Blog Intro: Why Blog?

On the blog title

My Reddit username & "fermenting": because I love anything skincare that is fermented but also I like to "incite or stir up trouble or disorder" (thanks dictionary!) - you'll see why below!

Note: if you read this and it all seems like too much work but you're interested in the products I'm reviewing, worry not. For the product reviews, I'll be pushing the stuff like this to the end of the review so you can just read about my experience with the product if that's more your thing. You might think all this feminism business has no place in a skincare review and that's totally fine. But it's my blog and I'm gonna write it my way :)

Intro to the Intro

I decided to write this blog because I love reading blogs and apparently the golden age of blogs is over. What better thing can there be than to contribute to a dying medium?! 

In all seriousness, this is mostly about writing the kind of posts I'd want to read. I want first impressions reviews but I also want to know, in detail, how that product was by the time it was panned. How it works with other products. Whether a repurchase is going to happen or not. 

I know everyone has to earn a living and influencers have a right to do that but I want something different to what most people produce. We all have to pay the bills and I have a full time job, it's just not producing content about skincare. Lol. And that means I'm free to write exactly what I want to here.

I should also say that I am very lucky, I also contribute to a blog for a K-Beauty webshop. I'm in awe that someone liked my writing and wanted me to be involved in their business! They very kindly pay me in skincare vouchers to spend in the webshop - win win in my view 🤣 I'm not obliged to review anything I order, I can order whatever I want and I have free reign over what I write - I don't have to write positive reviews. I do often write positive reviews because most things work fine for me and have a purpose of some kind of my skin.

I do a mix of first impressions reviews of products I've been using for a little while and longer term reviews of my HG products. For full transparency, I won't be talking about any of those products here unless I bought them separately with my own money (i.e. products I used before I started writing for the company or products I've repurchased separately with my own money elsewhere. I'll be listing where I purchased everything I write about here anyways).

If I already blog, why do this blog too?

I started this blog so I could write about products the webshop doesn't stock and write at great length. Lol. I get that not everyone wants to read long reviews and it doesn't necessarily make good business sense to have very long reviews, either. But I like to read reviews where the writer has really thought about a product, how it fits into their routine and written about many different aspects of it.

Here's the other thing I want to talk about: subject position. This might be a bit of an unknown term for you, it might not. In case it is new, I'll explain.

If you know what I'm talking about, feel free to skip this (or any of my writing, I'm not your reading supervisor! Plus, I'm trying to keep this informed by theory but for a general audience, so you also might disagree with my representation).

In my understanding, and how I studied this particular concept (note 1), is to do with the ways in which our identity (note 2) isn't something that purely springs from within us.

I'm sure most people, if they had a reason to think about it, would easily acknowledge that various factors affect who they are. Where they were born, where they live, what their family are like, religion, race, gender etc etc, all have an effect on how they see the world. And even that those things have important effects on their personality. It's kind of obvious, when you think about it.

What's perhaps a little less obvious is that whilst our personality is experienced as a continuous, unified whole, it's not quite as simple as that.

And this is where subject position comes in: it's a term that acknowledges, and keeps in view, the ways in which the cultural milieu impacts our experience of the world and that our identity isn't as unified as it generally feels.

I'm a white, cis-woman, who is working-class and very educated: each of those is a subject position that affects my perception and calls on me to respond in a certain way. Further more, one subject position can be at odds with other subject positions that I occupy. Working class plus PhD isn't unheard of but it's not all that common in the UK - and it plunges you into a social dynamic where most of your peers are a higher social class than you.

A more general and straightforward one is how gender (as a subject position) and something like housework plays out - most of my straight cis-female friends report on the mental load (note 3), even when they're not doing the majority of the housework. If you haven't heard of this, it's that even if other people in your household (i.e. your cis-male partner) is willing to do housework, the female partner ends up having to shoulder the burden of organising who does what, remembering what needs to be done etc etc.

Plus, many of said female friends are doing the majority of the housework too, regardless of hours worked or earnings. Source: my friends. This isn't sociology but I bet you could find studies if you wanted to do so. And that's not to condemn men - a lot of it is about socialisation.

The way in which you are socialised into a particular gender in a particular culture affects so much.

