Transcripts / Beauty
♪ "Faceshopping" by Sophie ♪
Hey guys, it's Natalie, welcome back to my channel. Today I'm gonna do a makeup tutorial, as always. But first, story time! Story time! Story time!
I just wanna be upfront with you guys and let you know that I've had some facial surgery. I'm always gonna be honest with you guys about this kind of thing, because you mean so much to me. Like, you've been here with me since the beginning and you've seen my story. My whole entire journey. This journey I've been on as a transgender woman. You've been with me on this whole journey. This is my truth, and you've accepted the truth of my journey. This is a really vulnerable moment for me and you guys are just so special because you've been here for me throughout my whole transgender journey–
The whole message of my journey as an influencer– The vulnerable moment of the truth of the lived experience of my transgender influencer journey– It’s just been so impactful on my life and the truth of my journey– It’s just so meaningful that you’ve guys have been– It really means so much to me that you guys were supporting the truth of the–
Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! 🙉
I think the main thing we've learned together on this channel is that makeup is a lot of fun, but it's inner beauty that really counts. Anyway, let's talk about plastic surgery.
I had facial feminization surgery on April 2nd, so about a month and a half ago. What we call facial feminization surgery or FFS, is actually a series of different procedures that some transgender women choose to have to look more feminine. So what I had done is forehead contouring, a brow lift, rhinoplasty, mandible contouring, a trachea shave– you know what, let's just have the skull lady talk you through it. 💀
Lady Foppington: A coronal incision was made athwart the cranial vault, whence the skin of the forehead was stripped away from the bone. A fragment of the supraorbital ridge was then chiseled away, removed, reshaped, and re-affixed, thereby eliminating that undesirable prominence of a robust brow that ofttimes distinguisheth the skull of the Chad. A second incision was made athwart the columella of the nasal septum, facilitating the reconstruction of the interior cartilage and bone. Further incisions were made betwixt the gum and cheek, through which the mandible was rasped and shaved down to a gracile curvature of a jaw and pointed chin. Thereby delineating a facial silhouette exhibiting that aspect which medical men call cunty.
It all sounds pretty gruesome when you describe it like that, but there's actually a very fine level of technique and aesthetics involved– my plastic surgeon is an artist. The results are natural, I don't look like I've had a bunch of work done which is good. You know, you at least wanna leave people wondering “maybe she's born with it, maybe a surgeon peeled her face off and fixed her shitty skull”. Here's a before and after picture where you can clearly see the difference. To use the exact medical terminology: my brow is on fleek, my nose is no longer busted the house, my jaw is snatched, and my Adam's apple is canceled. Wasn't it always really Eve's apple? Maybe Satan's apple.
I think I still look like myself, it's not a “new face”. We're talking about 𝗺𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗼𝗳 𝗯𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲. But to have all that done was… well it cost a lot of money, the anticipation was oh, terror like I've never known, the pain was memorable, and the recovery took more than a month. In fact I still have some swelling in my jowls. Jowls, there's a nice feminine-sounding word love that.
The standard YouTube T-girl thing to do of course would have been to vlog the whole journey– story time, my facial surgery experience, my FFS journey, and post constant social media updates about it. And I am grateful to the trans women who have done that, because it was really helpful to me to be able to watch those vlogs in advance and know what I was getting myself into. But I decided not to post about the surgery because I wanted privacy for the recovery, and to just take some time to get to feel at home with the results before subjecting myself to the vicious things they say about me in the tabloids.
You know, I think I've been kinda psychologically damaged by reading for years the things people say about my appearance online. You know I'm not even talking about “the haters”, like at this point I can mostly brush them off. But for instance about a year ago, I was reading through a transgender subreddit and some trans woman was agonizing about her appearance, and someone offered the encouragement: "you know, you can still look hot even if you don't pass. Just look at ContraPoints". 💔Ughh like a dagger to the heart, the unintentional shade of it all.
So the past six weeks have been at times difficult and lonely, but I did manage to keep my mug off social media for long enough that I'm as ready as I'm ever gonna be for the commentary of the Internet. So bring it on you jackals, you vultures, you goblin swine.
