EP134. Is beauty ready for the metaverse?

I've been struggling with the concept of the Metaverse for a little while, ever since I watched one of Mark Zuckerberg's quite frankly, hideous Metaverse videos where he was surfing and we saw this beautiful, colorful, unbleached coral underneath the water. Which, of course, is not the case, as climate change is wreaking havoc on coral reefs around the world. I realized that the Metaverse has the potential for people to bury their head in the sand and not face the problems we have in the real world. And then when you bring beauty into the mix, there's even more potential for things to go wrong. Let's just take stock of where we are right now with the global mainstream beauty industry. Firstly, the mainstream beauty industry exists to tell us that we are not good enough. It's their very essence, and we all buy it. Secondly, they sell billions of products because we think that we'll only be good enough if we buy their stuff. And then, of course, some people would now do literally anything to change their appearance. Let's not forget that earlier this year, Kim Kardashian famously said that she would eat poop every day if it made her look younger. Just let that one sink in for a minute. So this idea of moving beauty into a digital universe where people can change their appearance at the drop of a hat, well, it worries me. But then bring into that equation the idea of brands selling you products for your digital avatar. Is this consumption 2.0 for the beauty industry? Is this even ethical? And how can this possibly be sustainable? Hi, it's Lorraine Dallmeyer, chartered environmentalist, biologist, and CEO of award winning online organic cosmetic formulation school Formula Botanica. I host the Green Beauty Conversations podcast and these are my green beauty opinions, in which I share my main takeaways from the podcast interview that we released last week and set you a challenge to make the green beauty sector a better place. If you want to be the first to hear all of my latest episodes, make sure you subscribe to this podcast. So, last week here on the podcast, I interviewed Dr. Alex Box, an internationally renowned artist, identity designer and beauty futurist. And we explored many concepts around beauty in the Metaverse, and it was fascinating hearing her opinions. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, do head back right now to last week's podcast and go and check it out. So, having told you all of my concerns at the start of this episode, I think it's worth sharing that Alex challenged many of my views about the Metaverse, which I greatly enjoyed, because she effectively said that the digital World offers us a new way of looking at ourselves and experiencing ourselves. In the conversations I had with her, she explained to me that digitization can feel more real than real, something you might even call hyperreal. After all, the real world is chasing the cyber world. Some people are trying to look as smooth and ageless as possible, maybe a little bit even like an avatar. Whereas in the digital world you have the potential to do the same. But the same rules don't necessarily apply. You can change your appearance constantly. You could also highlight every hair, every pore, every so called imperfection. It then becomes so real that it's almost beyond real. What Alex terms post human or post body. Now, at the moment, I find it hard to think of myself outside of my body afterwards. The very thing that grounds all of us and which we all have in common. But what are we when we close our eyes? What is our very essence? Would we represent that in a way that rejects real world beauty ideals? Perhaps. And I find that question fascinating. Speaking with Alex flipped everything I thought upside down and made me wonder if the metaverse, done properly and ethically, could actually get us to the stage that we accept the way we are and look and reject the messaging enforced upon us by the big beauty players. Is this maybe even the beginning of the end for the major players? The issue, of course, is that the early adopters of the digital world do not always have ethics in mind. When you've got the brands racing to open digital storefronts, virtual cosmetics, and different potential products for your avatar to purchase, the conversation remains pretty much the same as it does in the real world. Tech does have a tendency to race ahead of itself and then go back to fix the ethical issues it's created. After all, Facebook didn't have an ethics committee set up when they first started, did they? And yet, wouldn't we all have benefited hugely if they had? Alex talked about the digital world, the metaverse, potentially even being a savior to get us closer to who we really are. But to get there, we have to tread gently and carefully. There have to be boundaries, and we have to be conscious of the fact that ethics will take time to catch up with tech. But perhaps, just maybe, this brand new digital frontier gives us the opportunity to find a completely new way of looking at ourselves. So my challenge to you for this week is to just think about it. Read up on the metaverse and follow Alex on Instagram. She's amazing. The links are in the show notes. Don't only listen to what the mainstream press is telling you about NFT this and Web3 that. Though it's still too binary, the metaverse is limitless and can be exactly what we want it to be. One day, the way we experience the digital and online world will be completely different to everything we know right now. So just remember that it's people like you and me talking about these points early on who can help give shape to what's coming. Thank you for listening to my Green Beauty opinions. Remember to visit the Formula botanica website@formulabotanica.com to try our free online formulation course. And if you haven't subscribed yet to the Green Beauty Conversations podcast or what are you doing, please make sure you do so now in your favorite podcast app. Leave me a five star review if you enjoy the conversations I host and I'll be back soon with my next episode.