists to protect you from, like, invading UV rays. It regulates your temperature. It regulates your moisture levels.
Like, your skin is why you can, like, take a bath and not get waterlogged. Like, there's so many functional roles that the skin plays. And in the large majority of cases with the products we're putting on it, we're actually, like, compromising those functions for the sake of aesthetics. So what I would I'd love to see change in the beauty industry is a focus on, like, actual well-being, actual function versus the aesthetic of the day.
Christy Harrison: That's really interesting. I've read a piece you wrote about acne products and how putting acne products on the skin that dry out pimples might have short term benefits, but in the long term, you know, might undermine the the integrity of your skin barrier. And as someone with acne myself and, you know, had long struggles with it, and as I mentioned in the main interview, I had, like, such a huge flare up when I was doing IVF, and my skin has kinda never been the same since pregnancy and breastfeeding and all of that. It's sort of like it's really related to hormones, but I just have a lot of, like, cyclical acne flare ups now that I didn't have before. And, you know, I have found that some products prescribed by my dermatologist are helpful for, like, dealing with some of the cystic stuff and the, like, really painful acne. And to me, that's, like, one of those things on the line of, like, how much pain would I actually be in from the zit if it was just the, you know, lesion itself and not the stuff that I'm putting on it, the, like, the stuff that comes from beauty culture about what, you know, how I think people are gonna judge me or what it looks like to the outside world or whatever. Right? It's a it's a fine line.
Jessica DeFino: Well, there's always, like, a negotiation between, like, immediate relief, especially when you're talking about, like, a painful acne breakout. So, like, immediate relief, like, great. That's good. It's good if we know it's immediate relief and not a long term solution. But if we know that if relying on immediate relief in a long term way is actually going to create more of a problem down the road. Right? So I think the piece that I see missing, especially in terms of treating acne, is this focus on immediate relief without really considering what's gonna happen down the road or how can I address, like, the actual underlying thing that's communicating through me as acne while giving myself that immediate relief? Right?
So, yeah, I mean, especially with acne, like, a lot of what you see on the market is is things that, like, kill acne causing bacteria. Like, acne causing bacteria is great. You need acne causing bacteria on your skin microbiome in order for the skin microbiome to function, in order for the skin overall to function. You know, so called acne causing bacteria actually also produces antioxidants, which help protect us from environmental pollution and from the sun.
Christy Harrison: That totally blew my mind when I read that in your piece. I was just like, what? I've completely bought you know, had completely drunk the Kool Aid or just not even questioned, like, why acne causing bacteria is on our skin in the first place.
Jessica DeFino: Right. Like, the healthiest skin will have this particular strain of bacteria on it and, like, getting rid of it completely will eventually lead to, like, issues down the road because it's creating even more of an imbalance. Like, the other thing I like to say is, like, the the way our skin can express inflammation or irritation, those are finite. Right? You get dry skin. You get oily skin. You get pimples. You get, you know, psoriasis, eczema, rosacea, a couple more. Right? But the reasons behind that are infinite.
So it's, like, really hard to be like, oh, you have acne? Use some Benzoyl Peroxide. That'll help it. Like, you actually probably have no clue why the acne is occurring. And then just to destroy your skin microbiome to relieve yourself of the acne in the moment, you're getting no information about, like, where this is actually coming from. Right? Or, like, a underlying issue. So I mean, I don't know if that's hopeful or not. It's just we're like, there are infinite reasons this could be happening to me.
But, yeah, like, destroying your skin microbiome in the name of relieving acne is actually not gonna have, like, the long term benefits that you want.