While I was lying around bandaged and bored, I did have a lot of time to think. And what I've been thinking about is probably the same thing you're wondering right now, which is, why would someone do what I just did? Why would I spend so much time and money and go through so much anxiety and pain just to change a few millimeters of bone? Isn't this all just extravagant vanity, some narcissistic symptom of phones but too much?
Well I feel like there's a lot of pressure on me to say that in fact, this wasn't cosmetic surgery at all. Usually trans people say that surgeries like facial feminization, top surgery, genital reassignment, and so on serve the sole purpose of alleviating gender dysphoria; this discomfort that we feel with the mismatch between our bodies and our gender identity.
So what I'm supposed to say is that my surgery was a medically necessary reconstructive procedure needed to make my testosterone-weathered facial bones match the 5'2" happy-baby-bouncy-biogirl I truly am inside. Thereby alleviating my dysphoria, helping me safely blend into society, and preventing a five-alarm psychiatric meltdown. And there is definitely truth to that. It's certainly the argument I intend to make when I write this off as a medical expense on my taxes.
If you're an IRS auditor, please stop this video now and insert the next floppy disk into your CD drive. 💿
But hypothetically speaking, I think the reality might not be quite so simple. How sharp is the line separating gender dysphoria from the other kinds of body image dysphoria that drive cisgender people to get cosmetic surgery all the time?
Last year when I used to foolishly tweet things of substance, I tweeted that I wanted to get FFS, and some trans people responded telling me that I was suffering from internalized transphobia and self-loathing. They compared it to East Asian people getting double eyelid surgery or so-called ethnic rhinoplasty, which they say are motivated by internalized racism and Western beauty standards. I think that's a pretty weak analogy, and telling a trans person to just learn to accept the way they look can actually be kind of transphobic, because a big part of what it even means to be trans– at least for me, is the desire to look more female.
But I also think that trans people often talk like gender dysphoria is this intrinsic, personal experience that's always 100% valid and never has anything at all to do with the external pressure of beauty standards. But in fact, gender dysphoria is not sealed away in a vacuum away from the influence of societal ideals and norms.
Early in my transition, some of my worst dysphoria was about body hair, so I had full-body laser hair removal and now I'm smoother than a cisgender boiled egg. But where does the idea that women don't have body hair come from? Isn't that just an arbitrary grooming custom? A lot of the cis women I know don't so much as shave their legs. So maybe I'm not even trying to look like a cis woman. Maybe I'm simply doing everything I can to avoid looking like the caricature of a knuckly, hairy, ʙᴜʀɢᴇᴏɴɪɴɢ, mannish trans woman with which society has terrorized me to my core. Is this gender dysphoria? Or is it internalized transphobia? Or is it simply a cosmetic preference?
When I try to psychoanalyze myself, I find that my desires to look female, to look feminine, and to look beautiful are not exactly the same, but they're woven together so tightly that it's kind of difficult to untangle them. And the opposite is also true, that for me feeling mannish or dysphoric usually goes along with feeling ugly. I don't have a lot of days where I walk out the house thinking "well, I'm giving femme queen realness, but apart from that I look like absolute shit".
Of course, there are qualities that make you look female that aren't necessarily attractive. Like cellulite or flabby arms, which are super fish but aren't deemed beautiful by society. The truth is I don't just want to look female. I want to be beautiful. Desperately, god I'll do anything.【ＡＮＹＴＨＩＮＧ】.
In this video, I want to explore why I'm so obsessed with being beautiful and why it seems like a lot of people who live in a society are so obsessed. Is it phones? It's probably phones. I know you're supposed to pretend that you don't care about being beautiful or that you're not trying but… guys it's the only thing I care about and I've never tried so hard at anything.
Of course I do feel guilty about being so obsessed with it, cause there's this idea that caring about beauty makes you shallow or vain. You know, “smart people” aren't supposed to care about beauty. And I've always been categorized as a “smart person” by people around me. Some of that is when you're raised like I was, as a middle-class white boy with no athletic talent, parents and teachers treat you like a fucking genius. Like Einstein nutted a load in Mozart's bussy and Mozart shat you out while he was getting a rusty trombone from Vincent van Gogh. It inspired his famous painting Starfish Night.
