When the now-defunct apps launched in September 2015, featuring content I’d created over the previous five months, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that 600,000 people subscribed to Kylie Jenner’s app alone in the first two days. Insider estimated the apps would generate $32,000,000 from the $3 monthly subscriptions in a single year. I was shopping for groceries at the 99 Cents Only Store.Kim Kardashian—a billionaire, born to a millionaire, who rose to internet-breaking fame on the E! reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians—recently told Variety she had “the best advice” for women in business. “Get your fucking ass up and work,” she said. “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.”I wanted to get my fucking ass up, I wanted to be in that room, I wanted to climb the corporate ladder, whatever. I wanted to work. I just couldn’t afford to get there.
Lina, another former app editor who asked that her name be changed for fear of retaliation, said that Whalerock managers did not ask her to make herself available at all hours outright, but she also felt pressure to overperform. “If anything, it was [the sister] being a demanding boss, but I bought into it,” she said.“I would be on a date with my partner and I’d be on my phone, and this was every night,” she said. “He’d be like, ‘Can you please put your phone down?’ and I’d be like, ‘No, I can’t, this is [a] Kardashian!’ I wanted to make myself available at crazy hours and on the weekend because of who she was. I literally would be up at 2 a.m. answering [her] emails.”For members of the executive elite, wealth increases with the productivity of every undercompensated worker beneath them.
“There was no such thing as work-life balance,” said Theresa, who also requested that her name be changed due to fears of retaliation “It was like a 24/7 thing. There was just no such thing as a schedule.” Employees were also expected to absorb responsibilities outside of their scope, the women said, without the requisite salary. Both Ellen and Theresa said that KKW Beauty relied on the labor of two unpaid interns as well.“Here’s this millionaire—she wasn’t a billionaire yet—who flaunts her excessive wealth, but she only wants [a few] people on the team because she’s cheap,” Ellen observed. Unlike some startups, where early employees accept lower salaries but earn shares through sweat equity, Ellen says she didn’t get any equity for her contributions to the brand.Theresa said that it seemed like the Kardashian-Jenners viewed themselves as “the royal family of America” and thought that employees would “take any pay” to work with them. Ellen concurred: “There was a general expectation that people were so lucky to be working for them that they knew that they could treat people like crap,” said Ellen. “That was very obvious.”“There was a general expectation that people were so lucky to be working for them that they knew that they could treat people like crap.”
I continued to advocate for myself and was eventually granted a pay increase—$42,000 a year, from what I remember—but it was too little money for too many hours and too much stress, so I applied to a few job openings. Soon after, I was called into a manager’s office yet again. One of her former colleagues had received my resumé and alerted the company to my application.“My friend saw your name pop up and said, ‘I thought Jessica was your girl,’” she told me. “Well, I thought so, too. What’s going on?” I was shocked to the point of silence. I think I apologized for applying elsewhere. The company seemed to be surveilling all possible paths to a liveable income, from freelancing to finding a new job. I felt manipulated and monitored, paranoid and trapped. Lina described the Kardashian Jenner Official Apps as a “toxic work environment,” explaining, “I worked all the time. I did not sleep enough. I was drinking alcohol—way too much alcohol—to deal with the stress. I became physically unwell. My hair was falling out. I was dealing with digestive issues I had never had before. I wasn’t taking care of my body because I was prioritizing this job above literally everything in life.”“I became physically unwell. My hair was falling out. I was dealing with digestive issues I had never had before. I wasn’t taking care of my body because I was prioritizing this job above literally everything in life.”
The normalization of cosmetic surgery, illusory makeup, and altered photos raises the baseline standard of beauty for all—a form of aesthetic inflation, if you will. It makes it harder for women and girls to opt out of spending their time, money, and energy on aesthetic labor without facing financial and social consequences.This work, like all traditional women’s labor—housework and childcare, for example; work that a capitalist society both demands and demeans—is so integrated into the take up of womanhood that it’s hardly thought of as “work.” It’s further divorced from the concept of labor through popular content like the Kardashian-Jenners’, which recategorizes it as fun, self-care, health, or empowerment. And performing beauty can feel empowering, since acquiring beauty capital confers literal power. But in the same way “girlbossing” empowers the individual “girlboss” but perpetuates the patriarchal values of hustle culture for everyone underneath her—see: the working conditions at the Kardashian-Jenner apps and KKW Beauty—performing beauty to gain power within a culture that rewards women for their looks further perpetuates those patriarchal values. Studies show that, besides the possible physical harms of surgeries, injectables, and even topical products, the mental health consequences of beauty culture parallel those of capitalism, which can alienate workers from communities and beset them with financial and emotional instability. It contributes to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, as well as body dysmorphia and disordered eating. Still, we buy into the beauty myth—the idea that embodying an aesthetic ideal will bring success and happiness—for the same reason we buy into the myth of meritocracy: Hope for transformation obscures the reality of harm. Reality caught up to me after I was diagnosed with dermatitis, a stress-related skin condition that manifested as rough, red skin around my eyes and mouth, in 2015. My self-esteem plummeted. I didn’t think I deserved to be seen. I developed a skin-damaging obsession with skincare and slipped into a deep depression. I couldn’t help but compare myself to the edited images I was uploading to the apps. Knowing the Kardashian-Jenner ideal was physically impossible didn’t stop me from internalizing it. I eventually left the company because I couldn’t stomach being part of that cycle. Beauty didn’t feel like self-expression anymore; it felt like a sickness. It felt like a second job—another one I couldn’t afford to keep.Kim Kardashian told Variety that “nobody wants to work these days,” but seven years after stepping away from the apps, I see evidence of work all around me. I see the hours that every over-tanned, overfiltered, Kardashian-inspired influencer funnels into their appearance in the hopes of striking it rich on Instagram. I see the money my own best friends invest into their filler-enhanced lips in the hopes of finally feeling beautiful. In an aesthetic analog of the American dream, it’s those who are already in power that profit. The rest of us keep running on empty.Jessica DeFino is a freelance beauty reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Allure, and more. She writes the beauty-critical newsletter The Unpublishable.Beauty didn’t feel like self-expression anymore; it felt like a sickness. It felt like a second job—another one I couldn’t afford to keep.