In recent years, especially because of social media’s influence, there’s been a rise in skincare
trends as well as the popularity of certain skincare and makeup brands, which has led to a
lot of overconsumptions of certain products and brands, which has in turn created a culture
that is okay with product waste, as well as having more products that one should actually
own.
On TikTok, you can find thousands of videos of users showing their shower routine,
displaying hundreds of products on their shelf. I often see the phrase “TikTok made me buy
it!” indicating that someone has bought a product after seeing someone else use it on
TikTok, it often being a product of a different brand that someone already owns. Not only
this, but TikTok influencers, such as Mikayla Nogueira, re often subjected to receiving PR
packages, which then mount up into rooms full of unused skincare or body care products.
It Is because of overconsumption in skincare and body care routines that I learnt about the
“Hygiene Olympics”, derived from when Derek Thompson coined the term “Hygiene
Theatre” to people ignoring measures of preventing covid that were actually effective, such
as mask-wearing or social distancing. Because these measures were ignored, instead people
used performative measures, such as obsessively disinfecting surfaces and groceries; to
which he claimed that “people are power scrubbing their way to a false sense of security”.
It’s obviously a good thought to want to smell clean and overall be clean, but often the
obsession with smelling and being clean is what’s led to the “Hygiene Olympics”, as people
will purchase an abundance of products in order to achieve their goal, which then turns out
to be extremely wasteful as people want to prove how clean they are by showing of their
collections of body washes, body scrubs and even cleaning products.
The environmental impacts of overconsumption often create waste which is bad for the
environment; the mass production of a lot of skincare and body care leads to a lot of plastic
waste. The Environmental Investigations Agency had found that at least 633 marine species
were affected by the microplastics in the water. Having too many products in your skincare or body care routine can also have bad effects on one’s skin. Dr Harris-Tyron, an associate professor in the Department of Dermatology at UT Southwestern Medical Centre. says that the more products you use, the harder it can be for your skin to do its job, as well as creating more problems, such as dryness, breakouts,
blotches and dermatitis.
However, people have started to recognise the overconsumption within the skincare
community and have started trends in order to combat these practices. For example,
“Project Pan” is a trend where people focus on hitting the pan of your products or finishing
them before, purchasing a new one. This way, people aren’t influenced to buy multiples of
one type of product at once, not knowing if they’ll be able to finish all those products.
This sudden surge in overconsumption and wanting to have an extensive skincare and body
care collection has, ironically, also led to “underconsumption core” becoming a trend-
where people will often try to not purchase multiples of things that they already have. What
is interesting is that something branded as “underconsumption core” today would’ve been
regarded as just a regular amount of consumption, or what people should actually be
consuming, if this were a couple of years ago.
The rise in overconsumption has also led to “de-influencing”, which is when people are
discouraged through reviews. For example, a TikTok user called Paige
(@overcoming_overspending) has dedicated her account to reminding watchers that a lot
of them are not “influencers” in the sense that they may not have the same amount of
income as influencers, encouraging people to not shop on impulse and to save their money.
Her efforts may not reverse the acts of consumerism we’ve seen in recent years, however
her acts help to prevent consumerism from affecting more people as well as affecting the
environment.
Overall, there’s not really any ethical or practical reason that one person would need 10
body washes, 16 body lotions, and 24 different face serums. Overconsumption has warped
peoples’ perceptions of what they actually need for their routines, and we should be
reminding each other that what we have is enough, or that we can make it work with what
we have.