But even among women, caring about beauty is often frowned upon. I feel like an alien species when I hang out with women in academia. And I know a few cause I once got half a PhD before dropping out to become a uhhh, what do you call someone who makes videos? A camgirl. 📹
Most female grad students and professors I know don't wear makeup. To them the idea of earnestly putting on press-on nails or false eyelashes is inconceivable, like maybe on Halloween. Now part of that is that women in male-dominated fields sometimes feel like they have to present more masculine to be taken seriously, because of this prejudice that beautified femininity equals frivolous. But another part of it is clearly some kind of not-like-other-girls weird flex. Which, okay fine whatever. I'm not gonna judge another woman for the way she copes with a society that pressures women to be beautiful while simultaneously belittling them for caring about it.
I guess my way of coping is this tacky, heteronormative, and tragically sincere aspiration to some kind of post-ironic feminine beauty. Why am I like this? Well part of it is vindictive transsexualism, pure and simple. To all the people who've called me a man I wanna say "fuck you!” 🖕 By looking like the undeniable visual archetype of a woman, which is a beautiful feminine woman… who's wearing 600,000 sequins.
They're biological sequins. Ooh, that is some ASMR right there, listen to that.
Another factor is this shitty website. I'm a professional YouTube influencer– forgive me Father 🙏– and I'm on camera all the time. I edit my own videos, so I spend upwards of 60 hours a month staring at my own face on a screen. Now you try doing that and see what kind of fucked up complex you develop. Plus I compare myself to other women who make videos.
A lot of the trans women on YouTube are so young and so beautiful it makes me want to throw up. And in comparison, for a long time I've felt like this shabby aging transvestite. Just this feral cat, wandering the aisles of the liquor store. So I'm insecure, I'm compensating for that whole mess, but I honestly don't resent the beautiful people I really just stan the hell out of them.
I follow this woman on YouTube, and I want to be just like her mom. Her name is Dame Jefferson Star. Her name is Lady Jane Maclean. Signora Nicole Beatrice Tutorials. Tatiana Petrovna Westbrookova. And of course my queen and perfect goddess whomst I stan and whose portrait I've painted hundreds of times.
So there's maybe some extra intensity for me, but I think it's actually pretty normal to want to be beautiful. I think even grad students want to be beautiful. They just wanna do it in that Becky kind of way where you scoff at anything glam or artificial.
And it's not just women who care about beauty either. I mean, gay men in LA have always been getting cosmetic surgery but now even the straights are doing it. Incels are completely obsessed with the defects of their personal appearance, and the ones that aren't completely blackpilled are obsessed with plastic surgery. The incel newspeak word for beauty is “looksmaxing”, because of course they have to go about this in the most heterosexual possible way.
It is imperative to implement a skinmax regiment in order to maximize Looks-Money-Status and secure access to females. Oh my god, calm down. Not every sentence out of your mouth has to be worded like a dispatch to the police commissioner.
Yes, they actually call skincare “skinmaxing”. James Charles I know you're having a hard month, but I've got a business idea that's gonna turn this thing around for you. Here's the plan, you're gonna create a new line of skincare products called “Chad Glow”. Bribe PewdiePie to send his fans to the promo video– “hi sistercels”– and send me a check in the mail, you're welcome.
If you read looksmax forums, they're filled with discussions of browridge implants, chin implants, mandible implants– it must needs be remarked that the skull of the Chad exhibiteth a jawbone most robust. It's literally facial masculinization surgery.
So everyone's obsessed with the bones, everyone's obsessed with beauty, whether man or woman, cis or trans, gay or gamer. Maybe lesbians are just straight chillin' while everyone else has completely lost their minds. But why, why do we care so much?
Well with incels, by their account the only reason they care is they think that looksmaxing will make femoids have sex with them. And they think that will make their lives feel meaningful, which um… it will not. So incels are canceled. Now what about women, what's our deal? What's our sitch? What's our vibe? What's our vish?
Well men seem to think that women are like inverted incels, that we care about beauty and wear makeup– “fakeup”– because we're trying to attract men. My daddy-dom went on Vice News last year and said that women wear makeup because they're trying to stimulate male sexual arousal, and because evolution. Now at the risk of being bratty, I gotta say this is maybe 10% true and 90% false.
