INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane · Jessica Murnane

How Nature Can Help With Body Image + Current Beauty Trends with Jessica DeFino (Award-winning beauty critic + Writer of Flesh World)

·51 min·3 clips

Jessica DeFino calls the trend “the self shelf” or “the self shelfie,” meaning beauty products worn directly on the body.

1. INSIDE AND OUTSIDE: Nature + Pop Culture News with Jessica Murnane centers on Jessica DeFino and the link between nature, body image, and beauty trends. 2. Jessica Murnane is the host, and Jessica DeFino is an award-winning beauty reporter and critic whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Vice, and Vogue. 3. The episode asks how time outdoors changes body image and what current beauty trends reveal about identity. 4. Murnane opens with “Reasons Why I Love to Grow,” describing her neighbor Mr. Bryant, who is 92 and spends about five hours a day rocking on his porch. 5. She says she planted a garden for Mr. Bryant after his daughters told her how much he loved the flowers she had been bringing him. 6. DeFino’s first nature memory is sitting in the outfield at t-ball practice and digging for worms while her father coached the boys’ team. 7. She says her nickname on the team was “Jesse the worm,” and she ties that memory to identity formation. 8. DeFino says she was not into nature as a teenager or in her twenties and jokes that her dating profile once said, “do not try to take me on a hike.” 9. Murnane and DeFino talk through the social pressure of “glamorous” hiking, matching outfits, and looking good outdoors. 10. DeFino contrasts that with her favorite 49 Palms Oasis hike near Joshua Tree, which ends in palms, water, and aquatic life. 11. Murnane brings up a study suggesting that deep relationships with nature can improve body image. 12. DeFino says she felt body shame melt away on a private beach on the Jersey Shore when she was alone with ducks and waterfowl. 13. She connects that feeling to the difference between being in a body and being looked at in a body. 14. DeFino says beauty, as philosophers theorized it, should bring people outside themselves and connect them to something larger. 15. She argues that phones, mirrors, selfies, and appearance culture crowd out those outward experiences of beauty. 16. DeFino says beauty products can restore “the confidence that beauty standards stole,” especially when she is thinking about concealer and under-eye bags. 17. She explains that the current trend she calls “the self shelf” or “the self shelfie” includes pimple patches, under-eye masks, and morning-shed routines. 18. DeFino says the trend is moving from selfies to shelfies to “shelf identification,” and she worries about the merging of person and product. 19. The episode feels conversational and reflective, with Murnane asking personal follow-ups and DeFino moving between memoir, theory, and trend analysis. 20. Listeners interested in beauty culture, body image, and social-media trends will get the most from it; listeners wanting light, trend-only chatter may skip it.

As heard by us

A body-image conversation that treats what the body does as more important than how it looks.

Jessica Murnane and Jessica DeFino spend the episode circling a simple idea: being in nature can pull attention away from appearance and toward what the body can do.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want body-image talk that starts in water and lands in what your body can do.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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