Sable Yong enjoys a complicated relationship with beauty. She loves it. And she hates it. She’s a beauty writer, but only occasionally a beauty expert. (“Oh, God,” she groans. “The word ‘expert’ gets thrown around so much.”) She wrote a book about beauty, but it’s not easy to describe. (“I don’t have an elevator pitch for it,” she says. “I have a please-sit-down-for-10-minutes-and-let-me-talk-about-this pitch.”) This “yes, but also” nature of both Yong as a person and her chosen subject matter translates directly to Die Hot With a Vengeance, her cheeky essay collection probing beauty culture and the many confusing reactions it arouses.
In fact, targeting the conflicting reality of beauty itself was Yong’s ultimate goal: She noticed a dearth of beauty writing that bridged the gap between service or commerce-oriented content (like “how to do makeup,” Yong explains) and academic feminist research (like “beauty as a tool of the patriarchy,” she says). Yong envisioned the sort of collection that’d acknowledge both the pleasure of looking good and the hierarchies that looking good reinforces. “We are constantly trying to reconcile this huge, huge cognitive dissonance between enjoying beauty, and having it be meaningful for us, but also understanding that the origins are not great for most people,” Yong says. But putting that sort of nuance into a “coherent package,” she says, was an extreme challenge, even for a former Allure editor comfortable with the contours—no pun intended—of the makeup, skincare, fragrance, fitness, and wellness industries.
Yong had always been a quick-witted writer; she got her first gig at the beauty site xoVain, sister site to xoJane, thanks to a particularly entertaining Craigslist entry she’d posted in search of a roommate. Writing about beauty for xoVain “was a really cool way to get into writing for the internet,” says Yong, who didn’t have a journalism degree or magazine writing experience at the time. But she remembers being told, “‘No, we just want you to do what you already do, but focused on beauty.’ I was like, ‘Oh, okay. That’s pretty easy.’” After her work at xoVain and other beauty-adjacent sites eventually caught the industry’s attention, she moved to Allure in 2017, where she worked as a digital beauty editor until 2019, growing familiar—sometimes too familiar, she feels—with the ever-expanding pile of products that’d accumulate on her desk.
As Yong tested hair dyes and eyeshadows and lip filler and multi-hundred-dollar facials, she questioned how much of her experimenting was a revelry in self-expression, and how much was a money- and power-driven acquiescence to toxic beauty standards. Yong writes in Die Hot With a Vengeance, “There’s money to be made from exploiting insecurities as well as celebrating individuality, and often the only difference between the two is marketing. Beauty sponsored by capitalism makes its pursuit a never-ending list because the ways that one can participate in beauty culture are now endless.”
Die Hot might not answer every reader’s questions about how best to engage with beauty, but it offers a position from which to study those questions with humor and compassion—and a sharply critical eye. Ahead, Yong expands on her own evolving relationship with these questions, and addresses how the explosion of beauty content on social media has shaped our very concept of “beautiful.”
After years of writing about beauty, how do you balance your frustrations with marketing, capitalism, and consumerism with your own earnest enjoyment of beauty and its assorted products? How did you get those ideas straight enough in your head to try and write a collection like this?
Honestly, that was the trickiest, most challenging part of writing this, because I don’t have the answers for everyone. I can have the answer for me, but that’s out of my personal experience. The truth is, it’s something that’s constantly a back-and-forth negotiation. Just, like, four years ago, I don’t think beauty was as urgently prevalent as it feels it is today. A lot of that has to do with the pandemic. A lot of that has to do with TikTok and social media. A lot of people equate what’s viral with what is the official new creed of beauty, which isn’t true at all. Whenever I read things about TikTok trends becoming the new beauty standards, I’m like, “Absolutely not. We do not have the attention span to uphold this standard.”
The reason that beauty standards exist and have existed for as long as they do is because they are so weaved into our political history and patriarchy and racism and misogyny, and because they uphold a ruling class. That’s why they work. I don’t think “strawberry girl makeup” is going to do that. I don’t think “eyebrow blindness” is going to do that.
Because I’ve worked in media, yes, I understand media is trying to capitalize on clicks by writing about these social media trends, but that also has the effect of compounding the importance that these trends didn’t have, but now they do, because they’re being covered by mainstream publications. So that’s two media forces feeding off of each other. That is the constant headache of today.
Now I’m in my late thirties, and I am fully embodying all the [beauty] shit that I wanted to do when I was a teenager, but wasn’t allowed to. If you can explore all the weird stuff that you like, but you feel like society tells you looks “bad” or you “shouldn’t do,” once you do it you realize, a) you’re not going to become a social pariah, and b) you might like it, or you might realize, “This isn’t actually for me.” Doing that bit by bit is such a great way to reconcile how you feel beauty standards personally affect you.
It’s almost like immersion therapy. [You can observe] how little or how much it affects your life, or more importantly, how it affects the way you look and feel about yourself. That’s how you can explore what you feel is more authentically your identity from what you think it is or should be.
