Tracy E. Robey | Vox

La-Z-Boy and the American dream

2020-01-09T09:49:52-05:00

La-Z-Boy used to be a punchline. Now it’s an aspirational brand. | Sarah Lawrence for Vox

My husband, an immigrant from the Soviet Union, divides consumer experiences via a simple binary: this is, or is not the America he was promised. A Starbucks that’s out of half-and-half is not the America he was promised, while a restaurant with unlimited soft drink refills is. At the peak of the America-I-Was-Promised hierarchy is a weekend afternoon with a beer in hand, watching football (US pigskin or otherwise) on TV while ensconced in an overstuffed La-Z-Boy recliner. It’s an image that was pushed deliberately in the 1970s, when NFL heartthrob quarterback Joe Namath appeared in magazine ads for the brand, a vision of masculine potential energy surrounded by a lot of brown tones and vaguely sleazy taglines.

The La-Z-Boy recliner is one of the last viable vestiges of the 20th-century American Dream.

The La-Z-Boy recliner is one of the last viable vestiges of the 20th century American dream, expansive as a classic Cadillac, but without the obvious fuel emissions. La-Z-Boy has emerged in the wake of the 2008 recession as both a stock market winner and luxury brand among millennials. In both form and meaning, it’s imagined as enormous, drawing revulsion from spouses who don’t want their dad’s ugly furniture parked in the living room, and longing from those for whom The Chair is symbolic of a good life. It’s a piece of interior decor that originated as medical furniture and can serve as a home hospital bed today. It’s an object that taps into our deepest, most American anxieties about comfort and leisure and bodies at rest.

The battle for the seat of America

The two furniture legacies built in Michigan typify the state’s, if not the country’s, cultural divide and explain some of the reasons for our confused feelings about living room recliners. On the east side of the state is the city of Monroe, where in the mid-1920s cousins Edward M. Knabusch and Edwin J. Shoemaker founded Floral City Furniture Company. In 1929, they would invent a product so iconic that it would eventually become the name of the company: the upholstered La-Z-Boy recliner. To the west are office furniture powerhouse Steelcase and Herman Miller, best known for the Eames chair, Aeron chair, and office cubicle. One could view western Michigan, also home to proto-side-hustle empire Amway, as tending the furnace that powers our current total work nightmare.

The geographic divide between Michigan’s iconic furniture brands and what they produce mirrors the nation’s push and pull between work and leisure. In the ’80s, ’90s, and early 2000s there was a fear of leisure, and by extension the La-Z-Boy recliner, a sense that maybe something that’s this comfortable can’t be morally okay. Judgment of recliners was tremendous, with La-Z-Boy attracting the most negative attention probably due to being the most recognizable brand. In the midst of the ’80s’ work-and-sweat fixation, William E. Geist of the New York Times headed to a La-Z-Boy showroom before the New York City Marathon to talk to customers who found runners “wacky” and planned to spend the day reaching into a polystyrene cooler for a cold beer. Several entries in the genre known as “men telling us how lazy we all are,” mentioning La-Z-Boy as symbolic of our woes, made their way into Vanity Fair and NPR. A few years after Brooke Shields was named La-Z-Boy spokesperson in 2010, a reporter wrote that she’d have trouble selling to women since La-Z-Boy “is synonymous with the words lethargic, sluggish and idle.”

The La-Z-Boy recliner was cast as an object that softens the body to the point that it takes on the form of the chair. A review of the movie Knocked Up calls lead character Ben “a La-Z-Boy in human form,” an image helpfully illustrated by artist Benedikt Notter in a NSFW Instagram post. 2008’s Wall-E features recliners turned into a lifestyle, where people essentially merge with their chairs due to an excess of comfort and convenience. Defending harsh boot camp tactics, Lance Corporal Gene Talley asked military newspaper Stars and Stripes, “Do you want a La-Z-Boy [recliner] in combat?”

