"It just brings light to your face"

Sometimes, when you think it can provoke no further, "Into The Gloss" takes things to a new level. This time, there's a defense of skin-bleaching, from Fanny Bourdette-Donon, a woman who works at Dior:

[...] I used to be so against whitening products. In Africa, all of these women were killing their skin trying to become whiter, and I hated that. But when I had to work on the press kits at Dior for Diorsnow D-NA Reverse White Reveal Night Concentrate, I had to test it to know what I was going to talk about. I became obsessed. Yes, it’s a whitening product but it’s not about being whiter or changing the color of your skin; it just brings light to your face. I’ve never experienced that before in my life. My face literally changed.

Similarly, when I flat-iron my hair, it isn't to straighten it, but to make it more straight.

I mean, the question of why women do the beautification things we do is interesting, and women's candor on the site is what makes "Into The Gloss" so compelling. (Well, that and the dreamworld photos.) There's this rule that says whatever it is you're doing, it can't possibly be to look less whichever-race-or-ethnicity, so those Korean eyelid surgeries? Nothing to do with white people, and aren't white people awfully narcissistic to imagine that it is. In any case, further complicating matters here is of course that the author is selling the product in question, not just using it.

Bourdette-Donon is also frank, if less evasive, about her hair:

When it comes to my hair, my relationship with it has always been bad, because I’m really low-maintenance and my hair is very complicated. My natural hair is really, really curly. I have a lot of volume and so much of it—I basically looked like Tina Turner. I couldn’t deal with it, so I started relaxing my hair at 15—everyone in Africa does it—and it changed my life.

While I find it hard to believe that everyone in the continent of Africa relaxes their hair, the overall point of what she's saying makes sense. It's her relationship with her hair that's "bad," not the hair itself. And the dilemma she points to - being low-maintenance but having hair that's anything but - is one I'd imagine many women can identify with. At least, I sure can. And people with wash-and-go hair will always be asking you (always, that is, at college or in some other close-living-quarters situation) why you make such a fuss, as if you had some perfectly viable wash-and-go option you were to vain to go with... as if a "natural" look that would be even halfway reasonable wouldn't be at least as much work as just straightening what you've got and forgetting about it.