010. Beauty's Youth Obsession Has a Paper Trail

The beauty industry's obsession with youth didn't come from nowhere. In this episode, Susannah connects the dots between the Epstein files, the men who shaped beauty and fashion for decades, and the standards that got built on the backs of those values — and asks what the industry does now that it knows.

In this episode:

• Why Ronald Lauder's name appearing nearly 500 times in the Epstein files is a beauty industry conversation, not just a political one
• How the men who owned Victoria's Secret, Limited Too, Bath & Body Works, and major beauty brands shaped an entire generation's idea of what beauty looks like
• Why a $60 billion industry still puts an 18-year-old's face on a product designed for a 45-year-old — and what that's actually communicating
• The modeling agency that told a 19-year-old Susannah she was five years too late — and what that moment reveals about how early the clock starts ticking for women
• Why beauty standards aren't just euro-centric — they're youth-centric by design, and why that design had architects
• What it actually takes to course correct: why changing the images isn't enough without changing the conversation around them
• Why women losing value with age is not an accident — and what it has to do with economic power, wisdom, and who gets to stay in the room
• Why Susannah believes the beauty industry, as a half-trillion dollar force, is one of the most powerful places to start rebuilding

01:25 Why There's No Polished Lead-In Today

02:00 Ronald Lauder, the Epstein Files, and Beauty 

03:36 Beauty's Obsession With Youth Isn't New 

04:49 Now We Know Why — Here's What We Do About It 

06:00 Market to the Generation You're Actually Selling To 

07:41 When a Modeling Agency Told Me I Was Five Years Too Late 

09:22 What That Moment Actually Said About Beauty 

11:04 Why Changing the Image Isn't Enough 

11:56 Why Women Losing Value With Age Was Never an Accident 

13:33 Women Have to Get in the Room 

15:09 What Can Happen in Two to Three Years 

16:00 Together We Can Change This

Off the Shelf is a podcast about the people, brands, and behind-the-scenes forces shaping the beauty industry — money, relationships, risk, and what it really takes to scale.