The concept of the La-Z-Boy has expanded far beyond the confines of a chair made by La-Z-Boy Inc., and has become a metaphor for disengagement, especially disengagement from the political process. In the lead-up to the 2012 election, an opinion writer described Obama’s Ohio strategy as, “Pry every Democratic voter out of his or her La-Z-Boy.” In 2014, members of MoveOn.org took an actor portraying then-Speaker of the House John Boehner on a four-day Ohio tour, where the character John “Lazy Boy” Boehner, “recline[d] in a La-Z-Boy recliner and contemplate[d] various topics for up to eight hours a day.” An Esquire piece from 2015 liberally paraphrases an Obama speech as telling Ohio voters to “put down the damn remote, [get] their lazy ass out of the La-Z-Boy,” and vote. Given that Donald Trump won Ohio by a margin of 8.13 points in 2016, Democratic candidates might want to embrace the recliner rather than beer as a symbol of their regularness.

When it’s not associated with sloth, La-Z-Boy is portrayed as a humorously hypermasculine accessory for men who are very male. In 2008, a Minnesota man was arrested for driving what was reported as a motorized La-Z-Boy while under the influence of alcohol. Police seized the recliner, which had been tricked out with a stereo and cup holders, powered by a Briggs & Stratton engine and small steering wheel. A forfeited property eBay auction topped $43,700 before La-Z-Boy Inc. requested that the name of the item be changed to remove their trademark since the chair was not, in fact, a La-Z-Boy. Police Chief Walter Wobig told Wired that he included the term “La-Z-Boy” because “because the media … used the term.” Not even the police department’s attorney caught the error before the auction started.

It was an easy mistake. In the 90 years since the birth of the La-Z-Boy, the name has come to mean much more than products made by La-Z-Boy Inc. Like Jell-O and Kleenex, the term “La-Z-Boy” is a genericized trademark that’s used to apply to a whole class of furniture, usually recliners, due to their popularity and the memorability of the brand name. There was a time when the Barcalounger dominated in popular culture and we spoke far more about the Morris chair, but only the La-Z-Boy occupies such a massive space in the popular imagination now that it’s a shorthand for every recliner ever made. It represents the whole checked-out mentality that resists America’s total work culture and fitness culture, without ever putting the footrest down.

Millennials: not killing La-Z-Boy!

A lot of the recent news about La-Z-Boy concerns the company’s hot stock. In March 2009, shares were trading at just 60 cents each; these days, they’re above $30 despite La-Z-Boy reporting that it had missed earnings expectations in November. Given that the traditional image of a La-Z-Boy consumer is an elder man enjoying his “earned repose” after a lifetime of work (or, less favorably, an older man who falls asleep watching TV instead of paying attention to his wife), I wondered how a company could be making so much money by mostly selling fairly pricey recliners to people living on fixed incomes.

Part of the stock’s rise is because La-Z-Boy makes a whole lot more than just recliners: Bedroom, kitchen, and outdoor furniture bear the La-Z-Boy brand name, and the company acquired mid-century modern brand‎ Joybird in 2018. They’re also now repped by Kristen Bell and they’ve restructured in the wake of the 2008 downturn. Far from being a chair for isolated singles and men dodging their families, involved dads like hockey’s Mike Fisher proclaim proudly that they cuddle their babies in the family La-Z-Boy.

View Link

For many people, the purchase of a La-Z-Boy may be a practical decision based on the way the US health care system works. We got our own La-Z-Boy under intense but, I’ve learned, not-uncommon circumstances; after a series of extreme surgeries that involved putting part of a cadaver in my jaw, I found that buying a recliner was only slightly more expensive than renting a hospital bed, with the added bonus of giving my husband The-America-He-Was-Promised. The use of a recliner as medical furniture isn’t quite so much a dystopian hack (like taking an Uber to the emergency room instead of an ambulance), as a return to the recliner’s 19th-century advent — as patent furniture for medical use. If work leaves you with back pain, the American Chiropractic Association has endorsed La-Z-Boy reclining furniture, and programmers have shared how to hack one into a desk chair. But for most people, a recliner represents a space away from work, a napcentric, personal pod of softness that aligns surprisingly well with late-2010s consumerism Treat Yo’ Self-care culture.

