Welcome. Welcome to Fat Mascara. I am very excited to see you here. Can't see you, but I can feel your presence. My name is Jessica.

Hi, everyone. I'm Jen. Welcome to our beauty podcast. You have entered a world of chaos in my home today.

Well, Jen's dog is so sad. It was, it was like funny, but sad, sad, sweet. We know everything's okay, but her dog was literally underneath the blanket and the blanket was moving so good ghost.

It looked like ET underneath the blanket. Don't bring up. You know how I feel about it. Please. It's right. It's my one fear. No, it is a three ring circus at the Sullivan household today. We have the guy fixing the dryer. My stepson's here.

Eric's trying to help the guy fix the dryer and the dog wants to run around in circles and yap at everybody right when I'm trying to record. That was a good time to record a podcast.

Exactly. So welcome. It feels right. It feels so right. This is what we do. How's everybody doing? How are you doing? I'm good. I'm good. We do. We do. Why don't we delve into a, like, um, 10,000 word New York Times article that you totally just felt like breezing through.

So I, I tease this last week that there's this article that I want the fam to read if they can handle it because even I just text Jess at points and be like, uh, help me with this art reference.

So there was this article in New York Times called why culture has come to a standstill. It was very fuzzy. A bunch of people mentioned it to me. Oh, did it after I look right after I read it. I started texting it to people because I was like, is this true? What's going on? So it's my Jason Farragale. You could also listen to the audio versions. 34 minutes long. Oh, wait, it's 34 minutes.

Yeah, but I guess when someone's reading it. It looks okay. But if you go online, there's a little button. I like that the time is he doing this. You can press play. Oh, I'll try and send everybody the gift article. Sometimes it doesn't let me on Instagram. But anyway, so seek it out if you can. So you can join in this thought experiment with me and Jess because I was reading it. And as I was reading it. Basically, he's making the thesis or the statement that culture is sort of slowed down and come to a standstill. And by culture, he means art. He means music. I think he referenced architecture.

Did he reference fashion a little bit? Yeah, he did because he said, if I don't, I hope I'm not jumping ahead too much. But he was like, I was looking around a gallery. He was writing the perspective was he was opening up the tree. The tree has a museum gallery. And he was looking around. And he said, I can see different fashions. And he said, none of the different styles looked distinctly to 2023. He said, I see skinny jeans.

Skinny jeans, which feel distinctly 2000s early 2000, baggy jeans, which feel very 1990s. He said, what looks like figure would look very 2023. What does a woman in 2023 look like? What does that style look like? And he said, is she holding a titanium iPhone? He was like, even the iPhone hasn't changed much in the past 10 years. Yeah, all time back to his point, which is that maybe culture is sort of come to a standstill.

Because in the last 23-ish years, he hasn't really seen the huge kind of changes that I think humans got accustomed to over the last couple hundred years. Art changed so much in the last 300 years. Every 10 years.

Yeah, but in the last 30. So the whole time I was reading this, I just kept thinking, well, fat mascara, we love to tackle beauty culture, right?

I just wanted to put a little carrot above the story, which is like as culture come to a standstill and instead put as beauty culture come to, because I kept thinking a lot of his arguments apply to the beauty industry, like we had huge forces of innovation.

We have all these artists and now all these creative people have all of these things that their fingertips to work with. And what are they doing with them? And so I was thinking, what are they doing with them?

Because here we are in 2023 and I like the fashion thing struggling to be like, huh, what defines? Is it a pimple patch? Is it an radio frequency atom device?

Is it, yeah, is it an injectable? Because there's certainly more stuff, right? Right. Or is it abandoning some of these innovations? Is it saying we don't want to use them? Right.

So I want to read this one line that just like stuck with me. He says to pay attention to culture in 2023 is to be belted into some glacially slow ferris wheel cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around.

The suspicion knows at me and then he says does it not you that we live in a time in place whose culture seems likely to be forgotten. And I was like, Jason Farragot, shot fired.

I love that this idea of just going around. Yeah. Sometimes I do feel that with beauty culture. I'm like, and it's time for a new patch and a new shape.

And now it's time for the lip oil, the lip serum, the lip viscous. Right. And occasionally sometimes we do see innovation going forward. Every year we go to CES and we get we come back every January.

So with new innovations like OK, they're making a sunscreen patch to tell you when you've had UV light, but has that been adopted by everyone?

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