Strikes, Bankruptcy, and Broken NDA's - it's Chaos for the Holidays, Baby!
Strikes, Bankruptcy, and Broken NDA's - it's Chaos for the Holidays, Baby!
Hello! Here’s the beauty news I’ve been thinking about lately, I know it’s been awhile:
Trans-led beauty campaigns for luxury houses: YSL tapped the big sweetie Chella Man and Armani tapped Valentina Sampiao. These aren’t the first times a luxury house has tapped trans talent by a long shot, but it is always nice to see! I am curious, though, what is the ‘better’ framework: trans talent to directly link their dysphoria to the brand or just tapping them to be a beautiful face like their cis counterparts. Does the best answer depend on queer community’s reception or the feelings of the person they tap? Who owes what to whom? I see cis influencers state that their brand partnerships also act as fundraisers to a specific community project far less often, but it’s part and parcel to a queer influencer working with a company.
Absolutely inhaled this piece on The Bizarre and Unsettling Rise of True-Crime Makeup Videos on YouTube and TikTok.
Olay Designs an Easy-Open Lid for People with Disabilities - they consulted with Cr*pple Media’s Madison Lawson among other people, which I think is great. [Full disclosure, I’ve consulted on projects for the brand, too, though not this one.]
I’ve been following the Johnson & Johnson bankruptcy fiasco with deadfish eyes, marveling at how the wealthy can find every loophole. Here’s a good summary of what’s going on. Filing for bankruptcy through subsidiary companies is such a predictable way out of restitution! Remember the INTERVIEW magazine bankruptcy declaration? Rather than selling to a new publisher and paying their unpaid freelancers the $3.3 million they owed, the owner just bought it back from himself through a new holding company for the bargain price of $1.5 million and it’s still publishing - sorry, ‘relaunched’. What lessons can be learned from this? Fail upwards with a holding company, I suppose. This is the plotline of a Succession episode.
In good news, whoever (I am guessing Adam Kakembo, the CMO, and his co-hort) runs Aesop’s brand partnerships consistently does a good job. Remember the free queer library at Aesop stores this summer? Aesop partnered with Saint Heron to support their free community library for rare, out of print community works:
My favorite brand projects and collaborations are stuff like this, about community taste-making and sharing knowledge rather than a transaction of product. It’s more about…soft power and conversation than it is about anything else. It’s a trust building exercise more than anything explicitly transactional. Which makes it perhaps more expensive to do in the short term, but it pays out in dividends later on, IMO. Loyalty is an expensive thing to procure.
And on the subject of loyalty, the fact Dana Scruggs and Okite Omineh broke their NDA’s to confront their former employers, beauty brand/nail salon Tenoverten is an incredible act of bravery. You can read their full statements responding to tenoverten’s rebrand and lack of accountability over at Medium. It definitely speaks to the racial capitalism implicit in the nail salon industry. Hoping that they get what they ask for.
To get more context into the history of nail salon culture and racial capitalism, I encourage you to watch the documentary Nailed It! It is available for rental or purchase across the usual platforms, and it’s fantastic. Here’s the trailer:
In terms of change making, there is a new bill package being introduced in Congress supported by The California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative, in partnership with The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics,BCPP, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, Women’s Voices for the Earth, American Sustainable Business Council and Clean Production Action. The package covers supply chain transparency, worker rights, ingredient transparency and more. It’s a pretty comprehensive suite! It’s not the first time ingredient transparency has been pushed forward in front of Congress - that is done regularly to PR fanfare by brands like BeautyCounter. (The fact Beautycounter is also an MLM is endlessly fascinating to me. A topic for another day.) However, this suite of bills is interesting because it’s being shaped by labor rights groups like the Nail Salon Collaborative, not by brand-backed corporate lobbyists. You can read more about the bills here and how to support them. If you’d like, I can discuss how lobbying has worked regarding the beauty industry in a later newsletter. I do love talking about money.
Beauty brands are still lobbying for systemic change in their own special ways, obviously. There’s CodeRed4Change, a coalition of 115+ brands advocating for consumers to call their Congressmen to advocate for specific points. It’s great that beauty brands are acknowledging the climate crisis and want to get involved, but I think that this attempt at change doesn’t require much of them. From what I understand, they put a red icon on their social media and a link to a form for individuals to call Congress with, and some of them paused e-commerce for a day. But are they minimizing packaging waste on their end, or even adopting a carbon-offset system to purchases? I know that many of the individual brands that signed this do these things - but it’s not a standardized response and feels like deflection of work they could be doing. They banded together for a beautifully branded Change.org petition, when we all know fossil fuel companies actually put their money where their mouth is and that is how we are stuck with climate villains. There’s talk, and then there’s money. If there are teams in this race, the climate change deniers are clearing winning, because they’ve funded the race, the horses, and the jockies.
That being said, I do want to highlight the fact art - a kind of beauty! - does serve a valuable role in the conversation around climate change. Whitney Bauck is doing incredible reporting on the topic. Really enjoyed their piece for NYT on Fehinti Balogun’s play at COP26, the climate summit that’s been trending this week.
This month, 15% of subscriptions will be going towards strike solidarity funds across the U.S. There are a lot of strikes going on across industries, and if you have one you’d like to see the money go towards, share in the comments. I’m interested in supporting strike funds that offset the cost of healthcare and childcare to on-strike workers, but if there are strike-related wish lists for unionized groups striking, too, feel free to leave them in the comments as well. I don’t make M*tty Yglesias money from my Substack newsletter, so the total contribution is not thousands of dollars, but I still want to support these collectives with your help. :)
A dense missive this week! How are you doing? I’m holding together my sanity by working slowly and watching an hour of TikTok for every 500 words I write or 1500 words I delete. Feel free to comment with your favorite Tiktok of the week, I would be grateful. xoxo