Starting in the late 2000s, the La-Z-Boy recliner became the benchmark for a comfortable seat, driving the company’s image rehabilitation. Car reviewers were among the first in recent memory to use La-Z-Boy favorably when they compared cushy car seats to a recliner. The 2012 Fisker Karma EcoChic’s seats “are plush and comfortable, not overly bolstered or sporty but, like an old La-Z-Boy, good for many hours of spinal serenity,” according to Car and Driver. A “big Lincoln’s seats rival most La-Z-Boy chairs,” the Hyundai Equus Ultimate has “a back seat that is as inviting as your favorite La-Z-Boy,” and a 2013 Lexus LS 460’s ride “is La-Z-Boy comfortable.” Soon, other seats were compared to the La-Z-Boy recliner: Singapore Airlines’s upgraded cabins featured La-Z-Boy-like reclining seats; NBA courtside seats were called relaxing like La-Z-Boy recliners; even bike saddles have been compared to La-Z-Boys. The comparison expanded to include super-cushioned shoes and beds of seaweed for just-released baby sea turtles.

The 20th-century promise of America is collapsing around millennials, turning functional, once-uncool companies like La-Z-Boys into luxury brands.

The 20th-century promise of America is collapsing around millennials, turning functional, once-uncool companies like La-Z-Boys into luxury brands. The association of La-Z-Boy with luxury seems linked to the advent of plush recliner seating at movie theaters, which started to take off around the early 2010s, likely inspired by the home theaters of the super rich. A luxury barbershop offered La-Z-Boy recliners at the grooming stations, and Seoul’s Incheon Airport offered relaxation stations with massaging La-Z-Boys.

Owning a La-Z-Boy is a shortcut to a taste of earned repose and literal leaning out, an act of passive consumer resistance to a culture of total work and burnout that offers no guarantee of the payoff that animated previous generations. For millennials, the promises aren’t very big anymore. You may not be able to buy a home, but it’s possible to score a discount La-Z-Boy online. Even if the American dream is out of reach, the American nap is still in our grasp.

Sign up for The Goods newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

Anyone with a body knows that clothing sizes are flawed. Could there be a fix?

2019-10-17T10:12:54-04:00

Clothing sizes are all over the map. | Sarah Lawrence for Vox

If you needed to explain how human beings buy clothes to, say, an audience of aliens, you would sound fairly ridiculous. Designers turn flat fabric into 3D body coverings in a limited number of sizes and even more limited number of shapes, and then we purchase what we can, hoping for the best, becoming angry at our bodies for not corresponding to the coverings instead of the other way around.

Buying clothes online has only complicated matters: The fraught process of finding an appropriate and comfortable fit isn’t exactly easier when it’s undertaken as an information-deprived guessing game while drinking wine at home. Failing to solve the problem of fit isn’t an option. Returned products eat into companies’ bottom lines as unwearable clothes contribute to environmental waste.

The idea is that some entity would step in and create The One True Size Chart, solving all confusion around buying clothes forever

It seems like these problems should be quite solvable, and yet they persist. A theoretically logical solution to the confusion around clothing sizes has been proposed many times over: standard, universal sizes that don’t vary between brands. The idea is that some entity would step in and create The One True Size Chart, and brands would label their clothes with the accepted official sizes, solving all confusion around buying clothes forever. It’s never going to work in the US — and for very good reasons.

Size universality is an alluring idea that appeals to our need for order, but order is a false god that would actually make it harder to buy clothes by limiting the shapes and dimensions available for our diverse bodies. Instead, we need something to help us navigate the existing size variation. That helper is new tech about to transform how we shop for clothes online. Recommendation widgets that guide us to the right sizes, apps that use a cellphone to measure the body, and brands offering affordable garment customization are about to make it easier to buy clothes that fit without ever visiting a dressing room.

What if sizing variation between brands is actually chaotic good?

While clothing sizes for men’s bodies grew out of the Napoleonic wars and the need to clothe soldiers, it was the approach of WWII that necessitated a grand codification of the bodies of women, who wore uniforms while working in factories to make war supplies. In 1941, Ruth O’Brien and William Shelton published Women’s measurements for garment and pattern construction, a report based on their Work Projects Administration study. The project recorded the weight and 58 measurements of primarily middle-class, young, white women.

“The 1941 study was the basis of all women’s clothing sizes” in the postwar era, says Lynn Boorady, department head and professor at Oklahoma State University. It “had additional studies” added “over the years and the data was massaged but it never strayed far from the standard ‘hourglass’ shape.” Despite the fact that just 8 percent of women in the US have true hourglass shapes — and that women of color need clothes — postwar mainstream clothing was dominated by a silhouette made for young white women wearing girdles. In the last two decades, new sizing standards put out by ASTM International and Size USA updated measurements and shapes. “We saw the new sizing for ‘curvy’ or ‘straight’ figures right after the Size USA data was available” in 2003, says Boorady.

