‘Beauty Is a Labor Issue’: The Ms. Q&A with Arabelle Sicardi

“The earth isn’t sustaining our desire for more goods—and a lot of those goods are beauty products.”

Since the start of their career, Arabelle Sicardi has worked to carve out a niche as a beauty writer who takes the industry to task. In a business that thrives on affiliate links, and where publications near universally get commissions for the products they recommend, it’s a hard angle to take: Critiquing the system, let alone exposing the inequality that goes on behind the scenes, can put you in a vulnerable position. But looking through the facade and seeing the ley lines of power that run beneath is exactly what Sicardi has set out to do in their new book The House of Beauty.

Sicardi sat down with Ms. to discuss beauty under fascism, the labor issues at play in the beauty industry, and finding community and connection in an industry that’s fraught with violence—both systemic and personal.

Oliver Haug: I was wondering if you have any thoughts about how beauty plays into the current fascist shift. Are there any kind of parallels you’re seeing there in terms of how the right wing is talking about beauty, and using beauty as a tool?

Arabelle Sicardi: Well, of course the way that tradwives and Make America Great Again and all these codifiers of white supremacy are obviously aligned with certain versions of beauty and of racial politics… And they’re not new ideas, we’re just in a new cycle of fascism that has always existed here. When people are like, oh, they’re Nazis—the Nazis modeled a lot of their regulations and propaganda on the way Jim Crow America operated. So to be racist in America is deeply American in some ways. This is not new. This is inherent to our country, unfortunately.

I’ll give it an extremely topical example that may offend some people: I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Taylor Swift’s new album is so, so big and also so traditional about gender roles… it’s very much against feminist ambition in some ways. And to do that in this version of America, this moment in time right now is… a particular kind of timing that didn’t have to exist. What we put out in the world is political, particularly around the timing and the context in which it’s consumed. 

Haug: Another thing that I was thinking about a lot reading your book is how many of these stories are labor stories, and stories about the labor of disenfranchised people in particular. I feel like that’s not like necessarily a sexy topic to a lot of the publications that are covering beauty. Why did you think it was important to bring that in? 

Sicardi: It’s not covered in most traditional media publications around beauty, because beauty in traditional media is about a product that you’re selling. And traditional media publications are always and have been always getting a cut from those sales in one way or another. I say in the introduction that traditional media publications are funded by beauty brands, and that is still true today, especially—they’re becoming more and more reliant on affiliate marketing and brand partnership deals as media platforms desiccate and collapse in front of our eyes. We have been operating in a zombie industry for more than a decade. Rates have stagnated. Publishing is a labor issue. Beauty is a labor issue. 

All of these things are labor issues, because they involve human beings. And it would be disingenuous for us to continue a conversation around beauty that doesn’t include these things, when the literal earth is suffering under the weight of our demands, to try to accommodate the weight of those demands right now. The earth isn’t sustaining our desire for more goods—and a lot of those goods, a good portion of those goods are beauty products. We have to talk about it. 

Haug: Yeah. I was glad to see you doing that, because so much of what I see online, even in the presentation of products in articles, has the human element so completely removed. There’s like no sense that a human being touched even the packaging to deliver it to your door. 

Sicardi: I think capitalism’s promise of convenience has erased human relationships from so much of our daily lives and almost every single aspect of it, that to just center humanity and the human cost of that choice that we have made through systematic choices is a kind of resistance to it. Just to understand how many people are involved in giving you a beauty product is a revolutionary form of storytelling because we’re always just presented with, oh, this perfect thing. But it came from somewhere. Why can’t we talk about that journey? We have to.

Haug: There is so much more awareness around those supply chain and inequality issues when it comes to fast fashion and the fashion industry, but the beauty industry is weirdly exempt from that kind of criticism. Why do you think that is?

Sicardi: It’s always felt like a weird elephant in the room considering my background. I come from a fashion background, I have grown up in the fashion industry. So whenever I see conversations and really great organizing happening around around fashion, I am just like, but why can’t we have similar energy come up in this space? These things are siblings. They exist because of each other and in relation to each other. 

I wanted to try and understand aesthetic communication as a conversation around access and community. 

Arabelle Sicardi

Haug: Yeah, it’s interesting though because even within that, fashion can be a space that is seen as an excess, or a privilege—whereas beauty, I feel, is often like framed as essential.

