“I like to eat healthy, I’m expecting a kid, so you would not imagine the amount of stuff that is coming at me all the time about being ‘clean,’” said Catherine Tebaldi, a linguistic anthropologist at the University of Luxembourg.
“What I’m noticing around clean beauty, first, is there’s a lot of very much these eugenic discourses of purity, bodily purity, pureness in your food, pureness in your makeup, that is very closely aligned to white supremacists [and] eugenics,” Tebaldi noted.
It’s also not clear what these terms like “clean,” “non-toxic,” and “natural” mean.
“Even words that we’re using, like clean, what does that even mean? And from there, just unregulated terms like saying things like, ‘oh, bad chemicals.’ Well, everything’s a chemical. Water is a chemical,” said Brivitch.
“These are unregulated terms that don’t really mean anything, but they get an emotional response,” Brivitch added.
While opting to use makeup that contains fewer chemicals is not a bad thing, where this could go via the social media algorithm is not ideal.
“This can kind of lead to this anti-science rhetoric and this distrust in our regulatory bodies, which then leads down this path of, ‘OK, well, this is toxic. What else is toxic?’ And the more you start rejecting science, it could trend closer and closer to what I think has a huge impact on what we’re seeing with anti-vax, the rise of measles, etc. It just opens the gateway to these larger ideological shifts,” said Brivitch.