We now have better and more diverse data about what bodies in the US are like, but that doesn’t mean that the next step should be a universal size chart that creates standard sizes used by every brand.

If we impose a universal size chart, “a lot of people are going to go without clothes”

If we impose a universal size chart, “a lot of people are going to go without clothes,” says Kathleen Fasanella, an apparel industry pattern maker with 40 years of experience in the industry. The reason comes down to anthropometric variation. Anthropometry is the study of the measurements and proportions of the human body. Sometimes it’s used for racist pseudoscience (example: phrenology) and sometimes it’s used to understand the range of foot sizes in a given country. The US has a lot of body dimension and shape variation because we have a lot of genetic variation. A universal size chart in the US would be a disaster — and it would likely center on the dimensions and shapes of white bodies, as the 1941 O’Brien and Shelton study did. “We’re not going to be able to standardize sizes until people’s bodies are standard, and they’re not,” says Fasanella. “Sizes are a social construct. What’s a size 10? Nobody can agree.”

Brands don’t want universal size charts. Think of a brand’s clothing shape, the dimensions of each size, and the amount of ease in their clothes as a form of intellectual property; it’s the secret recipe that makes each brand special and keeps customers coming back. In fact, brands take their sizing and fit so seriously that they create clothes that fit their customers, veering away from published size standards as they gain more data. “Size charts are the beginning of the process; design and fit must also be taken into account,” says Boorady. According to Fasanella, “Everybody sizes to their market, to their customer base.” Even if every brand were working with the same size chart, that doesn’t mean they would produce clothing of uniform dimensions.

This tailoring of the brand size chart and fit to their customers’ bodies and preferences has been called “vanity sizing,” often represented as a craven and confusing practice that preys on womens’ desire to be either smaller or larger depending on the garment type. In reality, brands are re-centering and adjusting their clothing dimensions so they can make clothes for their customers. The dimensions of sizes may have gotten bigger over time for some brands, but a whole lot of that is related to wonderful things such as the fact that we’re not usually wearing girdles and clothes are being made to fit the bodies of women over 30.

Why shopping online for clothes is so damn hard

If you’re uncertain about your size in a particular brand and cannot try things on in a retail store, the logical thing to do is hunt down the brand’s size chart on their website. For US women’s brands, the size chart usually lists the bust, waist, and hip measurements in inches for each size sold. It’s a great resource, if often ferreted away and hard to access on mobile.

Here’s the problem: When I surveyed my Instagram followers, a highly unscientific sample of over 1,000 respondents indicated that only 75 percent own a measuring tape meant for bodies (as opposed to a more rigid metal measuring tape meant to aid home improvement projects). If we do happen to have a measuring tape at home, one study indicates that we’re not always great at knowing how to use it to take clothing measurements: On average, errors ranged from -4.54 cm (1.79 in) to +6.15 cm (2.42 in). With an error rate like that, a measured customer could easily buy clothes at least one size off.

When you do manage to take decent measurements, then there’s the harrowing decision of how to wedge your body into a size chart that might not line up with your shape. If the measurements and size line up, that doesn’t mean that the suggested size will align with how you see yourself; many people identify with a particular clothing size and a change can be jarring. Finally, even if your perfectly measured body matches very neatly with an accepted size, your fit preference might necessitate a different size altogether.

Fashion’s surprisingly awesome sizing anarchy requires a matchmaker operating between brands and customers. That’s where tech currently delivers for fashion e-commerce.

Fit prediction: a guide through sizing confusion

At this moment, on certain online shopping sites, you can type in some data about yourself and get a personal size prediction for that brand. Brands hire firms such as Fit Analytics and True Fit to advise their e-commerce customers on the size they should buy (neither responded to requests for comment for this story). Online-only and plus-size retailers such as ASOS, Lane Bryant, and City Chic have invested in customer-facing size adviser widgets, but so have brands with strong brick-and-mortar footprints such as Macy’s and Kohl’s.

