The Guardian

Glass skin is not just erasure of ordinary faces - it's the final step towards objectification | Natalie Reilly

The obsession with women’s obedience never wanes, it only changes location. Right now, compliance looks like perfect skin
‘Ask any dermatologist and they’ll tell you: pore size is largely genetic and not something you can “cleanse” away.’ Photograph: Jonathan Knowles/Getty Images

Glass skin. It sounds a little like an insult – an extension of glass jaw. Or perhaps a cocktail, if you were into that sort of thing. But if you’ve hopped on a certain corner of Instagram lately, you’d know, it’s a beauty term; a trend, which describes a luminous, polished, poreless complexion – one that is so smooth as to resemble glass.

It reached a level of prominence in the beauty vlogger community in 2017, but originated in South Korea, land of the

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