BCC: quiet refusal

Welcome to the Beauty Culture Club.

Hi,

Welcome to our first edition of Beauty Culture Club (BCC), where we’ll discuss thought-provoking ideas, conversations, and stories about beauty.

I’m Jenni, a writer and editor working behind the scenes at Counter. While most Counter Programming letters will come directly from our founder, Gregg Renfrew, BCC columns will be coming compliments of contributors like me. While I love a perfectly feathered brow or bronzed cheek as much as the next beauty editor, BCC probably won’t be where we discuss how to get them.

Rather, we’ll look at where beauty intersects with other topics — history, technology, economics, and the semiotics of peptide lip balms among them.

Does this sound like a pretty nerdy beauty column? It might be. Welcome.

This New York Times Opinion podcast was ostensibly about the destigmatization of plastic surgery, but like many conversations about beauty, it was really about power.

Who decides what’s beautiful? What happens to previously aspirational beauty standards when cosmetic procedures become more widely accessible? And how can we maintain some semblance of agency when it comes to our own participation — and appearances?

For some, it might mean opting out completely:

“My punk spirit is like, ‘I’m just going to be ugly,’” writer Jessica Grose said on the podcast. “Old and ugly and wrinkled.”

Grose, for what it’s worth, had a dalliance with Botox just before her 40th, and was disappointed to discover it erased an asymmetry between her eyebrows — a skeptical quality that once also prompted a comparison to a Van Gogh muse.

“What if the imbalance, that asymmetry, is where the interest — even the humanity — is?” She wrote at the time.

“You don’t have to make it part of your identity saying, ‘I reject fillers’ or ‘I reject makeup,’” columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom said on the NYT podcast. “But I think there’s something to just quietly refusing the demand that you perform to a standard that you do not control.”

I like this for myself. It’s not laziness or frugality; it’s quiet refusal. I hope when another midlife L.A. mom — or even my young daughter — notices my errant silver hairs or unfilled lines, this is what she sees. Quiet refusal.

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Also noted:

• “​​Feeling ugly next to beautiful women was a deep part of how I formed my personality … You should have seen my friends in middle school.” — comedian and actor Kate Berlant on episode 069 of “Berlant and Novak,” after she was photographed alongside Charli XCX, Kylie Jenner, and Rachel Sennott.

• A reminder from Gregg: Beauty secrets are bullshit.

• You look young because you are young. 57% of plastic surgeons reported an increase in patients under 30 requesting cosmetic procedures or injectables. Women between 30 and 39 make up the largest share of the ~10 million cosmetics patients in the US.
  

• Don’t miss national treasure Amanda Peet playing an actress grappling with her aging face — as in, enlisting her kids’ babysitter to help her address her “turkey neck” —  in the sweet new movie Fantasy Life.
  

• Magasin’s Laura Reilly’s exhaustive/exhausting list of all the physical optimization procedures she’d undertaken in the first month of 2026 went Substack-viral:

  In January alone, I’ve done Botox, Emface, IPL, scheduled Moxi / broadband light, seen my orthodontist, cardiologist, GP, OBGYN, ophthalmologist, dermatologist, plastic surgeon, trainer, and pilates instructor. I’ve renewed my health insurance and medspa membership. I’ve drawn blood three times and given two urine samples. My current skincare routine is 6-8 steps, my daily supplement stack is 17 pills (20 on Mondays) and a peptide taken subQ, and I’ve engaged at least 5 high-tech tools from my home device library (red light, SAD light, PEMF, etc). I’ve tracked every meal, macro, and relevant micronutrient. All of this, and I consider myself pretty healthy and not hypochondriac. I am n=1, but I am not alone here.

  Much of the beauty discourse that followed seemed to comment on the list, whether consciously or not.

• Meaghan O’Connell did it consciously:

• “Joy is the real collagen.” — Molly Rosen