Upon clicking either company’s sizing helper link on a product page, a window pops up and asks about things like the customer’s height, weight, age, hip and midsection shapes, bra size, preferred garment fit, and favorite size in competing brands. Not all questions are required, but answering more questions improves the quality of the prediction. Depending on the company, one or multiple size options might be recommended.

“J.C. Penney tried doing this about 12–15 years ago with pants; they would ask questions about bra size and it completely confused people”

Learning your size without taking off your clothes might sound like a totally new invention, but the concept actually has long roots. O’Brien and Shelton, authors of the 1941 sizing study, determined that height and weight were actually good at predicting one’s body dimensions. The problem was that people didn’t want to walk into a store and disclose their weight — and they may not have even known their current weight since home scales were less common. More recently, attempts to predict size have failed because customers didn’t understand why certain data was collected. “J.C. Penney tried doing this about 12–15 years ago with pants; they would ask questions about bra size and it completely confused people. But it can be a valid question,” says Boorady, since “if you have a fuller bust, you are likely to have a fuller hip.”

Fit prediction technology has some challenges. The links to fit widgets tend to be so unobtrusive on a desktop browser that some customers don’t even realize they’re available. Many brands cut the link to size prediction for their mobile sites or insert it inconsistently even on desktop sites. Since size prediction hasn’t been discussed much in the popular press, customers may wonder why they need to share information such as their age with a company trying to sell them pants (answer: age impacts how weight is distributed) or have concerns about how their data might be used. For customers who have deliberately stepped away from using a scale, prediction based on height and weight isn’t going to work.

Despite the current limitations, fit prediction widgets are the fashion tech that’s already more or less working for e-commerce. At this point, the main hurdle for fit prediction seems to be a lack of public awareness, since most attention has gone to high-profile projects with far shakier track records.

Can body measurement projects and mass customization deliver a perfect fit?

The most visible fashion/tech collaborations to date have produced uneven results ranging from brand-specific measurement projects to avatars that creep us out to customization that doesn’t always fit us. At some point soon, these technologies will combine into a truly useful system for buying clothes that fit us in every sense.

Japan’s Zozo launched an ambitious custom clothing project in 72 countries starting in 2017. The Zozosuit, named one of Time’s best inventions of 2018, was a social media hit, utilizing fairly cute spotted stretchy body tights that worked with a branded app and cellphone camera to capture lots of measurements without a measuring tape. The capturing process took some troubleshooting, but the measurements themselves were shockingly good: The Zozosuit even managed to measure inseam and torso length without the need for a helper. The problem came when doing more with those measurements other than wondering how you came to be so asymmetrical; customers said that the “custom” Zozo clothing didn’t fit and took forever to ship. Profits for the brand fell when sending free fit suits didn’t translate into sales, and Zozo pulled out of the US and Europe in April 2019.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by 前澤友作 Yusaku Maezawa (MZ) (@yusaku2020)

Excitement around 3D renderings of clothes on customers’ avatars similarly collapsed in recent years. Fashion media and academics predicted that Clueless-style avatars would help sell customers on style and fit when shopping online. Alessandra Vecchi, senior research fellow at the London College of Fashion and principal investigator for the e-Size project, says that her team found that using an online shopping avatar or a rendering of the customer’s own body would frequently discourage purchases and that an avatar “often acts as a turnoff to the user.”

More promising is mass customization. Brands like Indochino and eShakti offer “custom” or “bespoke” clothing that allows for the garment to be made for each individual based on their measurements, with room for style changes such as longer sleeves or a wider neckline. “This is not someone drafting a garment for each individual, it’s selecting pre-made [pattern] pieces based on the measurement to customize [the garment],” says Fasanella, which helps to explain why such clothes are often priced only a bit higher than ready-made garments.

Uneven reviews of eShakti and Indochino suggest that the pattern database technology has promise but hasn’t always been successful in delivering clothes that fit well. As customization technology improves and measuring technology along the lines of the Zozosuit emerges to help customers capture accurate measurements, experts predict that mass customization will help reduce waste and returns while boosting customer satisfaction and profits. For now, ordering made-to-measure clothes online requires a leap of faith.

Despite technology’s current solutions to the fit problem flopping or offering modest improvements on the status quo, the fashion industry is betting on tech solving the problem in the future. Amazon Body Labs is currently offering $25 gift cards to customers who consent to be scanned at their NYC project office. A workshop in Copenhagen last month dove deep into how fashion recommender systems that draw on everything from preferred fit to personal style can be refined and expanded.

