Skin should be beautiful, and this applies equally to both women and men.

Substitute the word "beauty" with the words "vital" or “strength, or the phrase “ruggedly handsome," as you like.  The word “beauty” in its selected context is, in our view, sufficiently androgenous or feminine, while also suggesting a certain artfulness within either category, because our conception of beauty is inextricably tied to Health, which is a metric that should be common to men and women. 

We had variable metrics of beauty during most of the 20th Century in which a grey Marlboro haggardness or a poofy Monroe paleness together served as no more than marketing funnels for consumer goods—donuts • cigarettes • petroleum-derivative cosmetics—that drew men and women into supposed archetypes of acceptable attractiveness that had no connection whatsoever with our current notions about Health.  Today, there are Retro-Glam tendencies attempting to return us to that condition, in all its former greatness and carb-intensity.

I think we should resist.

Health as a single unified standard and metric of beauty is better, with differentiation into versions or preferred styles or phenotypes of beauty left to the natural microbiological, genetic and epigenetic processes across the gender spectrum with which our bodies are already quite familiar.  Equating Health with Beauty is especially important in the 21st Century given the tight correlation between healthy skin and the Skin Immunity Landscape.

The Right Skin

Of course, the word “beauty,” particularly when applied to Skin, is ambiguous and potentially confused in other ways, too.  We will discuss at some stage whether our current paradigm of the Right Skin, the Skin that Matters Most, and why That Skin is beautiful while another is Not, is consistent with true health among a globally mobile and social species; and, whether this fascination with the de-colorizing of Skin can ever promote a more comprehensive and realistic vision of fairness, equity and good sense across the many cultures and varieties of humanity who together comprise the social ecology and network we think of as 21st Century civilisation.  

Health is Beauty, but Health is also a kind of Power—indeed, perhaps even the most important source of Power—with deep and long-lasting implications for how our civilisation functions.  In later posts in this series, we'll explore some of the health crises of the past 500 years or so, and how those crises twisted and turned the worms of power to create the world we know now.

Slow Beauty

The question we pose for the moment is this:  Is there a difference between cosmetically simulated beauty and a sort of Slow Beauty (akin to Slow Food) that results from restoring to Skin the biological and bio-chemical functions that have been compromised and sometimes even disabled by ecological damage; air pollution; plastic contamination of water; soil depletion; produce grown with petroleum-derivative fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides that began as genocidal chemical weapons used in the Vietnam War; and, foods (like meats) “farmed" and/or processed with genetically modified feeds and heaps atop heaps of yet more petroleum-derivatives, pharmaceuticals and hormones?

I guess phrased this way, you’ll have no problem guessing our answer.

We like it Slow; not glacial or interglacial, but nice… and… slow.

If you’re wondering why we don’t include Climate Change in the list of deplorable risks to health, it’s because Climate Change is, like the Decline of Human Health, the result and consequence of ecological damage.  Climate, after all, didn’t change on its own.  And neither did Human Health after aeons of steady, homeostatic modulation within a narrow range sharply vector into collapse for no reason whatsoever, although that might be the illusion that certain large agri-food, financial and even governmental institutions would like you to believe.

Climate Change and the Decline of Human Health are facets of a single trend and global phenomenon.  The mathematical fluid chaos dynamics are the same because the cause is the same.  If you thought you were shielded from the risks of ecological damage because, unlike a polar bear, you are able at will to watch Netflix on a large OLED TV, you were mistaken.  There’s only one planet, one atmosphere, and even just one ocean that changes color and name every few thousand miles.  Unfortunately, this one ocean of ours has become an ocean of plastic, micro-plastic and probably totally invisible, blood-soluble nano-plastic as well.  

In the end, the condition of the polar bears could be in some ways better than ours at the moment, because their diet is at least exclusively wild-caught, and therefore quite high in some very important Fat Soluble micro-nutrients essential to polar bear beauty.

Fast Beauty

We’ve become massively obsessive about our Skin in recent years.  The advertised goal is to achieve the sheen and magical glow of supposedly healthy skin as quickly as possible; overnight, if you can manage to wait that long, but better within 15 minutes or less, leaving you time to eat a Pop Tart or microwave pizza.  We want to be more shiny and, almost always, more fair. 

One of the centerpieces of the revolution in cosmetology that is Fast Beauty is the effect called Glass Skin, popularised in South Korea but since exported to shiny cities everywhere, from New York to Moscow.  We associate this shiny, blinkering condition of Skin with youth, a certain degree of prosperity and the opportunity to influence and engage others within our social target zone.  

It is precisely this correlation with social power that has drawn more and more men of all ages and from all geographic districts into this pre-occupation with the appearance of one’s Skin.  However, even as men joined in the obsession that vast phalanxes of women have been pursuing for… forever… the marketing funnel of Fast Beauty has prioritised appearance before health; appearance before vitality; and appearance before strength.

