L’Oreal has found a new market in the faces of people who’ve lost weight. The beauty giant is selling products aimed at the loose skin that can follow rapid weight loss, including among users of GLP-1 drugs. Having lived under the demand to become thinner, customers are offered another round of bodily correction.
Chief executive Nicolas Hieronimus told investors that GLP-1 use was “a very important phenomenon for us” and was “having an impact on beauty consumption and skin care consumption in particular”. The group, which owns Maybelline and La Roche-Posay among other brands, reported a 7.7 percent rise in sales in the three months to September, beating analysts’ expectations.
The growing use of drugs such as Ozempic, Wegovy and Mounjaro has opened up this opportunity. Loose skin can result from rapid weight loss itself, rather than a direct effect of GLP-1 drugs. Hieronimus said the group’s SkinCeuticals and Kiehl’s brands have products “that have been designed to work alongside and complement GLP-1 and its side-effects on skin sagging”.
A woman must lose fat, but her face must retain the fullness associated with youth. She must alter her body, then conceal the marks of its alteration. When is she allowed to finish?
Fatphobia is a problem in current society. Fat people are accused of laziness, greed and lack of self-control, as though a glance at someone’s body revealed their conduct and character. These are familiar accusations to the working class. The ruling class uses the same language to explain poverty and unemployment, relieving itself of responsibility by finding fault with the people who suffer. Fatphobia recruits ordinary people into this policing of one another’s supposed failures.
For women, this contempt operates within a patriarchal order that treats pleasing others as part of their duties. Their competence can be judged through their appearance; their refusal to devote time and money to it can be treated as neglect. Where an employer requires a particular presentation, the worker pays for the products and does the preparation in her own time. Capital gets the appearance it wants without paying for all the labour required to produce it.
Telling women simply to ignore these pressures is cheap advice. The people judging them may control a job, an income, or the conditions of a relationship. A woman can understand the cruelty of a standard and still have good reasons to comply. Her purchase proves that she has bought something. It doesn’t prove that she freely chose the conditions which made buying it seem necessary.
People also use these medicines for medical reasons, including diabetes treatment. Sneering at them only adds another punishment to those they already face. A useful medicine can create bodily changes which another business turns into a fresh occasion for anxiety and sales.
The group is also buying a larger financial interest in aesthetic treatments. Last December it increased its stake in dermatology firm Galderma to 20 percent. Galderma owns Sculptra, an injectable aimed at stimulating collagen production, and Restylane, an injectable dermal filler. L’Oreal now has an interest in another part of the business to which dissatisfied customers can turn.
According to Reuters, both companies have been testing products in separate clinical trials involving GLP-1 users concerned about loose skin. Galderma also published a report last year on GLP-1 use and changes in facial appearance. Its own survey found that the vast majority of the medication users surveyed had noticed changes to their faces.
A finding that faces have changed doesn’t establish that they need correcting. The commercial task of beauty companies is to turn that change into demand for a product. The company selling aesthetic treatments has an obvious interest in cultivating close attention to every alteration, every fold, every departure from the approved appearance. The customer is encouraged to inspect herself with the diligence of someone searching for a fault.
Marx observed that production helps form the needs it then satisfies. The beauty industry gives us a particularly ugly example. It sells the means of correction while helping establish what counts as a defect. Its owners can prosper from a growing dissatisfaction with the very bodies they’ve spent years promising to improve.
Behind the apparent variety of brands stands concentrated ownership. Maybelline, La Roche-Posay, SkinCeuticals and Kiehl’s belong to the same group; the Galderma stake extends its financial reach further. Customers encounter separate brands and treatments, while capital accumulates interests across them. The world market carries this business beyond any single country. Within an imperialist economy, the ability to promote an ideal internationally belongs disproportionately to those who already command capital, advertising and distribution.
Meeting that ideal is then presented as an individual achievement. Money buys treatments, time and relief from exhausting work; the resulting appearance can be praised as discipline. The working woman is expected to reproduce it from her wages, after her shift and around whatever unpaid care she performs. When she can’t, the judgement falls on her.
Social ownership would allow research and production to serve needs decided collectively, with room for pleasure, adornment and treatment. That would also require a struggle against the contempt which makes fat people objects of correction before they’ve even asked for help. There can be no communist emancipation which makes a worker’s standing depend on their weight.
L’Oreal’s shareholders have a different measure of success. The company’s sales are rising, its interests in aesthetic treatments are expanding, and rapid weight loss is bringing prospective customers to another counter. Hieronimus told investors exactly what this development meant to his company: “a very important phenomenon for us”.