Vecchi says, “I think [fit recommendation systems] will become the next big thing” together with “actual measures with the aid of your mobile” and algorithms that “take into account other ‘softer variables’ like fit, any possible preference for the degree of softness of the garment fabric to the touch, smell of the fabric, and so on.” The solutions to fashion consumers’ fit problems are slowly coming together and there’s reason to hope that they’ll link up soon to create brand and size matchmakers that will actually help us find clothes that fit — even if we’re shopping while drinking wine.

Sign up for The Goods’ newsletter. Twice a week, we’ll send you the best Goods stories exploring what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters.

How a false eyelash boom aided North Korea

2019-02-05T22:48:24-05:00

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un speaks. | Pyeongyang Press Corps/Pool/Getty Images

Update: this post has been updated with comments from e.l.f. Cosmetics.

The popular drugstore beauty brand e.l.f. Cosmetics is paying the price for importing 156 shipments of false eyelash kits that contained illegal materials from North Korea between 2012 and 2017. Considering the company’s cruelty-free, vegan ethos, the potential backlash could reach far beyond government sanctions.

The US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced a nearly $1 million settlement for the violation of US sanctions on North Korea on January 31. E.l.f. Beauty CEO Tarang Amin said in an email that the “activity was conducted without e.l.f.’s knowledge or authorization” and that the violation was discovered “during a routine, self-administered audit in early 2017.” Amin said that the eyelash kits “represented less than 1% of e.l.f.’s revenue at the time,” a factor that OFAC gave as a reason for leniency despite the five-year period of violating North Korea sanctions.

Made in China, with help from North Korea

The US government has imposed sanctions on North Korea, officially known as the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), most recently in an effort to contain its nuclear weapons program by restricting the flow of money into the country. Sanctions are enforced by prosecuting US companies like e.l.f. that do business with North Korea.

What makes this case complicated is that e.l.f. wasn’t doing business with North Korea — at least not directly. Stephan Haggard, a University of California San Diego professor and co-author of Hard Target: Sanctions, Inducements, and the Case of North Korea, told Vox that businesses’ knowledge of supply chains can be spotty.

“American firms, and particularly midsize ones, often have complex sourcing chains involving China but do not have the capabilities to really look down their suppliers’ supply chains,” he said.

It may surprise beauty fans to discover that most brands don’t own massive factories where they make their own products. Anyone with money could have a business relationship with a contract manufacturing or private labeling firm and release a full product line — without ever having to see the factory where the goods are made. E.l.f. currently has a team in Shanghai, but like the vast majority of beauty brands, the actual products are made for them according to their specifications by other companies.

E.l.f. Cosmetics’ eyelash kits were made by Chinese firms that purchased and imported some of the materials from North Korea. US companies like e.l.f. are supposed to have systems for tracking the source of everything they use to make their products in order to avoid accidentally funneling money to regimes on the official no-go list.

Even when China purportedly enforces United Nations sanctions on North Korea, businesses can’t always rely on individual companies complying. “In China, smaller and midsize firms similarly are able to evade Chinese sanctions and thus exploit low labor and material costs in jurisdictions like North Korea; this is an example of how the North Koreans are able to avoid sanctions by ‘flying under the radar,’” Haggard said.

OFAC says that e.l.f. had an inadequate or nonexistent system for recording and auditing their materials’ country of origin when the finished kits were imported into the US. Failure to track the origin of materials doesn’t insulate companies from prosecution, and e.l.f. Cosmetics elected to self-report the violation to OFAC upon discovering it in January 2017 and pay a settlement rather than face a fine that could have been as much as $40 million.

The rise of false eyelashes — to the benefit of North Korea

A drugstore false eyelash kit typically contains synthetic or animal-origin fibers meant to resemble eyelashes, which are attached to two strips that can be applied to the natural lash line with some of the included glue. Good lashes can cost several hundred dollars and leave you looking like Jennifer Lopez on the red carpet; bad ones look cheap.

What do cheap falsies look like? Like e.l.f. Cosmetics lashes, according to YouTube reviewers. False lashes were something of a joke or costume product in the past, but the category has exploded, with the start of the boom coinciding with the years e.l.f.’s lash kits contained materials from North Korea. Nielsen reported that false eyelashes were a standout in the beauty category in 2018, with US sales reaching nearly $270 million, up 31 percent in revenue from 2017.