For one thing straight men don't like makeup, at least they don't think they do. Here's a chart I made illustrating what every straight man in the world thinks about makeup. Yes, I asked all of them. If you wear no makeup, they think you look diseased– and I actually do look diseased when I don't wear makeup, so fair enough. If you wear natural makeup, you know a little concealer, mascara, maybe a nude lip, they think you're not wearing any makeup and they like it. If you wear campy makeup, colorful eyeshadow, heavy contouring, overdrawn lips, they think it's dumb and they hate it. Of course I'm generalizing, #NotAllDaddyDoms.
But if women really wore makeup to attract men, then you'd expect that they'd stop wearing it when there are no men around. But that doesn't happen. About a month ago there was that video going around of a woman showing how to make jailhouse makeup, mixing deodorant and magazine ink to make eyeshadow, using Kool-Aid and Vaseline to make lipstick. There's not a lot of men in women's prison, but women are still performing incredible feats of ingenuity and resourcefulness just to wear makeup.
So, maybe women are using makeup to express their individuality and femininity. You know, things that prison tries to take away from you, kinda makes sense. There's a Refinery29 documentary about prison cosmetology, and also sexual exploitation– yikes, in which a former inmate describes how women would engage in sexual bartering with male guards just to get makeup:
“If a girl's performing sexual favors for an officer, he would bring her in colored pencils, lip gloss, things like that.”
That's right, women are sucking dick so they can put on makeup, not the other way around. Honestly if all the men died tomorrow– F, I'd definitely keep wearing makeup. In fact, I might wear more. And I'm not just saying that 'cause I'm trying to win feminist points or anything. Like do I want to attract men? Yes, of course I do. 🤨🤔
Do I want to attract women? I guess, I don't really think about it. Isn't it safer to just secretly fall in love with them while quietly dying inside? Whatever, it's fine. I want to attract nonbinary people too of course, but right now you guys are kind of getting in the way of my crudely stereotyping people based on gender, so how dare you.The point is when I think about my appearance, wanting to attract people to have sex with is not the main thing going through my head. What is going through my head?
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I guess I just want to feel beautiful, I want to see myself in the mirror and think I look snatched, is that a crime? I don't feel pretty very often. I'd say it happens about once a month, when I'm having a good skin day, I do my makeup just right, I glisten with setting spray, and then it happens. A tingle goes up my spine. I am Botticelli, I am Van Gogh. I have created beauty! I'm a girl! 🥰
And then it's over, that's it for a month. Usually when I look in the mirror, I can't actually tell whether I'm pretty or not. Like with other people, I can just look at them and instantly make a judgment about it, but with myself I have to just guess. It's the same as being a trans person trying to figure out whether you pass. Would you clock me? I'd clock me. I'd fuck me too, I don't give a shit. Get out of my room mom!
It doesn't work like that for me, I have to rely on other people's feedback. Of course the problem with other people's feedback is that people are liars. “You look great hon!” 🙃 Especially when those people are your fans. “Boots the house queen, step on my throat mother, I'll die for you!” Oh my god. Or when they're your haters. “Your disgusting giant collarbone outs you as a man at a thousand paces”. I guess I'll never know whether I'm pretty or not. But I can estimate, like I have figured out that I'm too pretty for Twitter. But I'm not sure yet if I'm pretty enough for Instagram. It's hard being a six.
I have been dipping my toes in the Instagram water. Before my surgery, I got into a pretty good rhythm of posting my shitty little makeup looks. And what I find addictive about it is this constant flow of positive comments from other people, even though I know it's mostly flattery. “You invented beauty, perfect angel, choke me mommy”. Every time I get a comment like that I'm perfectly aware that it's wild exaggeration fueled by parasocial delusions, but I still get a hit of dopamine in my biologically female brain.
And the intoxicating thing about Instagram is that the embellishment of the truth is a two-way street, thanks to the miracle of Facetune. Yes, we finally get to talk about the phones. See it's a black mirror because it's a window into the darkness of the human soul. Get it, should I explain it again? Phones live in a society. 📱
Facetune is an app that lets you fix all the problems with your face. So here's an unedited pre-FFS picture of me. What I would do in Facetune is smooth out the complexion, shrink the nose a little, bring the jaw in, and use the vibrance tool to make the eyeshadow pop. It's really no more drastic than the kinds of photo doctoring people have been doing since the invention of photography.
