Through “The Looking Glass”

Mikaela Dery reviews Sable Yong’s “Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity.”

By Mikaela DeryAugust 4, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Cultural Studies

THE STAKES OF BEAUTY make for a complicated subject. They’re both high—being beautiful undoubtedly makes life better—and low—beauty isn’t as important as, say, the health of one’s family and loved ones. Perhaps nobody has illustrated this complexity better than Edith Wharton, whose 1935 short story “The Looking Glass” traces the physical and mental decline of a wealthy, once-beautiful older woman, Mrs. Clingsland. The story is told by Mrs. Attle, a masseuse who used to moonlight as a clairvoyant but—as she explains to her granddaughter, the fictive audience in Wharton’s narrative—swore off the latter kind of work for fear of running afoul of her church and her priest, Father Divott.

One day, Mrs. Attle finds Mrs. Clingsland weeping into her silk pillows. “Nothing can ever help me,” Mrs. Clingsland sobs, “now I’ve lost it.” It, as it turns out, was her beauty. “I saw it suddenly slipping out of the door from me this morning,” she explains.

The narrator doesn’t think her employer is wrong. Mrs. Clingsland is aging, albeit gently; Mrs. Attle compares her beauty to the moment when one is sewing in the afternoon and the ability to see the work grows harder, blurrier, as daylight fades. Still, Mrs. Attle is initially shocked by the extremity of her employer’s response. “And me that thought it was your husband, or your son—or your fortune even,” she says, in reference to Mrs. Clingsland’s “loss.” Later, she reconsiders. “Why, we don’t either of us know anything about what a beautiful woman suffers when she loses her beauty,” Mrs. Attle thinks to herself, listening to a friend gossip about Mrs. Clingsland’s increasingly manic state of mind. She continues:

For you and me, and thousands like us, beginning to grow old is like going from a bright warm room to one a little less warm and bright; but to a beauty like Mrs. Clingsland it’s like being pushed out of an illuminated ballroom, all flowers and chandeliers, into the winter night and the snow.

In Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity (2024), the former Allure digital beauty editor, Sable Yong implicitly argues that the democratization of the modern beauty industry has left warm, bright rooms empty by permanently opening the doors to illuminated ballrooms. Ostensibly, anyone with a credit card and a high pain tolerance can become the kind of beautiful that makes life easier and more fulfilling. Yet this accessibility has also created the high, punishing stakes of modern-day beauty: you can either be in the illuminated ballroom or out in the snow—there seem to be few rooms, of varying warmth and brightness, between. Now, the rewards for beauty appear greater and more diverse than ever, ranging from a glowing, beautified vision of oneself in a tiny Zoom window to a Kardashian-sized cultural empire.

There are, in other words, material benefits to all of this. “Being hot does not offer immunity toward failure, illness, poor treatment, or poor self-esteem—but it can often grant second chances,” Yong writes. “Being hot won’t stop your partner from cheating on you, but it might give you a bevy of rebound options. Being hot won’t stop you from losing your job, but it may have opened lots of doors for you in the first place and will hereafter.” Overlooking the myriad flaws in Yong’s book for a moment, one thing is certain: it’s hard to argue with these points.

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There was a time in the early 2000s when concerns about physical appearance were considered—at least publicly—to be vapid, and were made fun of in the same way that women like Paris Hilton were. Perhaps the recent gold rush to correct our treatment of early aughts starlets has similarly encouraged us to acknowledge that beauty is important: shelves of bookstores are now, rightly, comfortably stocked with novels, essays, and memoirs dedicated to the subject in its many, often amorphous forms. Peruse these and you’ll find, among other volumes, Chloé Cooper Jones’s Easy Beauty (2022), in which the author examines her relationship to beauty in light of a genetic disease; Glossy: Ambition, Beauty, and the Inside Story of Emily Weiss’s Glossier (2023), Marisa Meltzer’s splashy investigation into the infamous brand, beauty start-ups, and the makeup trends of the 2010s; and Emily Ratajkowski’s My Body (2021), which examines the—at times terrifying—experience of being a woman in possession of an overly sexualized kind of beauty. Looking for fiction? You’ll find Mona Awad’s Rouge (2023), Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty (2023), and Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland (2024)—to name a few recent titles. As a subject, beauty is broad and deep. It’s both philosophical and practical, a country of its own divided into multitudes of political and socioeconomic territories. That capaciousness, the sheer enormity and variety of the concept, is why beauty has been meditated on and explored through art for centuries, from the above books to the sculptures of Michelangelo.