We don't have a monolithic identity - my experience of being a cis-woman in the UK will be intersected by the fact that I'm a white woman. If any of those aspects differ to me (being from the UK, living in the UK but not from the UK, not white, not working class etc etc), your experience of gender will be different to mine, even if we share certain aspects of having female bodies at birth and female gender norms (as those bodies and their cultural inscription will have differences to mine). And even if you're a white, cis-woman from and in the UK who is working class, our socialisation may well be similar but it's effects might be different, too.

So what's the point of all this and why does it matter?

To me, this matters because I want to think about the way in which gender, in particular, is a subject position that affects how we think about skincare. Then there's consumerism & capitalism as well as race & exoticism (more on this below).

So anyway, let's start relating all this to skincare.

A relatively recent article caught my attention: The Skincare Wars by Constance Grady for Vox (2018).

Grady does a state of the nation summation, discussing the sorts of issues and cultural biases that have been reported on skincare:

Critical think pieces about skin care abound, and they tend to hit the same beats: Is skin care exploitative? Is it a waste of money? Is it misogynistic? Or is it the backlash against skin care that is truly misogynistic?

These critiques aren’t unique to the skin care conversation. They emerge whenever women en masse become deeply and visibly interested in something.

Because in our culture, anything that women love is co-opted by two forces: corporations, which attempt to commercialize what used to be subversive, and concern trolls, who tell women that the thing they like and take pleasure from is secretly bad for them in particular and society as a whole. And while the two co-opting forces might seem to be opposed to each other, they’re actually mutually reinforcing agents of the same patriarchal myths about women.

So when we talk about skin care, we’re not just talking about cosmetics. We’re also talking about our anxieties about women, their bodies, their money, and their pleasure (Grady)

So this covers some of the issues with gender and capitalism.

And on capitalism, and influencers, I want to add a quotation by AB Muse from "An Effort to Deinfluence":

You're being used. If you, as an "influencer", are not providing unique content on your platform(s) outside of incentivized reviews, you are not an influencer, you are being used to build the illusion of grassroots popularity/ going viral. "But I'm just giving my honest opinions on product they gave me, they're not asking anything of me." They paid you in the product/discount to talk about it and you do not have leverage with the company. It's the difference between a celebrity advertising a product vs a no-name who had to go through casting, except you're not even being properly paid. You are dispensable. How many times do you think you can say "this product is shit" before they will just move on to someone who will say glowing things? (rczc)

That's part of my issue with influencers too and having watched a lot of influencer videos and read a lot of blog reviews: a lot of it doesn't feel thoughtful, even within the bounds of focusing on general skincare routines.

This isn't skincare but I want videos like this for skincare - I want thoughtful analysis, where it might fit in with cultural norms, evidence of feel thought!

I am making a point of doing quarterly routine update posts for various different themes on r/AsianBeauty for the very reason of wanting to be more thoughtful.

I read somewhere on the AB sub, forget who or I'd credit you, about how first impressions reviews seem to be the norm. That comment sunk into my brain but took a while to resurface. So I'm committing to re-evaluating the things I write about and committing to write longer term reflections.

Even when influencers do those videos / posts about reviewing previous routines and HG products, I still feel like it doesn't tell me enough - it feels like I'm still using it, still love it, or I've stopped using it because I found something else / fell out of love with it / my skin changed. But how does it compare?

I mean, I'm guilty of being lazy with reviews and linking to previous ones, but now I've realised that, I'm working on updating my content with meaningful discussion.

Sometimes influencers do acknowledge *aspects* of this generally knotty debate:

• James Welsh saying "progression not perfection, because perfection doesn't exist" (at the start of any of his videos)
• Lab Muffin "I do feel like it's good to have people who look their age and don't have that many treatments done in the public eye [...] I think most people probably shouldn't be striving to look that much younger anyway. I personally think it can be really unhealthy and you can get into that weird space where you're chasing the impossible and it takes up a lot of mental energy" (transcription by me).

I've also seen posts about over-consumption and waste / recycling - I could Google these but I've done a lot of research for this post already! I'm sure you've seen them or could find them easily.

This is kinda what I take issue with when it comes to influencers, these acknowledgements don't go far enough, in my opinion.

Granted, most people don't have a PhD that focuses on feminist theory and analysing dominant culture narratives, as well as power relations, like I do. I get that.

And I haven't worked in the beauty industry, like James Welsh has, or have a PhD in chemistry, like Lab Muffin has. So what appears imperative to me will be things that other writers / content creators might consider generally but it doesn't significantly inform their content.