Arabelle Sicardi: That kind of mentality was why I decided to be 10 toes down a beauty writer very early on in my career. There’s plenty of fashion magazines, and there’s plenty of reporting on fashion marketing and this and the other thing, but there hadn’t been beauty criticism in the way that I wanted it. We were at the point in which I was writing and reading publications when print was still more of a thing. People were just doing shoppable marketing content. And the landscape has vastly changed now, but I wanted to have more critical conversations in the beauty space. 

I also understood that both fashion and beauty are part of how we conduct ourselves and present ourselves in the world and how we’re treated by other people. But to feel like you’re a participant in fashion, you have to spend a lot more money to participate in codes of style and aesthetics and luxury coding. Beauty has a lower barrier of entry—ultimately, a red lip is a red lip is a red lip. You may never ever be able to buy a fancy Birkin, but you can buy an entry level designer lipstick for far less money. It will still be hours of minimum wage labor, but you’re way more likely to be able to afford a $40 fancy lipstick than a $4,000 bag. I wanted to try and understand aesthetic communication as a conversation around access and community. 

Haug: It feels like beauty is so much more democratic in that way. But then perception that it is a democracy hides all the inequality behind the scenes. 

Sicardi: Yeah, no one ever said democracy was perfect.

Haug: When it comes to beauty in this current moment, what do you think people should be paying attention to? What sort of stories do you wish were more in the narrative?

Sicardi: I do wish that there were more conversations about fossil fuels and the beauty industry. I also wish that there were more conversations and meaningful movement happening around AI in beauty. I’ve written about AI and fragrance before, but it’s also in every other possible aspect of the beauty industry, and in creative fields. I don’t think that a lot of people really understand how quickly it’s infiltrated every single aspect of our lives in a way that it does feel kind of impossible to backtrack from. How do we navigate a world with it now, when the Pandora’s box has already been opened? 

I think that it would be great if people talked more about archiving and care work, and beauty work as a form of care work, and how we are in a crisis of devaluing all forms of care work, and the fact that people are very used to paying very cheap prices for convenience because we have been weaned on on Prime and billionaire’s bank accounts. Not everything can and should cost very little. And that’s something that we need to confront in a lot of aspects of our lives.

Haug: Are there any places where you’re finding hope in beauty right now? 

Sicardi: I really, really love being a fragrance freak. I love independent and niche perfumery, and the perfumery communities of which I am part, and that gives me a lot of hope and creative energy. We are in a fragrance boom, which is a good and bad thing—yes, there’s over-production, there’s a lot of fragrances coming out, and there’s cons to that, but also there are so many people that have never had access to fragrance education before that now have access, and that are introducing the world to their stories, their talents, their fragrances, their worlds. And a lot of those people are queer people of color, and that historically has not been the lineage of perfumery. I love being able to step into the world of new perfumers that I personally identify with and like feel kinship to. Being able to help shape their worlds, or see them grow as artists and human beings is really fulfilling.

There’s also really cool multi-disciplinary artists doing a lot of work with nail art, or technology that uses nail art in some way. There’s more people that are stretching themselves artistically, and understanding beauty as a form of storytelling—it’s not just a product to sell or consume. I’ve been really loving archiving and collaborating with different nail artists who use manicures as a form of storytelling around being Palestinian, or being Indigenous Native American, or using it as a fundraising tool, or an opportunity to talk about racial solidarity, things like that. The whole world is full of lots of tragedies and ways to feel helpless, but there are a lot of different artists in the beauty space that are understanding these things, and translating it in a way that’s also emotionally moving and cool.

Haug: That’s so interesting—why do you think nails and fragrance are specifically where these creative booms are happening?

Sicardi: The tools to be able to be an artist, at least in nails, are more accessible than ever before—you can get nail tools online, or at your drugstore, and can play and can learn online for free if you want to, so that’s very accessible for a lot of people. 

And for fragrance, places like the Institute for Art and Olfaction in LA and other workshops around the world are making fragrance education more accessible than before. It’s always been a very hierarchical, expensive field to go into, traditionally. But some of the most exciting new perfumers on them in the market are people that have gone through the Institute for Art and Olfaction, and their classes are very affordable compared to traditional institutions. 

It’s really a matter of access creating opportunity. It’s all community driven—a lot of these institutions that are new and are opening up access are not funded by larger fields, they are funded by the people that go to them and by the people that are invested actively in their community. So, you know, we make each other possible.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.