CONNECT WITH SUSANNAH

Instagram: @brightbeautyconnect

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/susannah-dellinger

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

As much as I want to sit here and say, oh my gosh, okay, now we can put women with gray hair, we can show fine lines, and we can show we can show this. Consumers have to come to the table. Consumers have to rewire their brains and say, yeah, I think that looks great. I want to buy this product. Even with this type of person promoting it. And I think it has a lot of work that we have to do head on. I don't think we can just change the image. I think we have to come out and say, we are changing the images surrounding beauty because we think you are gorgeous. This is off the shelf, where we take the most iconic beauty brands, products, and people in the beauty industry off the shelf and examine the stories behind the story. It's where beauty is treated like the economic, cultural, and power-building force it really is. I'm Susanna Dillinger, and here we're going to talk about what really shapes the industry, who holds the power, how decisions get made, and what it actually takes to build, scale, and quite frankly, survive in beauty. These are the conversations happening behind closed doors about money, relationships, risk, and cult moments. If you're building, breaking through, or trying to understand how beauty really works, or just love a really good story, you're in the right place. Welcome back to Off the Shelf. I'm your host, Susanna Dallinger. I would typically have a nice polished, buttoned-up lead-in for today's episode. I've come to the conclusion that there's no great way to lead into the topic at hand today, except to say that we are going to dive in and talk about a big problem in beauty that has become even more front and center in the past week or so, which is the obsession with youth and where it stems from. A couple episodes ago, I had a little bit of a cheeky response to finding out about Ronald Lauder's involvement in a political acquisition of Greenland. Kind of like, why are beauty bros, you know, in politics? What is this about? Kind of made a joke about free gifts with purchases if we buy Greenland. And today is not going to be as cheeky or fun because in the past week we have learned that the same Ronald Lauder's name is mentioned just under 500 times in the files. Y'all know what files I'm talking about. And it has come to light that there's definitely connections, involvement, etc., with Jeffrey Epstein from one of, you know, at the time he was the chairman of the board for one of the largest beauty companies in the world. And there's many discussions now coming to light about how our youth as millennials was accidentally or purposely shaped by men involved with these files, whether it's the owner of Limited, Limited 2, Victoria's Secret, Bath and Body Works, Makeup Companies, et cetera, that everything that we touched in beauty and fashion growing up, for some of us, I'm 46 years old, was shaped by these men that are deeply interested in youth as it comes and pertains to females. And that is a lot to sit with and a lot to unpack with. But if we go even further back in history, it's not new. Beauty and fashion have long had an obsession with youth. Now we chalk it up more to the fact that we're marketing to Gen Alpha and Gen Z because of the buying power. So of course, everything looks young because we're targeting that dollar. That's very recent. You know, when I was growing up, we were still very much targeting my parents' dollar, the boomers is who we're going after. And we were still centering as industries, we were still centering youth. We are still centering this idea that beauty, that beautiful young girls are what is going to move product, even products meant for women, well into their 40s, 50s, 60s, etc. I mean, think about a L'Oreal, you know, anti-aging product, the person's face being used for it. It's probably 16 or 17 years old. And yet the person buying it is in their 40s. Because again, youth and the appearance of youth is what is being valued. And now we know why. We know why. Because the men in power, this is what they liked. This is what they thought of as being attractive, and this is this is what they platformed. And for me, rather than talk about everything that is wrong in beauty and how deeply disturbing this is, because my goodness, I could I could just talk about that for the next 20 episodes and more, is what can we do about it? Now that we have this information, how do we move forward, especially in the beauty industry, and re-center beauty standards, knowing that they really went off track and why they went off track? And instead of saying, no, it doesn't happen, or you know, we're overthinking things, no, oh no, we most certainly know that it happened. We have the evidence, we have the proof, we're staring it in the face, and now we get to do something about it. Because, as the most amazing woman, Michelle Obama said, is rage with purpose, right? Rage with purpose. So take the rage, take the anger, you know, if you're angry, I think many of us are, of finding this out. And now it's the purpose behind it is okay, we know it now. How can we move forward with it? And there's some small steps that we can think about, right? Which is let's market the product using women and men that are in the same generation that the product is intended for, right? If we're marketing a product to decrease fine lines around the eyes, maybe we don't need a 14-year-old on the packaging or in the ad about it because that is subliminally showing us we don't look like that. There is clearly something wrong with us. So now we must buy the product. That is what that is saying. And we now know that that's what we are saying when we choose somebody that is so much significantly younger than the intended audience. And I'm setting aside Gen Z and Gen Alpha brands. Of course, they are going to use models and faces that reflect their core consumer. It's beautiful, that's wonderful. I am not pointing out those brands. It's a completely different topic. I am talking about we're launching a new mascara. Our core audience that we know is between the ages of 30 to 45, and yet this eyeball belongs to an 18-year-old. Why are we doing that? Also, sidebar mascara ads use fake lashes. And if you ever read the ads that are in the magazines with the mascara, it always says in teeny tiny print that the lashes have been modified. Like, we have a big problem in beauty, right? Like, we're not authentic and honest in beauty advertising as well as we're using the wrong images in beauty. And all of this has made me think about my own experiences even before beauty, when I was a model. And I've talked about before, I went to school for theater, I left. I was like, I'm gonna be a soap actress star. Accidentally became a model because I happened to be the size, the height