That capaciousness is also what complicates—or perhaps highlights the comparative shallowness of—Die Hot with a Vengeance, which touches lightly on numerous aspects of beauty without truly delving into the extent of their cultural cachet, the less obvious details of their histories, or the breadth of their implications. Insofar as Yong has racked up an insider’s knowledge of the beauty industry and a range of bylines in top-tier publications, her collection feels like a missed opportunity. In its introduction, Yong asserts that she hasn’t written “a self-help book or a guide in the traditional sense.” Her choice is framed as highly intentional: “Having a pleasant experience with beauty is possible,” Yong claims, “when you engage with it on your own terms.” She goes on to express her hope that “by the time you’re done reading this book, the harmful cultural and social messages surrounding beauty will seem so much less relevant to your own definition of it.” This sounds very much like a self-help ethos to me, one that I think many people—especially the young women placed implicitly and explicitly at the center of Yong’s discussion—would find genuinely enriching. Put another way, the demographic to which Yong alludes is self-evident; her book might have benefited from orienting itself toward that audience more directly. Instead, Yong packages these essays as a less convincing, broader cultural critique, supposedly addressing herself to anyone who “live[s] in a body.”

While it’s true that bodies and beauty—both the industry and the concept—loom large in most people’s lives, their discussion across much of the book feels thin, the argumentative equivalent of hastily applied foundation. In “Sephora Good Time, Not a Long Time,” Yong reflects on her teenage experiences with makeup and its role in shaping her sense of self. “There are endless ways to evolve at will,” she concludes, “and you can always start over and over again. I have, several times over already.” “The Pretty Privilege Is All Mine” purports to examine the material benefits enjoyed by people who meet traditional beauty standards, and to confront the various biases embedded within those standards. But any analysis is fleeting, cliché, and largely undercut by Yong’s peppy final words: “Owning your individual quirks and what makes you you is always hot behavior. […] Energy always pulls where beauty falls short. There are no ugly people, only bad PR.” The essay “Fuck Around & Find Out: Beauty[TM] Edition” provides a list of tips “debunking” standard beauty marketing language. (“There is no such thing as ‘universally flattering,’” one reads.) The list gets as specific as to advise that “you’re never going to need an eye shadow palette with more than a dozen shades in it” and “you should wear sunscreen everyday.” It also includes schematic assertions such as “sometimes you just have to log off,” “beauty standards are made up,” and “everything comes back around,” including “trends, karma, exes …” (Yong encourages us to “rest assured that just by living long enough, that thing [we] like will totally be cool one day.”) It’s sometimes unfortunate to be reminded of Nora Ephron—in this case, her essay “On Maintenance”—when reading, because she sets an impossibly high standard for humor and insight. By contrast, Yong’s essays aren’t quite comedic, nor are they original or rigorous enough to be genuinely informative to most readers.

Even so, some of the essays exhibit loftier ambitions. By far, the most successful in the collection is “The Flawless Industrial Complex,” which considers the rise of filler and plastic surgery. The piece both details Yong’s own experiences with the former and examines the implications of increasingly accessible and popular cosmetic procedures—because, as Yong posits, it’s these procedures, above all else, that open the door to the glittering ballroom Wharton once described. “What flaws a retinol serum can’t solve, a microcurrent device can, and what a microcurrent device can’t solve, an injection will,” Yong writes. “The Flawless Industrial Complex” not only supplies Yong’s firsthand insights into the beauty industry frankly and pointedly, without some of the self-conscious asides that characterize other essays in the collection, but also delivers bigger revelations. Especially compelling is its discussion of the “natural beauty” craze. In New York, Yong notes, women ask their aestheticians for fillers and injections that look natural. Yet “stick around the beauty sphere long enough and you’ll discover just how impotent the word ‘natural’ is,” she writes.

Natural beauty’s objective is less about beauty in its unadorned state so much as it is a campaign for understated beauty and a stratagem for invisibility of effort. Nature takes time; ask any late bloomer this and we’ll tell you. But nobody has the patience for nature in our age of Amazon Prime.

