Estelle Tang in The Guardian:
The very first sentence of Arabelle Sicardi’s book, The House of Beauty, reads: “When I tell you that beauty is a monster, I need you to know it is my favorite kind.” Sicardi, who splits their time between New York City and Los Angeles, has a love/hate relationship with the beauty industry. A writer and consultant working in beauty and tech, their projects include a beauty newsletter, a creative collective called Perfumed Pages and a non-profit arts project called the Museum of Nails Foundation. In their new book, they examine the impact of the $450bn beauty industry – the pretty and the very ugly.
Sicardi has written about beauty as “a terrorizing force” for their whole career, including a stint as a beauty editor at BuzzFeed, which proved a spiky learning experience. “I wrote a story critical of an advertising campaign and then got flak for it,” they recall. “I decided to leave because I didn’t want to deal with the politics and the insincerity of being told I can do something, but then having my work deleted. That type of situation still happens very regularly to writers for publications to this day,” they said.
More here.
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