Imagine checking your mailbox and finding a package from a major dollar beauty brand. Exciting right? Now, inside of the PR package is a headshot of your own face, meticulously marked up with dotted lined and arrows by a marketing team acting as faux surgeons. On top of that, suggesting that your “3 p.m.” look is here (meaning a jawline lift).
To me, this would be a dystopian horror movie at its finest, but it’s not. This is the PR package Tarte Cosmetics sent to influencers to launch their new “Snatch Stick contour tool”. This box featured a “glambulance” staffed by makeup artists in medical scrubs performing mock emergencies, wanting the image of “plastic surgery in a stick”.
While the brand calls this “approachable fun,” college is a pressure cooker for self-image for young women. Between Instagram and TikTok filters, young women are already conditioned to pick themselves apart. By overlaying a “pre-procedure on a woman’s face, the campaign tells us that our natural bone structure is waiting to be corrected.
It shifts the conversation from self-expression to self-fixation and teaches young women to look through the lens of a surgeon.
As college women, we need to take a stance and show society that we have power over what trends we will accept and Gen-Z has championed self-acceptance and body autonomy. This proves that campaigns such as the “Snatch Stick” keeps pulling us backwards into an era of clinical self-loathing.
It’s time to call this marketing for what it is: a toxic ploy for engagement. We don’t need a “prescription plan” and we don’t need brand drawing lines all over our face to tell us where we fall short. Stop apologizing for the face you’re living in and maybe think twice before giving your money to a product that thinks your insecurities are a joke.