What's changed is that now everyone is doing it to their own photos every day. And I've noticed that when I'm in the habit of editing my flaws out of pictures, when I look at an unedited picture of myself or when I look in the mirror, my eyes go straight to the flaws. Why are my pores so big? Why aren't medical scientists doing something to stop this? Is this really a good use of my mental energy? Here comes that guilt again. Instead of worrying about my pores, shouldn't I be helping stop the impending climate catastrophe that's gonna destroy the planet if we don't change the economy in like 12 years? Shit, I guess it's 11 years now. It's just hard to focus on climate change when there's so much else on my mind.
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I guess I'd just rather think about the aesthetic than the apocalypse, and that's the darkness. Why is my neck like two decades older than the rest of my skin? Do I need Botox yet? Should I get a facelift? These are the questions that will no doubt define the next couple decades of my life. As if it wasn't bad enough to have to go through a second adolescence on camera, I also have to deal with aging. And thus the ritual of skincare products. Here's my daytime routine.
So first I'm gonna mix the Dermalogica exfoliator with the cleansing gel and just massage my face. None of this is sponsored by the way, this is just me supporting corporations out of the kindness of my heart. Now if I'm not running late for something I will do a face mask, but if I'm out of bed it's because I'm running late for something so… I've never done a face mask.
Now I'm going to use a toner, which is very important. Now a lot of people don't know what a toner does, but um…… Look it tones okay, do you want your face to be un-toned?! Next, I'm gonna spray expensive Korean yeast directly into my eyes. I use this cause it's actually a lot cheaper than the Japanese yeast. So you're really losing money if you don't buy it, think of the savings.
Now I'm going to mix a pump of hyaluronic acid with a couple spritzes of organic Bulgarian rosewater. You can almost smell the Bulgarian rose fields. It's enchanting, it's like I'm there. There's not enough serum in the world for this neck leather. I use this moisturizer because Gigi Gorgeous told me to, and I do everything Gigi says.【Ｅｖｅｒｙ ｆｕｃｋｉｎｇ ｔｈｉｎｇ．】
I know it seems like a lot of products, but once you get locked into a serious skincare collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can. And I feel like I'm forgetting something. Oh sunscreen. I'm not really sure what this does, we can probably skip it. And I'm just gonna finish it all off with some more expensive mist. Yes god, I love a good facial. I'm so fucking wet right now.
So after all these products, does my skin look clearer, younger, more toned? Well, it's hard to say for sure, but it certainly is moist. This is the part where I usually just stare at my own face for 10 minutes and contemplate the futility of my struggle against the ravages of time.
I'm fine. It's fine. This is fine. It's fine. 😔
Lady Foppington: Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas. For dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return. Leastwise I shall bequeath a female skull.
So… isn't beauty supposed to be fun? I'm not having fun right now, why am I not having fun? I guess I just don't feel beautiful. And I know a lot of people think I'm pretty, and I know a lot of other people have it worse than me, and I know I should be grateful, and I know I'm privileged to be able to get plastic surgery, and I know I shouldn't care so much about this in the first place.
But the truth is that this just eats away at me, and I'm losing a lot of time and life to this pain. I've been kind of depressed this past month, and I think part of it is that on a subconscious level I think I was hoping that surgery would completely change my self-image and make me like myself. But it really hasn't. I mean I'm happy with the results, I'd do it all again. But I still feel the way I felt before.
You have to keep in mind that surgery fixes very specific problems, like the Adam's apple problem, or the way my forehead looks in profile problem. But it's really not a solution to deep psychological issues. I still don't feel beautiful, and I need to face the fact that I'm never going to feel beautiful unless I change the way I think. Because I'm trapped in a doom spiral over here. And if I'm ever gonna get out, I think I need to start by forgiving myself for wanting to be beautiful.