I'm going to talk about the exocitism aspect of AB now - which u/rczc reminded me of in the post I linked above.

Rczc directly references an Odile Monod video that I'm going to quote from and references Snow White and the Asian Pear generally (which reminded me of a blog post I read of hers a couple of years ago).

Odile talks about how Koreans know that the provenance of ginseng matters:

Korean beauty brands know that in if they want to be taken seriously in their home country, they need to disclose certain details, age of the plant, growing environment, processing methods, etc etc

And it's very important to know these things because there are some some Korean brands that are mainly targeted at the foreign market that take advantage of the fact that many Western consumers are somehow fascinated by the idea of ginseng but don't know much about it.

These brands would sometimes make very bold claims without disclosing the type of ginseng used in their products. Only last year a Korean beauty brand that is very popular abroad was fined by the Korean health authorities for making exaggerated claims about the ginseng used in their products (Odile Monod, transcription by me).

Snow White and the Asian Pear wrote that:

For every sincere, heartfelt blog/article like Fiddy Snail's extremely influential How My Elaborate Korean Skincare Routine Helps Me Fight Depression, there are 10 articles with cringe-worthy clickbait-y titles breathlessly announcing "10 Beauty Secrets from Korea! You Won't Believe Number #7!" and "8 Weird Korean Beauty Products You'll Be Glad You Tried!" and "See the 12 Step Routine that Keeps Korean Women's Skin So Notoriously Ageless!" and "Get Korean Womens' Perfect Skin with the Latest Craze from Seoul!" and so on. (My eye is twitching from just typing those out) 

[.....]

t's not surprising that's the tack taken when marketing K-Beauty; certainly the west has a long (and sordid) history of referencing Asia in an exoticizing way meant to attract and entertain a European audience (Snow White and the Asian Pear)

Precisely.

So what's the takeaway?

I don't have a solution to this but I have some thoughts.

Grady ends her article with this:

But none of this — the outrage cycle, the think pieces and the backlash to the think pieces — is really about skin care. It’s about a system that is designed to make women feel terrible no matter what they do. And the best way we can help women through that system is to refrain from judging their choices as they do their best to get through it anyway (Grady)

What I think we could, and perhaps should, do is to acknowledge what we bring to the table when we're thinking about skincare.

I'm massively simplifying here but because I don't want to be stuck in the second wave of you have to give up pretty things because you're therefore unenlightened and pandering to the patriarchy or stuck in the media representation of third wave of nah feminism is all about embracing the choice to conform or not or whatever and then it's co-opted to sell more stuff (I'm not going to go into detail here but see Stuart Hall & Dick Hebridge on the way in which the mainstream weakens the subversive power of radical subcultures by co-opting the outward style and mass producing it. I'm simplifying).

I'd like us to reflect critically on the whole shebang, whether we have answers or not.

One of my all time favourite feminists, Jana Sawicki notes if women appear to have the only the choice of whether to speak in phallocentric discourse or be silent, that's not necessarily how it is: 

[Foucault] would have rejected the view that the power of phallocentric discourse is total. Instead, for Foucault, discourse is ambiguous and plurivocal. It is a site of conflict and contestation. Thus, women can adopt and adapt language to their own ends (note 4)

So let's look at the language we use, how we use skincare and let's be aware at least of the issues.

I'm sure my reviews will basically be extended versions of the kinds of things everyone else writes, when it comes down to it.

But I always want to think about the ways in which my subject position - and the dominant discourse that I am subject to - affects my interactions with, well, anything really. And, of course, especially skincare!

(Note 1) I'll try to keep mentions of my PhD to a minimum here but this is kinda necessary. I just searched my thesis for "subject position" to recheck my understanding of my understanding and I mention it 50 times. Loooooool.

(Note 2) I'm using identity and not subjectivity to try and keep this a bit more general but also to make the point that I'm working through the liberal-humanist conceptualisations of self before, say, post-structuralism (again, for simplicity, I'm using post-structuralism as a monolithic theory to stand various theories that conceptualise subjectivity). I'm going to refrain from too many references to Foucault, just know that Foucault, and especially feminist extensions of Foucault, underpins my thinking.

(Note 3) theres a feminist comic by "Emma" but Google it, you'll find lots of examples.

(Note 4) Disciplining Foucault: feminism, power, and the body, page 1.