Last week we learned that Goop is getting its own Netflix show, and yesterday Victoria Beckham announced her own skin care line. Branded as Victoria Beckham Beauty and available through her website, it’s obviously a far cry from the #wellness Gwyneth Paltrow keeps trying to sell us, but still belongs to the same family: celebrities having a say in the way we take care of and present ourselves.
“I want to take care of women inside and out, providing them with the must-haves in makeup, skincare, fragrance and wellness that I feel I need in my own life,” Beckham said in a statement. And, like, sure!
But at the same time, I’m getting tired. I love makeup and skincare and fragrance and wellness (despite not really knowing what wellness means anymore), but the novelty of celebrity-sanctioned and/or created lines has worn off a bit. I may still live and die for Fenty, but Rihanna is an entity unto herself. She is the Da Vinci of being alive, and I trust her with my livelihood. But self-proclaimed lifestyle heroes like Paltrow are strangers I don’t trust as implicitly. And while I’m sure she and Beckham and everyone else who’s parlaying their own tastes into viable brands have consumers’ best interests at heart, I don’t have the bandwidth to sift through them anymore, let alone get psyched when a new foray gets announced.
The thing is, beauty and wellness (still, not sure what it means but sure) and skincare and all of the aforementioned are all quite personal. We wear makeup for different reasons, and before bed/first-thing-in-the-AM rituals are tailored to our specific schedules/tastes/lives. Do I love a suggestion? Absolutely. But my favourite makeup is a conscious choice; it reflects my own tastes and what I need my battle armour to be, determined long after it’s been tried and tested over the course of various scenarios. I don’t know the famouses who are hawking me their go-tos. They’re not the pals I consult or compare notes with, nor do they have my best interests at heart. Their beauty is their business – both literally and figuratively. Why should they have access to my bank account andmy face?
Maybe I’m just getting old. (It’s possible! I am certainly aging.) Maybe I’m just the worst possible shopper. But since a big part of growing up is filing away the stress you don’t need anymore, I’ve opted to file away the need to rank celebrity-sanctioned (or created) beauty and skincare below my own tastes for once. Not everyone is Rihanna who puts so much thought into her lines that she makes legacy brands look amateur, and I won’t expect them to be. Especially since I like spending money on products I’m obsessed with or can’t stop thinking about and make me feel powerful, instead of something that claims to know what I want despite us never interacting before.
In the immortal words of Bobby Hill, “That’s my purse. I don’t know you.”
