Self Destruction Through Self Improvement: The Inherent Body Horror of Skincare

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“Why can’t you be excited for me?” Stacey, the main character in Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities episode “The Outside”, asks her husband, who insists she is having an allergic reaction to her skincare. “This is what’s going to fix me,” she says, scratching at her oozing welts. In the episode, directed by Ana Lily Amirpour, socially awkward Stacey breaks out in a rash after using a retinol cream gifted by her coworker during Secret Santa. Encouraged by a cult-like telemarketer who reassures her that “when it hurts, it works,” she embraces her peeling skin and awaits her transformation, hoping to be accepted by her perfectly coiffed and manicured colleagues.

Similarly, in Kalley’s Last Review, a short film directed by Julia Bailey Johnson, fledgling beauty YouTuber, the titular Kalley reviews a chemical peel sent by a skincare startup. After a minute and a half she looks badly sunburned, and by the next day, every inch of her face is cratered with bloody sores. Both women see the desiccation of their faces as part of their healing, and they aren’t alone. “The stinging is a little scary (five stars),” writes one real life skincare product reviewer. “I ended up getting some burn spots (five stars),” says another.

As skincare has become more synonymous with self-care and wellness, healing your skin has become wrapped up with healing your soul. Kalley chalks up her bad reaction to skin purging — when a product causes a temporary increase in acne breakouts before perfecting the skin — similar to letting out buried emotions in order to move on. “A really, really crazy thing is there was actually stuff hiding underneath my skin,” Kalley says, gesturing to a mountainous scab under her cheekbone. “I think that’s just pores that I didn’t even know were clogged,” she reasons, as if discovering a repressed memory. Sloughing off dead skin cells to reveal young, shiny ones underneath gives us the impression that we can always start afresh. “Your new life, it’s already growing under your skin,” the telemarketer says hypnotically to Stacey. Believing you can heal or change is key to manifesting a better future. “You have to trust the formula,” the telemarketer urges. 

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“[Skincare] starts out with this idea that you are inherently bad as you are – your oil, your dead skin cells, your wrinkles, your pimples — these are bad things, and only through the power of products can you be made good,” beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino says on Sounds Like A Cult podcast. She argues that our skin is better off without products, and that the beauty industry actively preys on our feelings of inadequacy and our search for spiritual meaning. “If a product burns or stings post-application, you have exfoliated living skin cells, not dead ones,” she emphasises. And anyway, dead skin cells aren’t the enemy — they help our skin lock in moisture. She also notes that Western beauty standards are a product of greater societal forces – recalling the 10 step skincare routine of Patrick Bateman, a character symbolic of a white, capitalist, patriarchal, appearance-obsessed society, in American Psycho. 

In her book Bodyfulness, somatic counsellor Christine Caldwell argues that treating the body as a project and ignoring its signals of pain as stemming from the mind/body divide, the belief that our minds and bodies are distinct and separable. The ghost in the machine. It’s easier to objectify and harm ourselves when we conceive of our bodies as something we are inconveniently tied to, rather than something we are. In Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, Stacey gives her coworker a duck she taxidermied herself for secret Santa, and her description of skinning it, removing its insides and sewing it up echoes her coworker’s enthusiastic description of a facelift minutes earlier.

“A skilled embalmer will put a tiny bit more fluid in than came out, resulting in the smoothing out of your wrinkles, a post-mortem facelift as it were,” Rupert Callender reveals in his book Life, Death and the Human Art of Undertaking. The retinol telemarketer assures Stacey that she “[doesn’t] have to go under the knife to achieve perfection.” But perfection is static, like Stacey’s glassy-eyed duck, while being alive involves constant change. 

“The burgeoning field of psychodermatology has even started treating skin disorders using psychological and psychiatric techniques. A sense of wholeness requires understanding blemishes as a message about your overall health rather than as an alien invader.”

Both The Outside and Kalley’s Last Review are examples of body horror – showcasing grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body to provoke audiences. “Our bodies are weird. And terrifying. And beautiful. And frustrating,” film critic Lisa Laman writes in Collider. Body horror, she argues, “helps normalise the complicated relationships we all have with our bodies,” which aren’t socially acceptable to talk about openly. In Powers of Horror, philosopher Julie Kristeva writes about abjection — a response that is not exactly disgust or repulsion, but more akin to suddenly becoming conscious of one’s own corporeal reality. “There’s a way in which pimples get conditioned in our own minds as nonhuman actors — they’re us, but they’re not us at the same time,” associate professor of sociology Marc Lafrance said to The Walrus. Being the most visible, our skin is the most regular site of abjection. 

The word ‘healing’ comes from the Old English word for ‘whole.’ I’ve struggled with acne on-and-off for the last ten years and my breakouts often erupt in times of stress, showing just how much the skin and the mind go hand in hand. The burgeoning field of psychodermatology has even started treating skin disorders using psychological and psychiatric techniques. A sense of wholeness requires understanding blemishes as a message about your overall health rather than as an alien invader. Having perfect skin is as impossible as being perfectly healed; as long as there’s more life, there will be more changes to grapple with and more opportunities to falter and regain our footing. I think part of the appeal of body horror – from gorey cinema to viral pimple popping videos – is that it reminds us of our shared humanity, and reassures us that we can all be a bit messy. “I was dating a man with dandruff a while back and I found that oddly erotic,” DeFino says. “Seeing the flakes was a relief, almost? Like a reminder that this person was just a human being in a human body too.” 

Words: Helen Brown