McMansion face

When I was in college, I remember being surprised—not blown-away flabbergasted but, surprised—to learn that one of my friends, yet another intellectual, coastal, upper-middle-class white girl who’d found her way, as I had, to the University of Chicago, had gone to tanning salons in high school. This was a thing where she grew up, it wasn’t something she still did, but in her bit of America, this was what one did. In mine, it extremely was not. On paper, she and I probably had pretty similar backgrounds. But in the specifics, she came from a tanning milieu and I did not. A beauty treatment that struck me as bizarre (I knew no one doing it), dangerous (skin cancer!), pointless (what’s wrong with looking pale?), and maybe, if I really dug into my subconscious about it, a bit déclassé (if you were really posh you’d have a tan from winter vacation, not that I ever had this personally) was just normal at her high school. Given that the universe I was coming from had girls drinking absurd amounts of water instead of eating, and otherwise finding ways to be as thin as possible, this was not about one of our environments of origin being BETTER than the other. It’s just, it’s a big world out there.

I was thinking about this in terms of the role online context collapse plays in discussions of beauty treatments and who’s doing what. I don’t know Laura Reilly or Kate Wagner personally. I know that both use lower-case for their names on here, suggestive of aesthetic overlap, but disagree rather profoundly on beautification. I know that Wagner’s the person behind McMansion Hell, which will be tangentially relevant here.

Reilly’s account of her own wellness beauty whatever it is routine became Substack’s main character. It’s something, as a piece of writing. It made me think immediately of Edina Monsoon, in “France,” a Season 1 episode of Absolutely Fabulous that contributes to my sense that 1992 might be when television peaked. She’s heading off to an ill-fated vacation but first speedily lets her personal assistant, Bubble, know what needs doing on the personal-assisting front while she’s away: “Cancel my aromatherapy, my psychotherapy, my reflexology, my osteopath, my homeopath, my naturopath, my crystal reading, my shiatsu, my organic hairdresser. And see if I can be rebirthed next Thursday afternoon.” (Airheaded Bubble’s memorable answer: “Consider it done.”)

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But Reilly’s big internet-manners crime was not in the copious list of procedures (mixed in with unremarkable things like having health insurance and seeing a GP) but rather the projection (or, seeming projection) onto the world at large: