When I first saw it, I thought it was a joke. April Fools? No. It can’t be, it’s July. A viral marketing stunt, perhaps? Surely no one is seriously trying to sell shape wear… for your face. And yet here it is, available to purchase on the Skims website: the ‘Ultimate Face Wrap’, designed to sculpt your jawline while you sleep. Because apparently even in rest, women are not allowed to let go.
Can we sit with that for a second? Not only are we expected to spend our waking hours toning, tweaking, lifting, plumping, slimming and smoothing ourselves, but now we’re being told that the work must continue while we sleep. The beauty ideal has quite literally become a 24/7 project and nothing - not even the resting body - is off limits.
At first glance, this might look like just another weird wellness trend - we’re seeing a lot of those right now: castor oil packs that wrap around your stomach, face taping, lip masks, mouth tape, injections of regenerative molecule NAD+ and a thousand other products and devices that promise to ‘detox’, ‘sculpt’ or ‘revive’ us. But this one feels insidious, like there’s something darker at play here. The product is weird (and I’d argue highly unnecessary) but it’s also a reflection of a culture that is increasingly hostile to women’s natural bodies and faces. It feels like a form of control - and I don’t think it’s happening in a vacuum. IT coincides with the rise of conservatism, the resurgence of traditional gender roles and a broader cultural push to make women quiet, compliant and small.
And let’s just be very clear about the kind of message this sends when a major brand – one of the biggest and most influential fashion brands in the world, no less – markets and sells a head wrap that literally compresses a woman’s face? It doesn’t immediately evoke a sense of freedom or empowerment, rather discipline and restraint and even erasure. It visually mimics post-surgical compression gear or, even worse, historical restraints that were used to punish women.
I feel like this symbolises the normalisation of discomfort in the name of desirability- and it’s a discomfort that men are just not expected to endure. This kind of pressure is almost exclusively reserved for women… Of course, the Skims face wrap is modelled solely on women – because when was the last time you saw a campaign urging men to sculpt their jawlines in their sleep?! Yes, male beauty standards exist and are growing but they aren’t enforced with the same intensity. Their body size, their appearance or their ageing isn’t scrutinised, monetised and even policed in the way ours in.
Men are allowed to age, they’re allowed to take up space and they’re allowed to rest, while women are constantly fed the message that to be desirable is to be disciplined: beauty is pain, time, headspace, money, and beauty, of course, is our no. 1 goal.
It’s exhausting. If we buy into just a fraction of these trends, it becomes a full-time job. And what’s worse is that it’s a goal we can never reach. Because no matter how much we spend, how much we tweak or tape or tighten or tone, the finish line keeps moving. Just as we adjust to one trend – glass skin or buccal fat removal – another expectation comes in to take its place. There is always more to buy, more to fix, more to do, more to feel ashamed about.
Even if we did everything asked of us – we could buy the face wrap, follow the routine, eat the ‘clean’ food and tape our mouths shut at night – we would still wake up feeling like we’ve fallen short. Because the standard isn’t real and it was never meant to be attainable; it was only ever meant to be pursued, forever.
The game is rigged – against women. We are never quite enough: not thin enough, not curvy enough, not smooth enough, not ‘snatched’ enough. And that’s the point – because if we ever felt enough, truly enough, then the entire beauty and wellness machine, a billion dollar industry, would collapse. It depends on our insecurities, feeds off our doubts and profits very nicely when we believe that we need just one more product to be accepted by the world.
And that eternal and impossible beauty quest? It stops us from asking bigger questions or demanding more. It’s a brilliant tool of the patriarchy to keep women preoccupied, quiet and obedient.
So, while many may think I’m overreacting about the launch of a face wrap, I believe that this isn’t just a gimmick but a symbol of how far we still have to go. Of how cleverly the beauty industry disguises oppression as empowerment and of how deeply entrenched the expectations of beauty remain for women.
The most radical thing we can do is not to the buy the next fix, to opt out. To instead choose rest and rebellion. Because, honestly, truly, our faces don’t need to be tightened or shrunk. No part of our bodies does. We just need to be allowed to exist, as we are. We are not projects, or problems to solve.
Skims, you can keep your wrap...
Grazia beauty panel member Alex Light is an influencer and author who addresses body image, self-acceptance, and the harmful impacts of diet culture. Having struggled with eating disorders influenced by societal beauty standards, she now advocates for body confidence in women and girls, helping her audience move away from restrictive ideals. This passion led her to write the Sunday Times Bestseller You Are Not A Before Picture. As someone who became a mother for the first time earlier this year, her content also deals with the benefits and challenges that come with motherhood and how that intersects with beauty. Alex is a fashion and beauty creator on social media, having previously been a journalist for leading industry titles and subsequently has created an engaged community of over 500K people across her Instagram channel as well as TikTok where she shares creative content pieces as well as each episode of her chart topping podcast, Should I Delete That which she co-hosts with Em Clarkson. @alexlight
Main image credit: Instagram @skims