Do you think it’s becoming easier or harder to be considered “beautiful,” as beauty culture becomes increasingly accessible, particularly across social media?
I definitely think that our purview on what is “beautiful” has expanded so much, which is great. But I also think that the expansion of inclusivity has mostly been inviting more people in to conform to the same standards.
Ten years ago, foundation shades ended at medium tan. Now, it’s like, “Great, we have more foundation shades for everyone of all colors, so you, too, can also feel the pressure to look hot.” We have access to beauty, that’s great, but with more access comes more pressure to do it. This is the crucial time to explore: What do you think is actually for you, and what do you feel is just the pressure to “do” beauty?
I think it’s easier to be beautiful, but it’s harder to know what that means.
In Die Hot, you touch on how effortlessness, as an aesthetic choice, has less to do with the actual effort involved and is more about “proximity to class.” That reminded me of our modern obsession with “quiet luxury” or the “old money” look, these class indicators that have more to do with mimicking wealth than they do the actual monetary value of the clothes. We see the same thing in beauty with the “Instagram face” phenomenon. Do you think it’s true that looking the part—when it comes to beauty—is almost akin to being the part?
For a lot of people, yes, looking the part is almost akin to being the part. It’s not who you actually are; it’s what you can convince people you are.
This [phenomenon] is very quiet and pernicious. The fact that injectables and all these beauty treatments are so widely accessible for everyone to smudge away whatever slight insecurities they have … it’s not going to solve the insecurity so much as it is going to conform to the aesthetic of not having that insecurity.
Beauty is a very good tool to replicate the existing class structures that we have in place, because the more that you achieve the beauty standard, yes, you personally are improving your economic standing, and your social standing, and your mate selection and all that, but you are also, in the same way, compounding the existing social status that oppresses all of the things you were before.
How possible is it to actually opt out of beauty culture? Because you can forsake makeup or shaving or what have you, but is that really the same thing as opting out of a system that, arguably, permeates every aspect of how we see one another?
It’s tough because there is this negotiation of who has the privilege to opt out, and what different types of tenets of beauty standards you possess. There was this one book I read before while I was writing the initial manuscript, called Perfect Me by Heather Widdows, and she described that there’s these four main tenets of beauty standards: thinness, firmness, smoothness, and youthfulness. So it’s like you have these four very broad tenets of beauty standards, and you can possess a bit more of one, or you can let go of one if you possess more of another. It’s this constant negotiation of how much of one you possess in relation to another [that dictates] how much you’re able to opt out of beauty standards without [as much] stigma.
I have certain beauty privileges. I’m fairly, still, [considered] in the youthful category. I’m feminine-presenting, and I am largely considered a thin person. So, with those, I can get away with not shaving my armpits because it’s like, “Oh, well, you’re otherwise thin and feminine-presenting, so sure. And you’re young, so that’s considered more forgivable.”
I think you can push back depending on whatever your tastes are, or whatever aesthetics you prefer for yourself, can anyone truly just opt out? No figures really come to mind for me.
You have a following on social media. You are a beauty writer, which allows you to represent beauty in a more figurative sense beyond your literal appearance. So how do you think about your own social media platform and the strategy therein?
Social media just defines so much of appearance politics and beauty today. I feel like I had a much better handle on it five years ago. With the proliferation of so much beauty content, a lot of which is really well-made and thorough … I’ve become a very lazy person, and I’m not willing to commit to doing this very, very well-curated content. I don’t think I’m adding anything to that conversation.
I don’t know what to do about social media these days. In the past, when I did post more, I would try to be a little bit tongue-in-cheek with it. If I posted a really well-lit, nicely angled selfie, I would, in the next slide, post an outtake that I thought was funny. Because we all know that the result of one good selfie is a hundred outtakes.
I think that’s what I find interesting with other people’s content as well, and [particularly] other people who do influencing professionally and are doing really high-level Reels and videos. I always appreciate it when they put a behind-the-scenes thing in there.
You write a bit in the book about the bond of beauty editors and beauty writers. How have you experienced that bond in the relatively small beauty media space?
You get very intimate with one another in ways that, probably, HR would not approve of. Because beauty is very personal, you get to share a lot of your inner vulnerabilities with these people—for work, yes, but also intimacy begets intimacy, no matter the context. In most office environments, you wouldn’t necessarily talk about getting a breast augmentation or getting a nose job, whereas when you work at a beauty publication, that stuff is table stakes.
Sharing insecurities is, obviously, one of the fast-track ways to connect with someone, because connection requires vulnerability. … It’s such a great way to learn the experiences that have made the people around you. And then you get this consensus of people who have nothing to gain or lose by telling you to get or not get this procedure. A lot of them are just, honestly, like, “Dude, you don’t have to do this,” or like, “Have you thought of all of the things involved?” The context around [beauty], with these people who are very informed, is such a lifesaver.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.