To be or not to be, that is the question—at least it is when it comes to our round faces now that Kim Kardashian’s Skims has found a new body part to squeeze and shape.
This week the brand unveiled a $48 Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap, a new addition to its shapewear line, which is like a face bra 2.0. With its Velcro closures on the top of the head and the back of the neck, the contraption essentially shrink wraps your chin, jawline, and cheeks in polyamide (which is, apparently, also infused with “collagen yarn,” whatever that is).
Skims Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap
Skims
Skims goes on to call it a “must-have addition to your nightly routine” in an Instagram post, while Kim went so far as to say on Stories that the Face Wrap is “such a necessity” and that “it snatches your little chinny chin chin.… It’s super comfortable to wear at night or just around the house.”
In whose world? Given the Face Wrap is designed for “strong, targeted compression” according to the product description, and it’s been designed by a woman whose Met Gala corset was so tight it left her bruised and struggling for breath, “comfortable” is probably a stretch.
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“Is it April Fools?” wrote skin care expert Caroline Hirons in the Skims comments. “Gentle reminder: they’re targeting and profiting off your insecurities with stuff like this,” wrote another. While Akash Chandawarkar, MD, a plastic surgeon, looked on the wrap more favorably, saying it’s “perfect for after facelift, necklift, or submental lipo,” which is hardly surprising given it makes you look like you’ve been bandaged up post extreme cosmetic surgery.
Nevertheless, the Face Wrap sold out within 24 hours online, which speaks volumes about how complicated our relationship with our faces has become. Even our toxic beauty standards, which normally push one “perfect” aesthetic forward, seem to be confused.
On the one hand, toddler-plump cheeks are being sold to women as the ultimate signifier of youth—hence cheek filler is still booming despite some celebrities having their filler publicly dissolved. On the other, we’re being told to have our buccal fat sliced away so that we permanently look like we’re sucking on a straw. Not to mention, for years we’ve been conditioned to believe that our makeup should be placed high and winged out on our cheekbones to elongate and slim our faces.
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Contouring, a makeup technique incidentally also popularized by Kim, is entrenched in the idea that we can use artful stripes of concealer, bronzer, and highlighter to narrow our faces and chisel our cheeks and jawbones for a more “snatched” appearance.
TikTok is awash with tutorials such as “Snatched Makeup Routine for Round Faces” or “How to Contour a Round Face for Flawless Makeup”—the implication being that our round faces need to be narrowed and that a sharp, angular look taps into the current cultural zeitgeist. And perhaps on some sort of dark Black Mirror level it does, given diet culture is back and contouring pressures Black women to adopt European features.
Happily, there’s a counter movement on social media that celebrates rather than compresses round faces. Jamie Janejira—a multihyphenate photographer, filmmaker, writer, model, and makeup artist with over 200K followers—is one of the forerunners, eloquently promoting makeup that embraces “soft features.”
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In one Reel she says: “What if your face doesn’t need to be snatched and lifted? What if you can stop actively fighting your natural features? It seems every beauty tutorial is always about lifting and snatching the face and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. However, some faces just don’t look like that and they’re not meant to look like that.… What if lifted and snatched is not the only form of beauty? What if there are infinite numbers of types of beauty? That’s what makes us beautiful is that we don’t all look the same.”
While TikTok influencer @baldiechi proudly says, “I love my double chin! She’s here to stay and slay” in her blusher tutorial.
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Much has been made of whether the Face Wrap actually works. I’m not going to give any oxygen to that, but I’d like to see the evidence for it. After all, Kris Jenner didn’t get her new lifted face from polyamide headgear.
So rather than squish our “chinny chin chin” and plump cheeks into what looks like a straitjacket for the face, maybe it’s time we step away from the madness and start to see our—round, long, square—faces as beautifully bespoke instead.
For more from Fiona Embleton, Glamour’s associate beauty director, follow her on @fiembleton.
The post Skims Face Wrap: When Will the War on Round Faces End? appeared first on Glamour.
