The Beauty of It

Maybe my Gen X is showing, but I wonder if I might not understand the millennial interpretation of “anti-capitalist.” Or perhaps I might not get it enough to understand how Daphné B. — a writer from Montreal with a new book on getting through lockdown while buying makeup online from Sephora, losing herself in YouTube beauty videos, and finding bankrollers on sugar daddy match sites — could be soft branded by her publisher as some kind of late capitalist whistle-blower.

But I will say that B.’s Made‑Up: A True Story of Beauty Culture under Late Capitalism is well worth reading. A tight string of thoughts and observations, translated from the French by Alex Manley, it is a work of art born of the pandemic, not simply a piece of writing about it. This is something we are beginning to see: considered words, newly bound and published, emanating from 2020’s seat of solitary and...