This is also the book’s only essay that, by excavating the fascinating origins of modern-day cosmetic surgery, incorporates historical context beyond gratingly commonplace references to women in corsets and Cleopatra wearing mascara. Namely, the essay investigates the work of Dr. Ivo Pitanguy, who, until his death in 2016, could be found on his private Island with Tom Cruise, or atop a float at Carnaval where he would be, as anthropologist Alexander Edmonds described a 1999 sighting of the doctor, “surrounded by samba dancers in feathers and bikinis” while a singer proclaimed that his scalpel was “guided by heaven.” Yong relates how in 1961, well before he invented the infamous (and often lethal) Brazilian butt lift (BBL), Pitanguy was working as a doctor in Brazil when a circus tent caught fire. Those inside—many of them children—suffered intense burns. Following the fire, Pitanguy pioneered various reconstructive surgery techniques, trained scores of plastic surgeons, and advocated for the “right to beauty” and its positive impact on mental health. As Yong notes, this philosophy is in large part, responsible for the Brazilian government’s current subsidization of nearly half a million cosmetic procedures annually. And though Yong never mentions this specifically, others have noted that many American surgeons now see Brazil as the frontier for innovation in plastic surgery; practitioners there are able to experiment with new procedures, often on low-income patients, without the same fear of litigation that restricts US surgeons. Yong also overlooks the belief held by many academics that the rise of both the BBL and other cosmetic surgeries in Brazil has roots in the country’s short-lived eugenics movement. (In 1923, the prominent eugenicist Dr. Renato Kehl wrote his book The Cure of Ugliness, which laid out a strategy to create a uniform beauty in Brazil that privileged European features and an hourglass body shape through, among other things, cosmetic surgery, as part of a slow move toward diluting the appearance and prevalence of the country’s Black population.)

Yong does, however, observe that South Korea is the only other country whose government subsidizes these kinds of procedures, which she attributes to the same commitment to uniformity among its citizens. “The nearly homogenous look of K-pop idols is evidence of a very specific beauty algorithm at work—that of cuteness, youthfulness, and a pale, blemish-free, and pore-less face,” Yong argues.

Basically, if everyone in your country is superhot, that raises its social capital and economic standing in the global purview. Rather than conforming to other norms, Korean culture has dominated music and cinema by perpetuating its very own unique aesthetic and style. I mean, it’s a worldwide flex, for sure, but one shouldered by its inhabitants subject to the most stringent expectations for perfection.

This historical and global perspective (even if limited in its purview) makes for a compelling read; unfortunately, it also highlights the relatively narrow scope of other essays in the collection. There’s a darkness that lurks beneath both the ideals of beauty and the beauty industry. And while it’s true that Yong is adept at identifying and describing this darkness alongside the lighter facets of beauty—vanity is fun! makeup is an exciting form of self-expression!—this intellectual loop isn’t anything new in and of itself. The ability to describe an industry’s allure isn’t quite enough to satisfy readers interested in more rigorous analysis of such towering cultural forces.

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Toward the end of “The Looking Glass,” Mrs. Attle notices a medium—who had previously “sucked people dry selling them the news they wanted, like she was selling them a forbidden drug”—visiting the bereft Mrs. Clingsland. In an effort to protect her vulnerable client, she goes “against [her] Church and [her] own principles,” and taps into her own psychic abilities. She decides to “deliver” Mrs. Clingsland messages from a young lover who died in the Titanic—a man whose gaze, in life, made Mrs. Clingsland feel assured of her beauty. She enlists the help of an educated young man to write these letters as if he were the young lover communing with her from beyond the grave, assuring Mrs. Clingsland of her beauty then and now. Thanks to the last of these letters, Mrs. Clingsland feels rejuvenated; it is, she says, “a treasure [she] can live on for years.”

Yet, as Mrs. Attle discovers and informs her granddaughter, the young man who wrote the letter had died immediately after writing it. Feeling guilty for this tragedy, and for betraying her priest in the first place, Mrs. Attle asks only for “money enough to have a few masses said for his soul.” In a haunting final line, Mrs. Attle relates how she “saw to it that Father Divott said the masses […] so he was a sort of accomplice too, though he never knew it.”

Mrs. Attle may not say so explicitly, but her granddaughter, the young woman listening to her story, is also an accomplice of sorts. So, in a sense, is the reader. In the end, really, we’re all accomplices in the unwieldy, intractable world of beauty. Wharton knew that. Yong knows that too.

Yet while Yong wants us to think about beauty and vanity, she also wants us to let ourselves off the hook, to understand the messaging we hear about beauty but ultimately embrace “[o]ur own definition of it.” This kind of advice seems fitting for the self-help book that Yong insists she isn’t writing. But what would happen if we didn’t pretend to ignore the superstructure of vanity—ballrooms, bright rooms, snowy doorsteps and all—and instead allowed ourselves to wander freely through its shadowy hallways? There, we could confront, interrogate, and perhaps even accept our desires without naively imagining the possibility of true escape. I suspect what we’d find in those in-between, rarely trodden spaces would prove more illuminating than any grand chandelier.

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Featured image: John Singer Sargent. Nonchaloir (Repose), 1911. Gift of Curt H. Reisinger. National Gallery of Art (1948.16.1). CC0, nga.gov. Accessed August 1, 2024.