It turns out that false eyelash kits are an easy way to end up with some accidental DPRK in the mix, but manufacturing companies aren’t keeping their North Korean materials a secret. Many Chinese manufacturing firms that advertise on Alibaba, for example, mention that their lash fibers are North Korean mink right in the product title.

In fact, a search on Alibaba for “North Korean Materials” shows that false eyelashes are by far the top product associated with the term. A company called ZM Lash Beauty promises “1 to 3 Days Delivery To U.S.” of their North Korean mink lashes, mentions a “California brand office,” and even touts North Korean materials in two US Amazon lash listings. Just how many brands other than e.l.f. are guilty of similar sanctions violations and simply haven’t discovered the problem or self-reported it is unclear at this point.

The North Korean government appears to have direct involvement in making some finished semi-assembled eyelashes. A US human rights group report on North Korean concentration camps mentions that younger women in the Jongo-ri camp make wigs and false eyelashes.

An inactive AliExpress listing for “North Korea handmade false eyelashes” by a company called Norkmade Lashesis touts six years of experience making OEM lashes, presumably for companies in Qingdao, which is across the Yellow Sea from North Korea. The listing touts Norkmade as “one of the biggest and most professional eyelashes manufacturers in North Korea,” which suggests that the DPRK’s lash trade might not be incidental or particularly hidden at all.

The development of a gulag-backed North Korean false eyelash manufacturing industry would run parallel to Kim Jong Un’s interest in the development of DPRK cosmetics as a whole. E.l.f. Cosmetics responded to a request for comment saying, “the materials were not made in gulags/concentration camps/re-education camps.”

Fast and cruelty-free, but make it cheap

E.l.f. Cosmetics attempts to juggle two beauty trends that make oversight and record-keeping both difficult and necessary: It develops new products very quickly, and it markets itself as a cruelty-free brand. A 2018 profile of e.l.f. in Business of Fashion noted that the company sometimes launches new products in as little as 13 weeks. This relates to a growing trend toward “fast beauty,” meant to imitate the cheap, quick-to-market approach of fast-fashion retailers such as Zara. At the same time, the brand’s September 2018 investor materials tout their “[l]ow cost supply chain.”

“Cruelty-free” is an unregulated claim in the beauty world

E.l.f. Cosmetics advertises itself as both cruelty-free and vegan. “Cruelty-free” is an unregulated claim in the beauty world, sometimes verified by a third-party audit, that is usually taken to mean that a brand does not test products on animals and does not sell products in China, where animal testing of cosmetics is usually required (making products in China is not disqualifying as long as they’re not sold there).

The term “cruelty-free” does not typically indicate that the products are free of animal-derived ingredients — those products are designated as vegan. E.l.f. Cosmetics has long touted its cruelty-free and vegan status in the FAQ section of its website and in emails to cruelty-free beauty bloggers seeking info on its animal testing policies.

Despite earlier claims that “[o]ur products do not contain animal derived ingredients,” e.l.f. partnered with PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) in 2016 to announce that its brushes would now be made with synthetic fibers, making the brand entirely vegan. In light of the use of North Korean mink in Chinese-made false eyelashes and maybe-spurious, maybe-true reports that the DPRK government collects a whole lot of dog fur annually from citizens that could be used to make clothing, brushes, and maybe even false lashes, Vox asked e.l.f. Cosmetics if the materials from North Korea were of animal origin, and e.l.f. replied, “the materials are not of animal origin — they are synthetic materials.”

The announcement of e.l.f. Cosmetics’ settlement last week was met with wry jokes about OFAC going for the most innocuous, low-hanging fruit under President Trump and made barely a ripple in the beauty community, already used to stories of brands behaving badly. Yet the transfer of money to North Korea via products marketed as more ethical than others shouldn’t be overlooked. Consumers demand answers about whether brands test on animals. The same questions need to be asked about the possibility of people involuntarily making false lashes in North Korea.

Want more stories from The Goods by Vox? Sign up for our newsletter here.

