The rort of self-care

How did a term that used to be about wellbeing turn into an expensive guilt trip? By Maddy Phillipps.

Browsing internet content with the label ‘‘self-care’’ is a perplexing experience. Listicles featuring ‘‘38 best self-care products under $200’’ promote $90 hand cream, detox teas, lip salves, and ‘‘jade facial rollers’’. Female-focused beauty products advertise themselves as being essential to a self-care routine (selfcare.co.nz takes you to a wholesaler of top-end skincare products). Instagrammers use the hashtag #SelfCare to capture a startling range of activities, from candlelit bubble baths with fragrant oils, to eating Domino’s while bingeing on Netflix.

Even Air New Zealand is tapping into the self-care concept. A grabaseat Facebook promotional post for February 2019 deals featured the word FEB-YOU-RUARY above an image of a woman in a bath with hair curlers. The caption read: ‘‘Feb-you-ary – the only month that’s all about you so book in some much-needed ‘me time’ with flights from just $19 seat one way.’’

You could be forgiven for wondering what, exactly, self-care is, given that apparently it can mean anything from slathering on some hand cream to enduring a one-hour domestic flight to New Plymouth featuring minimal leg room and a sachet of cassava chips.

It wasn’t always this way. The original meaning of ‘‘self-care’’ is prioritising your mental and physical health, especially in the kind of challenging circumstances that make it hard to do so. For someone with major depression, self-care might be taking a shower, getting changed, going for a walk,

bailing on a family function that is only going to make them feel worse. For someone with chronic illness, self-care might be taking medication, going to medical appointments, going to physiotherapy even though it’s painful. For someone with crippling debt, self-care would be going to see a financial advisor or making a budget.

This type of self-care isn’t about indulgence or treating yourself, and it’s certainly not selfish. It’s about recognising that the only person who can ultimately look after you is you, so wherever possible you need to prioritise doing things that will make you feel and function better – to the eventual benefit of everyone in your orbit.

Glenda Stone, an Otago-based neuropsychotherapist, describes self care as being ‘‘about the basics – getting adequate sleep, eating a good healthy diet, having ideally some balance, social connection, including sufficient exercise because it burns off the stress brain hormone cortisol’’.

On a deeper level, ‘‘the true sense of selfcare is people finding out what nurtures them. It can be going out in nature, volunteering... there are multiple possibilities of what nurtures and nourishes us. And I’m not saying everyone should rush off and get therapy, but self-care and selfsoothing are often about exploring our deepseated beliefs and challenging those.’’

So, all very laudable, but that kind of personal development is both hard work for the person doing it and not something that can be packaged and marketed and sold for profit. It’s certainly not very sexy.

Enter a whole new version of self-care, which reared its ugly head in around 2016, a year which was marred by a global sense of unease around the election of Trump, terrorism, and Brexit. Social media posts urging the importance of self-care amid the turbulence started to proliferate, and the term entered our collective consciousness. Very shortly afterward clever marketers of mostly female-focused products realised selfcare could be commodified to the tune of billions of dollars. The trick was threefold:

Firstly, it tapped into our perennial desire to treat ourselves, indulge, overspend, escape from the world around us, relax – then reframing this behaviour, and its associated products (spa treatments, clothes, herbal teas, beauty products, essential oils) as ‘‘essential self-care’’.

Secondly, it took a coterie of products that are something to be endured rather than indulged in (diets, waxing, laser hair removal) and called those ‘‘self-care’’ as well.

Finally, and most insidiously, it made us feel like not buying their ‘‘essential self-care’’ products and services is an abject failure to care for ourselves properly.

The constant subtext to the self-care advertising strategy is: ‘‘If you truly care about yourself, you will buy our product. And if you can’t afford it or don’t want to buy it, well, you’re not caring for yourself, are you?’’

