Over the summer, in one of many small, ridiculous attempts to affirm to myself that I will outlive the Trump Administration, I decided to incorporate both retinol and sunscreen into my daily skin-care routine. Both were recommended to me last year by a dermatologist. Retinol is an anti-aging ingredient, and I flinched, a little, fancying myself too young, at twenty-eight, for the Sisyphean hobby of trying to halt the effects of time on one’s body. But I went home and did some research, clicking around various beauty publications while checking the news on my Twitter feed, which every few seconds loaded a fresh batch of disorientation and dread. The Web sites told me that I should have started retinol earlier. I thought about the moment, a few weeks after the election, when I found my first gray hair, and how, soul-wise, several thousand years had passed since then. Skin seemed like a nice controllable project. As it turned out, it both was and was not.

In recent years, the concept of skin care—specifically, of skin care as a phenomenon that invites unlimited expenditures of money, strategy, and time—has exploded kaleidoscopically. The Korean beauty industry has popularized, globally, the idea of a nightly ten-step program. (For example: cleanse, double cleanse, exfoliate, tone, spray yourself with “essence,” use an “ampoule,” apply a sheet mask, add eye cream, moisturize, moisturize again.) The invention of selfie-friendly sheet masks—individually packaged pieces of fabric that are soaked in serum and look ridiculous when applied—has ushered in a per-use price point. (They run from a few bucks to an astonishing twenty dollars each.) Before my recent deep dive, I’d thought of myself as fluent in beauty products: I am vain and from Texas, and also a former women’s-media editor. But the ingredients I knew about—vitamins, antioxidants, acids—now inhabit a climate of techno-surrealism: there are products with donkey milk, snail slime, placenta cream, pig collagen; there are face helmets that blast you with infrared light. I started lightly spiralling. I followed one tweet to a Sunday Riley lactic-acid serum that cost a hundred and sixty dollars, another to a Shiseido essence (a sort of very special water) that cost one-eighty. The New York home page recommended a cleanser that made your dead skin cells come off like eraser scraps. I bought it, along with a bunch of other stuff, unsure if I was buying skin care or a psychological safety blanket, or how much of a difference between the two there really is.

When my skin feels good, I feel happy: my skin is a miraculous six-pound organ that keeps my blood and muscle from spilling all over the C train, and I’d like to treat it well. At the same time, it’s impossible to ignore that the animating idea of the beauty industry is that women should always be working to look better, and that means, in our culture, that we should always be working to look as young as possible—shielding ourselves from what Susan Sontag, in her essay “The Double Standard of Aging,” calls the “humiliating process of gradual sexual disqualification.” The beauty industry functions partly by solving a “crisis of the imagination,” as Sontag puts it—the ambient fear that you will be less beautiful in the future, and that some obscure but awful consequences might result. This fear is both artificially imposed and pragmatic: as long as women are broadly objectified, beauty will function as value, and its absence as lack.

As feminist discourse has gone mainstream, the beauty industry has tried to cover some of its tracks. At the Times Magazine, Amanda Hess recently wrote about how the term “anti-aging” is going out of fashion: instead of youthfulness, advertisers promise radiance. This is not a revision of beauty standards, Hess observed: it’s a rebranding, in which “young” is positioned as a synonym for “natural,” despite the fact that nothing is more natural than getting old. Something similar is going on today with a certain popular beauty look, which we might label “Instagram model.” The look evokes both nakedness and airbrushing and is made possible by technology. A lot of the work formerly performed by makeup has been redirected into products and procedures—eyelash extensions, micro-current facials, injections of all kinds—leading to, and prompted by, an aesthetic of militant naturalness surrounded by an unambiguous aura of money and work. It’s a regime posing as a regimen. “Rules of taste enforce structures of power,” Sontag wrote. The beauty industry runs on its ability to redefine “natural” at increasingly higher prices.

At the same time, the Internet’s destabilizing and democratizing tendencies have transformed the industry. I wrote to Alexis Swerdloff, the editor of New York’s The Strategist, which offers highly edited shopping guides; she pointed out that cheap, formerly hard-to-access Asian brands are now available online, and that women are increasingly looking to sources like Reddit for product recommendations, “which makes everything feel less force-fed to you by Big Beauty.” (A particularly popular post on The Strategist this year was written by Rio Viera-Newton, a nonprofessional enthusiast who detailed the Google doc she kept about her skin-care routine.) There’s also something perversely, unexpectedly hopeful about skin care in today’s political context. Traditionally, skin care represents an attempt to deny the inevitability of the future. For me, right now, it functions as part of a basic dream in which the future simply exists. I recently wrote about the embattled millennial generation, whose members overwhelmingly do not believe that we will receive the Social Security benefits that we are paying for, and for whom conversations about having children commonly invoke fears of climate destruction and violent nationalism and nuclear war. I wonder if women my age are less afraid of looking older than we are of the possibility that there will be no functional world to look old in. Sontag wrote, about anti-aging, “The collapse of the project is only a matter of time.” At the moment, that thought applies much more broadly.

The idea of beauty as a site of resistance rather than capitulation is often traced back to Audre Lorde, who, in 1988, wrote, “Caring for myself is not an act of self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” The context for these words is Lorde’s fight against liver cancer as well as the intersectional politics that she theorized as a black lesbian feminist. But her thought, in a much diluted iteration, has led to the popular idea of “self-care,” in which there is moral and political utility in relaxing with your sheet mask. And there can be—although it’s up to us to reframe beauty as the means to something, rather than, as the market would have it, an end in itself. “I think a lot about beauty as propaganda for a success story,” the writer Arabelle Sicardi wrote to me in an e-mail. “We want to be able to not have our suffering visible.” Beauty is a tool that tends to serve those in power, she wrote, and, at the same time, it fundamentally involves acts of witnessing the body, helping it to endure its conditions. This paradox becomes clearer to me each night, patting my face with serums while looking one-eyed at Twitter, using these apparatuses of self-loathing in an attempt to pronounce some form of love.