“This book is all of the subtext of my entire beauty editorial career that I wasn’t able to publish or say just because it kind of undermines my career,” says Sable Yong, a longtime beauty veteran who has previously held positions of beauty editor at Allure and XoVain. Now, however, she is lifting the lid on an industry that – while offering freedom and self-expression – enforces ideals that are becoming increasingly unachievable. “Vanity is an innate animal behaviour like how monkeys groom each other, birds groom each other. It’s what we do for health, but humans take it to this level of obsession.”
In her debut essay collection Die Hot With A Vengeance, Yong explores the beauty industrial complex, reflecting on her ever-evolving relationship with beauty and self-image. From dissecting our fixation with wellness to the rise of tweakments (and how they can go wrong), Yong takes a critical look at the industry while still trying to hold space for the joy that beauty can offer.
“We have a lot of critical analysis which generally concentrates on how beauty is oppressive – a lot of the titles are like ‘How Beauty Harms Women’ and it frames beauty as harmful to women and also tells us how inescapable beauty is,” says Yong. “Or there’s the How To’s on how to be hotter. My hope is that this book would be a middle ground.”
The book really dives into the realities of being a beauty editor. On one end, it’s a very privileged role that ‘people would die for’, but it’s also a role that’s heavily romanticised. How did you navigate these nuances when writing about it?
Sable Yong: A lot of my peers and colleagues complain about their jobs as anybody complains about their jobs; but everyone adds a caveat: ‘I’m so grateful, I’m so lucky, I’m so privileged that I get to do this’. And that is true. However, and I’ve noticed this from the inside, these privileges that are pretty unique to this position are dangled as incentives to not pay us or give us raises and to basically burn people out. It’s been said in the office where it’s like ‘We let you go on this fancy press trip so now you have to double down on these projects that you don’t want to do and don’t make sense’. That’s not how you should run a business.
I didn’t go on as many press trips [when working at Allure]. Press trips have just boomed in the last few years, but I do remember thinking ‘Well, I get all of these products, I get all of these treatments for free and I’ve been able to stay in these five-star hotels for free’. It’s the golden cage situation, it’s what keeps you in the job, but then you realise that you are living paycheck to paycheck and this is not sustainable.
In the book, vanity is a double-edged sword, it oscillates between ‘self-care’ and ‘self-mutilation’, could you talk a bit more about this binary of how it feeds us and disgusts us at the same time?
Sable Yong: Vanity – it’s an innate animal behaviour. It’s what we do for health, but we humans just take it to this level of obsession. We have clinical words now to describe overgrooming, like dermatillomania when people pluck their eyebrows and eyelashes out [due to] anxious behaviour.
Everybody is encouraged to have a beauty regimen, and to take care of themselves to ‘beautify’, but you have to keep it under wraps. Nobody wants to know how you do it, they just want to see the result. In the meritocratic society we live in, beauty is the one thing – or vanity, rather – where merit is undercut by the effort it took to achieve it. You’re expected to be beautiful, for there to be the result of vanity and grooming, but there’s still a stigma on the process of getting there.
You have this interesting passage about people’s obsession with undetectable tweakments, but then we binge watch shows like Botched with glee. In the book, you talk about when a husband kills his wife, people often respond ‘Well, why did she marry him?’ Why do you think we hone in on the individual?
Sable Yong: It’s such a psychology that fascinates and repulses me. For shows like Botched, there’s this idea of ‘beauty-ing too close to the sun’. We’re drawn to it because we desire to indulge all of our most vain desires and wishes for ourselves.
The concept of wellness and beauty optimisation has an omnipresence. Where do you think this self-optimisation of beauty and wellness is heading?
Sable Yong: Ooof! I think it’s only going to get more intense. I do feel like it’s also a reflection of this chaos and uncertainty going on in our world, and the fact that we’re just constantly inundated. Beauty and anything having to do with the self is a form of self-armour and self-protection. Beauty is a form of control. If we cannot control the world, we can control our place in it. Beauty is the first thing we grab at when we’re in emotional turmoil or emotional distress and uncertainty. It’s chasing comfort through control.
What are your thoughts on beauty regimens becoming so hyper-specific?
Sable Yong: It’s wild. I cannot keep up with it. Whatever virality algorithm TikTok has is so much more extreme than Instagram and when people go viral for one little thing that they didn’t think would take off, it really encourages people to keep doing that because of the attention metrics. A lot of K-beauty have niche [trends] like ‘cherry lips’, or ‘douyin eye make-up’, and beauty TikTok creators… that’s their bread and butter. They’re just trying shit out.
It’s also partially the media because media now has to cover social media to stay relevant so when Allure would write about this thing we’re seeing on Instagram, these crazy eyebrow trends, it would then double-down the legitimacy of these trends to readers. When they see something covered in The Times or covered in Vogue or Allure they’re like ‘Oh, people are really doing this’. No! It’s just one person who wrote this tiny little new clip about [it] for traffic hits. It’s literally just traffic chasing – looking for clicks. It has this detrimental effect that is careless.
“Beauty is the first thing we grab at when we’re in emotional turmoil or emotional distress and uncertainty. It’s chasing comfort through control” – Sable Yong
What are your go-to beauty and wellness guilty pleasures?
Sable Yong: I never feel guilty about pleasure. I love going to the Korean bathhouse – that’s my thing. If you go to the legit ones, not the ones that pander to mainstream beauty, you are butt-ass naked. So when you go with friends, these should be friends you’re comfortable with, you’re going to be totally naked. It’s such a bonding experience. When you can [be in your body] in a communal, neutral environment, it’s such an amazing reset button because you are seeing real people’s bodies in a neutral context that is not being performed or sexualised.
Do you think because beauty is easier to control, we are trying to avenge each other with it?
Sable Yong: For women – specifically with ‘revenge bod’ – we grow up being told explicitly and implicitly that our primary value is our appearance. we’re rewarded for it when we do a good job, when other people enjoy our appearance. And when we don’t, we’re invisible and we’re ignored.
There’s an enmeshed entanglement with beauty and love for women specifically. So when you have the particular wound of heartbreak and rejection, obviously the first thing you think of is, ‘If I was more beautiful, would this not have happened to me?’ Or, ‘if I get more beautiful maybe then I could win them back or win the attention of a new person’. It’s our way to reclaim our self-worth. I don’t want to say you should stay in self-loathing, it’s good to do things that make you feel better about yourself. It is very effective when you do a little ‘glow-up’, and someone tells you that you like nice, it does have a very positive impact on you. But at the same time, you have to do that while understanding that isn’t your primary value.
If there’s one takeaway from the book, what would that be?
Sable Yong: I want people to redefine what beauty means to them, and to think about it rather than doing what they are told is considered beauty. Even if that involves backing out wholesale, do that. I have conversations with other women and they say things like ‘Oh, I can’t eat that, I’ll blow up’ or ‘I think it’s time for Botox’. I want to shake people sometimes and tell them that you don’t have to do this. Just decide beauty on your own terms, and go at it that way.
Whether consciously or unconsciously, we all try to die hot with this ‘vengeance’ for someone or something, or society. Do you think we all strive for that unwillingly?
Sable Yong: I think most people strive for a good life. That’s what most people can hope for themselves. Whether or not you feel that you are having a good life is often dependent on things out of your control that you had no part in deciding, a lot of which has to do with appearance politics and appearance discrimination. But when you can parse them out and remove yourself from their judgments, and decide who you are out of the context, on your own terms, I think that is very very hot behaviour.