What’s interesting about this is that it represents an evolution in marketing tactics. Once upon a time, as recently as the early 2000s, advertisers could tell us straight to our faces that we were fat and ugly and our hair was too frizzy and we had better buy this diet shake or that cellulite cream or no man would ever want us and we would die alone. We understood this completely. We bought the products and were devastated when they either didn’t work or they did work and STILL we didn’t have a husband. But this kind of direct abuse is no longer tolerated by the modern consumer. The modern consumer spends money to feel better about themselves, yes, but in a more roundabout way. When products are promoted as part an essential part of a self-care routine the pressure to buy the product feels internal, not external. Somehow it is now possible to genuinely, truly love and care for yourself so much that you’re compelled to pay a coolfingered beautician hundreds of dollars to shoot intense pulsed light at your bikini line.

Sarah Dryden*, 31, spends a lot of time on Instagram. She frequently feels depressed that she doesn’t look like 90 per cent of Instagram models, and her self-care regimen is based on theirs. It consists of waxing, tanning, hair colour, Shellac manicures, facial dermaplaning (having her face shaved with a very small blade to remove excess dead skin and fine facial hair), and eyebrow microblading (tattooing on eyebrows so they look sculpted and full). Botox and fillers will be on the agenda soon. She has a relatively low-paying job and spends around $600 per month on ‘‘maintaining’’ herself. Despite this, she says she has always prided herself on ‘‘not taking the beauty bait and spending my hard earned money on unnecessary treatments’’. The treatments she does have aren’t fripperies, they are necessary to ‘‘look after myself properly… The worst part is that most beauty treatments are so temporary that when they start to run out you feel feral. Chipped nails, streaky tans, shadowy bikini line… the in-between appointment time is so bad for my self worth.’’ Her definition of selfcare is ‘‘anything that makes you feel better or good’’. Are her beauty treatments self-care? ‘‘Yes, definitely, because they make me feel like a million bucks, for a while anyway.’’

Stone warns: ‘‘The commodification of self-care – Botox and all that stuff – it’s very temporary, and comes with potential risks and dangers. People do engage in some of these practices which are all over the place – get this done and that done – it becomes problematic because it can become very expensive, obsessive, and even quite addictive for some personalities. There’s this sense that if I get this done I’ll feel better – but ultimately I don’t think that really shifts the core of how people feel about themselves.’’

The end point of the self-care narrative that’s been pushed by marketers for a few years now is what we see on Instagram. Younger consumers have picked up on the message that if you slap a self-care label on virtually any purchase or activity that behaviour becomes objectively good. (Whether you can afford it/it is actually good for you is irrelevant, because the moment something is ‘‘self-care’’ it’s automatically justified!) This has triggered the endless flood of Instagram posts labelling the poster’s chosen activity as #SelfCare and waiting for comments and likes to roll in, validating their decision to watch Netflix instead of looking for a job, or get a Shellac manicure even as their credit card debt is winging its way from the bank to Baycorp. The prevailing definition of ‘‘self-care’’ on Instagram seems to be along the lines of ‘‘Treat yo’self!’’

Stone’s view is that humans ‘‘are very capable of justifying behaviour that is not necessarily good for us, and this is another example of that. Self-care is about minimising the vulnerabilities by maintaining good healthy habits. So for example, bingeing on Netflix for days on end and not seeing the sunlight is probably not going to ultimately help with the calming of mind and body. Things like occasionally (if you can afford it) getting a massage, getting a takeaway – that’s all fine, but it is about balance and it is about looking after the essentials, because if they aren’t looked after that will increase vulnerability.’’

In 2019, we have reached a point where the popular conception of self-care has departed completely from its original, psychotherapeutic definition. Self-care should be about self-love and self-improvement. It should be a necessity, not a costly luxury. It should not be about promoting the very behaviours that feed off and foment insecurities. The new, commodified version of self-care is ultimately nothing more than the latest in a long line of rorts designed to separate consumers (mostly women) from their money. The sooner the zeitgeist throws it in the bin, the better.

*Name has been changed

The constant subtext to the self-care advertising strategy is: ‘‘If you truly care about yourself, you will buy our product. And if you can’t afford it or don’t want to buy it, well, you’re not caring for yourself, are you?’’