The cult-like tactics that wellness & beauty companies use on your teens (and you)
My new YA book, You Belong To Me, explores this world of cult X beauty via a high school girl who gets involved with a local wellness guru's daughter.
The word wellness is everywhere these days, and no wonder. It’s a trillion dollar industry and has very little regulation. Everything is wellness. Home products, cold plunges, collagen powder. What’s not wellness is really the question. In the 90s, I used to work for a health food store in San Francisco and I could see the explosion happening in front of my eyes. People wanted answers for their health problems and they would take any advice they could get even if it meant getting it from a 25-year-old like me who had very little knowledge. (My favorite response: Take probiotics!)
As the wellness industry exploded and with celebrity brands like Goop and Poosh coming out with lines of their own, I couldn’t help but become skeptical of an industry I once believed wholly in. Now, the marketing tactics of the wellness and beauty industry today look eerily similar to some of indoctrination strategies that cults use. This is especially problematic when we’re talking about the mental health of teenage girls who are getting influenced on social media, literally, bombarded by messaging about what wellness and beauty product they have to buy, and why they have to buy it NOW and why they’ll DIE WITHOUT IT.
Because I have a 16-year-old daughter and because I write about women and girls, exploring this world seemed like a natural progression for me and my work. I can’t believe this, but You Belong To Me, my fourth book, comes out in two weeks on April 15.
You can pre order it from Barnes & Noble, Amazon or Walmart (and many other places here), but I would prefer that you get it from your local indie book store, or my local indie bookstore if you want a signed copy! You can also ask your local library to carry it!
So how does the wellness and beauty industry use cult tactics?
One: Cults have no tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.
Back in 2018, Conde Nast approached Goop to create a partnership; Goop content overseen by a Vogue editor. But then something happened. Conde Nast is a media company with a long history of fact checking. “They have a lot of rules,” Paltrow said to Taffy Brodesser-Akner in a New York Times Magazine interview.
Writes Brodesser-Akner:
The rules she’s referring to… is — well, the thing couldn’t be fact-checked. Goop wanted Goop magazine to be like the Goop website in another way: to allow the Goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations via the kinds of Q. and A.s published, and that just didn’t pass Condé Nast standards. Those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like double-blind, peer-reviewed studies. The stories Loehnen, now Goop’s chief content officer, wanted to publish had to be quickly replaced at the last minute by packages like the one on “clean” getaways.
The thing couldn’t be fact-checked. Why? Because Goop didn’t want science or doctors to challenge her claims. ARE YOU SHOCKED? I know you’re not.
OK. Let’s move on to another cult tactic. Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability. You might think to yourself, oh that sounds more like Donald Trump than the beauty industry, but I promise you my friends, there’s not much difference!
More and more products claim “clean” without any backing. According to the Times, the research consultancy Brandessence estimates that nearly one-third of the United States market is now labeled clean. How is that possible? There’s no real definition for clean beauty, except someone from the top (ie., the authoritarian) who deems it to be “clean” therefore it’s clean. Bullshit. There are no legal guidelines governing the use of such terms like “clean” or “natural”. The lack of regulation in the beauty industry is so vast, that companies don’t have to be accountable. Why should they have to be?
One last cult tactic! Followers feel they can never be "good enough".
The beauty industry lives off the idea that your skin is bad and only through the power of products can your skin be made “good.” Sounds like a religious experience, right? But teens and tweens have become a target for the beauty industry. Eleven year old kids are sitting there watching influencers on TikTok tell them that their skin will be better if they just use this product. If the product isn’t working? Well, it must be that they’re not using it right. Or that they need MORE products. Or that they have to keep using it because it takes time for it to build up in your system. The nature of social media mixed with teens’ need to look good, mixed with teens who are worried about their skin and mixed with teens who don’t feel like they belong, makes kids prime targets.
But wait a second, young skin doesn’t need anti-aging products, you say. Of course not, that’s crazy, you say. Too many of these products can be harsh for their growing skin. So why are they buying it? Look, it was happening under my roof too. My daughter was using an over the top amount of products about two years ago when she was 14. Glossier was the temple and she the worshipper. But the products were making her skin break out into a rash. You know what her dermatologist said to use? Cereve. Drug store Cereve. That’s it. Her skin is smooth now with a pimple every once in a while. No more rash.
With all of that said—and if you’re still reading, then you’re clearly as obsessed with cults as I am—I want you to know that I love the wellness industry. But as a grown woman with a tiny bit of knowledge, I’d like to think I can make good decisions for myself. If ’m going to buy an expensive skin care product I don’t think it’s going to change my life.
OK fine sometimes I think it’s going to change my life because I WANT it to change my life! Who doesn’t? That’s the whole point. We all want a magic pill. We all want “glassy” skin or whatever word they’re using these days. But the real thing here is how these companies prey on our most vulnerable population. Teenage girls.
Would love to know your thoughts on all of this. Thanks for reading.
-Hayley