And who could have known that the ultra-moisturising miracle of Glass Skin and its associated facial masks and serums achieved immense global success because it relieved the dryness associated with depleted dermal Natural Moisturising Factor (“NMF”), which is one of the many painful symptoms of an increasingly (as an exponential power function) common and globally well-dispersed autoimmune disorder?

Health should come first.  We need new terms and even a new language to communicate this revised set of priorities.  Of course, we don’t reject aesthetic concerns.  But, we hope that in time this change in priorities—with Health placed first in the equation in which Health = Beauty—will initiate a change in the tired 16th Century orthodoxy of subjective aesthetics that promotes an absolutist white stricture and denies the truth of… pores.

Queen Elizabeth I, the Great Virgin

It’s true that improving the condition of one's Skin can fundamentally transform a person’s life.  In the blink of an eye, as Malcolm Gladwell would say, the Skin can communicate, not just the mood history of how you’ve reached a certain stage of life, but also your glowing aura of confidence in the fullness of your potentialities for the future.  

This can be a remarkable achievement.  

Yet, the choice of methodology for achieving fantastic Skin is going to be very important.  Consider that Queen Elizabeth I of England from the 16th Century is remembered today mostly for her fondness for lead-based cosmetics, used to mask the scarring left from smallpox, which was then (and until deep into the 20th Century) a recurring pandemic.  Elizabeth I, was, of course, very, VERY fair after the application of the pale white leaden Venetian Ceruse.  This habit of using a mixture of water, vinegar and lead as a cosmetic began in Ancient Rome, where lead was used both to line water pipes and as an all-purpose food perservative.  The consequences for Rome and Queen Elizabeth were dire, deadly and catastrophic.  Whether lead poisoning was the central force in the Fall of Rome is uncertain, but when a leaden butterfly begins to flap its toxic wings the follow-on effects aren’t likely to be very happy.

Fast Beauty—whether from South Korea or Japan or elsewhere—bears no similarity to the disaster of Venetian Ceruse.  The Glass Skin protocol, for instance, often involves the use of Vitamin C serums and other antioxidants.  We like antioxidants, generally.  Also, Vitamin C is hardly the scourge of our age, as lead was in Ancient Rome.  Nor are these topical antioxidants any kind of catalyst at all for Climate Change.  However, the bioavailability of topical vitamin antioxidants—whether as C, D, E or A—is quite low.  Ingestion of all-natural antioxidants along with healthy saturated fats that dramatically increase bio-potency while also containing other trace phytonutrients is typically more efficient; and probably even sufficient in many instances. 

More to the point, between a) simulating a surface beauty and b) choosing the path of a much deeper Slow Beauty, through which one would seek to achieve greater Skin Fitness and Skin Function, Slow is more preferable and ultimately far more Powerful.

As I’ve said, we’d like to develop a new set of terms to discuss how we approach the health of our Skin.  Our provisional selection, as you’ve seen, is Skin Matters.  We are also advocates of Slow Beauty.  And our locus of attention at this time is the Skin Immunity Landscape, which as a phrase has an artful ring that nonetheless hints at an appreciation for scientific rigor in the context of Health.  

Language can be immensely important, because the words we choose set the stage for our next thoughts and our next actions.

As Fast Beauty exploded in popularity in recent years, we ought to have paid much closer attention.  Instead of musing about connections between K-Beauty and K-Pop, we might have devoted a little thought to what the sudden rise in sales of Skin Care products around the world might be telling us about Health.  Even for Elizabeth I, her resort to Venetian Ceruse wasn’t intended primarily to make her more beautiful.  Her primary objective was to mask all evidence of disease.  

Was the same motivation driving sales of Fast Beauty products?  

Epidemics and Pandemics aren’t driven exclusively by infectious disease.  It’s perfectly possible that a ubiquitious toxic agent global in its distribution and scale could catalyse a global health crisis.  We’ve been discussing just that, as we suggested that ecological damage and multivariate pollution may be driving a generalized Decline in Human Health as a component of Climate Change.  The Spanish Flu pandemic resulted from a combination of a) a new flu virus and b) an immunity crisis caused by the sudden nutritional constraints imposed by World War One. Both elements were necessary to propel the Spanish Flu virus along with its serial mutations around the world in 1918.

One possible hypothesis today is that the sudden rise in popularity of K-Beauty and other Fast Beauty products signaled that an immunity crisis had reached a tipping point around the world, as evidenced by the widespread occurrence of both clinical and sub-clinical skin conditions.

The cause?

Our answer is that it’s air pollution, plastics in water and depleted / contaminated soils. The same forces that cause Climate Change have begun to seriously compromise health around the world. K-Beauty began in Asia precisely because the rapid acceleration of pollution in Asia from the 70’s to the present as a result of rampant and rapid industrialisation began to compromise innate immunity, as evidenced by declining skin health and skin appearance.

Slow Beauty is better than Fast Beauty because it allows men and women to think simultaneously about skin appearance and skin health.

Trü-Sky

Singapore

December 2020