How Beauty Pros Gaslight You

A few days after graduating from college, I was sitting in the Elizabeth Arden Red Door Salon on Fifth Avenue, having a free beauty makeover. I had just started work at Condé Nast, the high-gloss media conglomerate, and the higher-ups didn’t want a group of new recruits to embarrass the company when we represented it in public.

That was back in the analog era, long before the reality TV star Kylie Jenner took to Instagram with her lips bloated with injected filler. The advice my co-workers and I heard at the Arden salon all sounds so innocent now.

Seated at vanity tables, we listened to simple tips on cleaning our skin and applying makeup so we wouldn’t look like — well, exactly what Jenner and her Kardashian half sisters look like today.

Since then the beauty business has morphed into a $500+ billion a year industry. And its trends come less from magazine editors than from online influencers. But in some ways it’s changed little since I worked for Glamour.

Or so I learned from Die Hot With a Vengeance, an entertaining but sobering new essay…