There's lots of reasons to want to be beautiful besides being shallow and vain. For one, beauty is associated with youth. It's a symbol of life, of defiance of death. That's a profound thing to be concerned about. See I'm not a bimbo, I'm a poet. Beauty is also associated with moral worth. The beautiful princess versus the evil hag. There's studies showing that conventionally attractive people are more likely to be assumed to be happy, healthy, and trustworthy; they're more likely to be hired.
So it's not just about Instagram likes, this is serious stuff. And we “the woke”, we're all aware of this. We know that beauty is power, that beauty is political. We know that beauty standards come from the people with privilege in an unequal society. We know it's unjust that being light skinned, cis, able-bodied, or thin is considered more attractive than being dark skinned, trans, disabled, or fat. We know that female beauty matters so much because patriarchy. We know that our obsession with beauty is being provoked by advertising, the cosmetic industry, and beauty influencers who are trying to sell us products. We know, we know, we know all this because we've all been sitting around critiquing it for decades.
Because that's what leftists do, we critique things. We are finely tuned detectors of racism, sexism, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia, and capitalism run amak. We notice an injustice, we problematize it, we critique it, and then we cancel it. But what's next, when we're done critiquing things, what are we supposed to do? Because I'm aware that conventional beauty standards are a racist, sexist, ableist, fatphobic, transphobic social construct designed to preserve power relations and sell products. But does that awareness mean I desire any less to be conventionally beautiful? Well… no, I want it more than ever.
The problem is that the intellectual exercise of critiquing things doesn't usually affect my desires very much. So what am I supposed to do, sit here in silent contemplation until my desires finally align themselves with the interests of the international proletarian revolution? Oh fuck the revolution, I want to be a pretty rich girl. I don't wanna be ContraPoints anymore, I wanna be Gigi Gorgeous.
Fighting fascists on YouTube was an idea I came up with when I was a male alcoholic. Unfortunately, America needs a ContraPoints right now more than it needs a 30 year old Gigi Gorgeous impersonator, so I guess I'm stuck with it. Maybe it's for the best. Critiquing society may not change our desires, but it can motivate us to change society. And changing society can change our desires.
So how do we change society? Revolution. Well sure, revolution. Depending on what happens in 2020, I'll think of grabbing a brick myself. But failing that, I think there are ways we can work to loosen the grip of restrictive beauty standards without the futility of trying to stop caring how we look.
I do think representation matters, and I think having visible beauty icons who are dark-skinned, or trans, or gender non-conforming, or disabled, or fat, or over 35, or influencers makes a big difference. Beauty standards are social constructs, and social constructs can change. That's why it's so important to recognize that influencers are 👏 just as 👏 valid 👏 as other 👏 celebrities.
But the problem with changing society is that it takes a long time, and this video is almost over. Where I can see an escape from my particular doom spiral is in style as an alternative ideal to beauty. You can be stylish at any age, you can be stylish whether you pass or not. Style is a way of cultivating a personal aesthetic that you have complete control over. It's like art in that originality is a virtue. Style is an individual aesthetic, unlike the collective aesthetic of beauty standards.
As the poet Wordsworth said about artistic appreciation:
"Every author, as far as he is great and at the same time original, has had the task of creating the taste by which he is to be enjoyed."
So even if you don't conform to conventional beauty standards, through the power of original style you can create the taste by which your unique beauty is to be appreciated. Society may frown upon us six foot trannies, but if I know I'm dressed well or my makeup is snatched I can easily abide any comment, any stare. I can be misgendered at Dairy Queen for all I care, it does not matter. I can strut with confidence because I am basking in the regal knowledge of my own aesthetic superiority. "Bow before me peasants,” I proclaim to the drive thru window, "for I am serving a lerk."
"Sir, this is a Dairy Queen."
So I guess that's the solution. I can't believe I single-handedly ended capitalism. Now does that mean I'm not gonna get a lot of expensive plastic surgery? Fuck no! What do you people think I am, some kind of transgender Mother Theresa? Goddamn. The audacity of you people, the hubris. Look, I need plastic surgery because I have no style. In fact after the month I've had, you should be grateful I'm wearing clothes at all. So that's it for me, I guess I have nothing but the decay of time and age to look forward to. I guess I'll just have to find my self-worth in cultivating kindness, intelligence, and inner beauty. Eww. Gross.