Who cares if we are sicker, so long as we look good?
That’s the gist of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-science approach to making America healthy. Kennedy poo-poos GLP-1s, not because they do not work for weight loss and diabetes, but because exercise and clean eating are more natural. He has suggested that eating glysophate-free grain could reduce eczema symptoms and that “organic,” cellphone-free “wellness farms” are suitable for people suffering from addiction or who take attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder medication.
More tellingly, he has promised to end government “suppression” of treatments like “psychedelics, peptides, stem cells, raw milk, hyperbaric therapies, chelating compounds, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, vitamins, clean foods, sunshine, exercise, nutraceuticals and anything else that advances human health and can’t be patented by Pharma.”
Health, his rhetoric has long implied, is an easily attainable personal choice; by pursuing it, anyone can look and feel good.
Simple belief system
If you strip away his famous surname and maybe look past his advanced age, Kennedy is indistinguishable from a beauty influencer. He has “niched” down his content, narrowly focusing his message on the idea that clean and natural are synonyms for healthy.
Scientific recommendations can be overwhelming, even conflicting. So when the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement talks about health, it really offers a simple belief system: Healthy choices are self-evident in beautiful bodies.
That version of health is bad science. But it is great marketing for beauty, health and wellness products that promise to make you look healthy — whether you are or are not.
As millions of Americans struggle to get access to and afford health care, spending on beauty is growing, so much so that the global market for beauty products grew by 7% annually between 2022 and 2024, in part because manufacturers are merging beauty, health and wellness into one big lifestyle market, in which cosmetic products are marketed as “natural” parts of “clean” living.
Products like these can be anything from talc-free eye shadow to hair growth “vitamins,” to collagen powder, to red-light therapy masks, to full-body cold plunge pools that you inflate in your backyard. They fill the vacuum that’s created when we prioritize individual responsibility over safe, scientifically sound health policy.
Our national obsession with maximizing our health through individual choices makes clean beauty sound vaguely moral. Social media amps up its appeal. Now, almost any attractive person can hawk a wellness product as “clean” or “natural,” as if to suggest that organic products with shorter ingredient lists are inherently virtuous. But the notion that clean and natural are undeniably safe is wrong. It also can be dangerous.
Look at how this mentality has invaded the beauty industry. It is far easier to call a beauty product “clean” than it is to prove, via science, that a product is safe and effective. Caveat emptor and all of that, but this industry’s consumers are younger than they were when I bought my first Origins skin care box in the 1990s. Preteenagers are among the fastest-growing age group for hair, skin, cosmetic and wellness products.
Many of those products target younger consumers with vague claims for which there are no industrywide, regulated standards. Instead, the half-trillion-dollar industry relies on self-policing. For some consumers, that hasn’t been enough.
For instance, a 2022 study found that the hair relaxers used in many Black beauty routines are correlated with higher rates of cancer. Solving this should be easy. Regulators should mandate better products and inform consumers so that they can choose a healthier or cleaner product.
But to manufacture safer beauty products aimed at Black women, companies would have to research what is and is not safe. For a host of reasons, that research barely exists. Black women are underrepresented in clinical trials, for one. And historical racism in the manufacture and distribution of Black products has undoubtedly warped Black women’s consumer power. In economic terms, consumers’ purchasing choices inform what the market produces for them. But when Black women don’t have a lot of available choices, what they buy may not signal what they want.
When people are underserved for a long time, they will create solutions. When the market underserved Black female consumers for generations, many became do-it-yourself beauty pioneers. I remember my grandmother dying her pink “flesh tone” pantyhose in leftover coffee to make them match her skin tone. Her generation also had a homemade concoction that predates today’s mass-produced hair relaxers.
Black beauty culture still has a pioneering spirit. It is common to whip up a homemade conditioner from mayonnaise or a hair clarifier from apple cider vinegar.
But DIY beauty solutions can be a gateway into gimmicks marketed online as clean and healthy. When regulation failed to give Black women better choices, influencers saw an opportunity to capitalize on our risk. There are now many influencers on TikTok who decode product ingredient lists like true crime podcast hosts who promise to get to the bottom of an unsolved murder.
Their credentials vary. Some are scientists; others have more in common with new-age gurus. All of them sell the idea that there is an attainable clean beauty protocol available to anyone informed enough, and brave enough to seek it.
If I close my eyes, they sound a lot like Kennedy. He is also very suspicious of multisyllabic scientific compound names.
There is a level at which MAHA makes some intuitive sense, just as it makes intuitive sense to doubt the chemists who put formaldehyde in Black women’s hair relaxers. My gut says that someone should absolutely be in charge of making our products safe. If I made that gut instinct my political identity, MAHA’s convoluted approach to health might make sense.
Kills critical thinking
But slashing scientific research or regulation won’t give me better options. It will mean that more consumers will experience the skewed incentives that Black women have long endured. It will mean more bad options and more individual responsibility for the consequences of those bad options. That is a perfect storm for MAHA’s real market: misinformation.
The movement’s demonization of chemicals shows how an obsession with being “clean” can shut down critical thinking. Many clean-beauty enthusiasts consider anything made in a lab an unnatural, potentially toxic threat to healthy living. But scientific labs are the ideal places to create the sustainable bioidentical dupes of naturally occurring compounds that make our products safe and effective. On the other hand, many things labeled “natural” can be toxic. Vitamin D is — for all intents and purposes — natural. But take too much of it and you’re sick.
Consumers with fewer safe, healthier choices are greater targets for this sort of misinformation and manipulation. So when a beauty influencer like Kennedy takes over a regulatory arm of the U.S. government and brands deregulation and consumer risk as taking care of one’s health, he’s making all of us marks.
Americans get sicker and scammers get richer.
Health isn’t just for beautiful people, and healthy choices do not happen in a vacuum. Regulation, policy, science and culture work together to produce healthy choices. When they don’t — or can’t — scammy solutions fill the void. Anyone selling aesthetics in lieu of actual health is just promising to make us into good-looking corpses.
Tressie McMillan Cottom is a New York Times columnist.