of a giraffe, right? I'm 5'11 and a half. And I moved to Chicago. I get signed with an agency at the time, Elite. And I was 19 and I walked in. I'll never forget, there was a big meeting because man, was I old. I was told to my face, you're about five years too late. You're about five years too late. So 19 minus five. Not that great at math on the fly, but it's 14, right? Like, what do you mean I should be 14 years old to become a model? Like, that's that's a child. A 14-year-old is a child. And then they looked at me and they had me turn to my left, turn to my right, smile, not smile. And there was a group of four or five of them, and they were discussing, debating how old they could list on what's called a comp card. At the time, models had these physically printed composite cards of your pictures and your stats they sent out to clients to try to get you booked, and it would include age. And they wanted to decide what age they could put on my comp card. And they're like, unfortunately, we don't think we can go younger than 17. And this was decided as I was like turning to my profile if they could put 16 or not. And they're like very disappointed. They're like, I think we can only go 17. I was a 19-year-old receiving a message that beauty as a whole was associated with youth, and that immediately at the age of 19, I had a clock that had started ticking that I did not know about, and my value was intrinsically tied to my appearance of adolescence, not as a mature woman. Of course, I could not process any of that. At the age of 19, I now process that as a 46-year-old woman looking back on it, and I'm devastated. I am devastated for the thousands and thousands of young girls and boys that have come forward and shared similar stories about their youth being feticized, about having to lie about their age. And as I now sit in the beauty industry, I deeply wonder how long it will take us to course correct it because it has been ingrained so much in our brains of what a beauty standard is. A beauty standard is a face that doesn't wrinkle. A beauty standard is a face that is still up here, not down here. A beauty standard is clear skin. It's not having any signs of aging, which include dark spots, discoloration, it's wide eyes, it's pouty lips, it's these beauty standards are so ingrained, not just from European standards, but from children, from adolescents, right? Like that's what has been valued. And we've built an industry on the backs of these images. And as much as I want to sit here and say, oh my gosh, okay, now we can put women with gray hair, we can show fine lines, and we can show, we can show this. Consumers have to come to the table. Consumers have to rewire their brains and say, Yeah, I think that looks great. I want to buy this product, even with this type of person promoting it. And I think it has a lot of work that we have to do head on. I don't think we can just change the image. I think we have to come out and say, we are changing the images surrounding beauty because we think you are gorgeous no matter what your age. We think you can be hot and have fine lines. Heck, you can be sexy and have deep lines. Like, let's look at the Sophia Lorenz and all these beautiful, gorgeous women who have aged and are still gloriously beautiful by any standard and plot for that and say, you do not lose relevance, you do not lose any value as you start to age, because the only gender that loses value with age is women. You guys are like, oh, she's gone off a deep end here. But I want to ask why it is not an unintended consequence that we lose value or that it has been framed that women lose value with age. And I want to say very clearly we have to speak out against this because the intent is to have women step aside when they reach a age of wisdom, when they reach an age of financial power, economic power, and the ability to really make change typically comes later in life. And that terrifies a certain sector of patriarchy that it will not hold if intelligent, resourced women can question it and be listened to and held in the same esteem and value as their male counterparts. It will not hold. It cannot hold. Not anymore. Not after what we all now know and what we all now see, which is women one million percent need to take seats at these tables and make sure that we are riding ships that are hurting children. Women fundamentally protect children, women biologically protect children. Okay. We must step into rooms, step into places where we can protect each other, protect children, and move our ecosystem forward with integrity, with love, and with care. And that can't happen if we are dismissed because of our appearance. We are depowered with our age and our wisdom because of a system that we never agreed to. None of us remember showing up that day and saying, This sounds great. Right. We're all born into it because this has been going on since Roman times, right? Like this has been going on since Caesar, right? Like this is not something that is just like, oh no, the 2020s, this is what happened. No, this has been going on for thousands and thousands of years. And it's going to take deep, deep work to course correct. And y'all are like, why are you talking about the beauty industry around this? It's because beauty unintentionally became weaponized and used as a tool to continue that messaging that there is something deeply wrong with us that must be corrected that comes with age. And now that we know that we have the opportunity in beauty to correct it. Most of us in beauty want to correct it deeply. And I think it's coming together and talking about how to do that. It's not going to be perfect. It's not going to be overnight. It's not going to be within a year. I think though we underestimate what can happen in the course of two to three years. I think we underestimate the appetite that consumer society and we all have as a whole to address this head on, to not sweep it away, but as an industry to say, hey, we do about a half a trillion dollars in revenue. We're pretty much an economic political geo force. If we address this, people are gonna listen. And that's a good place to start. And it's a heck of a reason why I'm so excited to be in conversation in just two weeks from the day of this recording in Gloria Steinem's living room about how beauty can be a tool for feminism and not weaponized against it. And it is a simple act, it's one conversation. Yet if all of us try to have these conversations and come to the table in community, amazing, powerful things can happen to where the generation below us is going to grow up in a very different landscape. Not that is perfect, not that is nirvana, but where it is talk about, it is addressed, and it is actively being used in a positive, beautiful way to platform women of all ages, all ethnicities, all body types, all walks of life, because together as women we can literally change the world. And it's time we do it.