How Washing Your Hair Could Help You Survive a Nuclear Blast

2019-02-28T12:01:55-05:00

Shower, yes, but don’t condition your hair after a nuclear blast. | Photo: Ilaria Luciani Photos/Getty Images

Like most people confronted with the possibility that a nuclear weapon or dirty bomb could release radioactive fallout somewhere near me, I’ve become obsessed with how to best wash my hair after such a disaster. Escalating rhetoric between the US president and North Korea has caused many people to wonder how they could survive a nuclear blast. In the event of the unthinkable, knowing a bit about haircare could prove useful.

The federal government’s Ready.gov Nuclear Blast web page recommends that if you’re exposed to nuclear fallout, you should remove your outer clothes, then take a decontamination shower to wash your skin with soap and your hair with shampoo or soap and water — not, I repeat, not conditioner. It explains, “Do not use conditioner in your hair because it will bind radioactive material to your hair, keeping it from rinsing out easily.” It’s rare that the government makes haircare recommendations, so I needed to find out more.

Ready.gov. | Photo: Ready.gov" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Ready.gov" />

I imagined post-blast radiation to function like an unholy ghost, but invisible radiation isn’t the biggest concern. Nuclear fallout is actual, visible stuff: It’s “a fine dust or sand-like material” that emits radiation — you need to get that off and take deep cover while it’s blowing around and burning through its wild, destructive infancy and adolescence.

After removing your outerwear, the next order of business is a decontamination shower. If a nuclear bomb or a dirty bomb goes off and you survive, experts say that you can easily shed 85-95 percent of the radiation on your body just through the removal of outer clothing and a decontamination shower. Yes, water from pipes will probably contain some radiation, but unless a specific warning is issued, use it for washing up anyway. This isn’t the time to blow bottled water on washing your face. Put down the micellar water, dry shampoo, and cleansing wipes and get in a real shower, unless you can’t reach one or getting wet means risking hypothermia.

You can shed 85-95 percent of the radiation on your body just through the removal of outer clothing and a decontamination shower.

While my first instinct would be to take a scalding hot shower and scrub down every inch of my body like a surgeon washing up before entering the operating room, that’s not recommended. After exposure to radiation, new skin nicks, cuts, and irritation caused by cleansing or shaving should be avoided. My old colleague Ran Zwigenberg, assistant professor of Asian studies, history, and Jewish studies at Pennsylvania State University (he’s the author of Hiroshima: The Origins of Global Memory Culture), said that the Japanese government recommended that people cut their hair after the Fukushima accident because it was believed to contain a large amount of radiation. But in most cases, it’s safer to just shampoo your hair rather than crop or shave it.

If you’ve ever compared shampoo and conditioner ingredient lists, you know that there’s sometimes overlap between what’s in each bottle. While the Ready.gov recommendations just mention avoiding hair conditioner, research on decontamination advises that one should use a mild shampoo, and it warns against protein-based conditioners and shampoos for decontamination showers. Another earlier article warns against using protein-based shampoos with conditioners in them. Yet another article simply advises one to avoid conditioner and shampoos that contain conditioner.

To find out why conditioner is a problem, I talked to cosmetic chemist Perry Romanowski, who specializes in haircare and serves as a host of the Beauty Brains podcast. He confirmed via email that conditioners are a problem for decontamination showers because “[c]onditioners are meant to stay behind on the hair whereas shampoos are meant to be washed away.” Ingredients such as “Cationic Surfactants (like cetrimonium chloride), silicone (like Dimethicone), and cationic polymers (like Guar Hydroxypropyltrimonium Chloride)” remain on the hair and can bind radiation to the strands.

Why not just tell people to wash their hair with bar soap while decontaminating?

The good news is that it’s okay to use things like hair conditioner and your favorite shampoo during your next shower, post-decontamination, according to Thomas F. O’Connell, an expert in radiation safety and the Health Physics Society’s homeland security and security screening editor. In fact, things like skincare for your face and body lotion are fine once you’re done decontaminating.

After learning about post-nuclear haircare, I was left wondering why conditioner warnings were emphasized in government recommendations, but shaving, which could result in cuts that weaken the skin barrier, was not. Hair is a great nest for stuff, as I’m sure you’ve discovered if you’ve painted a ceiling or walked under some asshole birds while on the way to an important meeting. But why not just tell people to wash their hair with bar soap while decontaminating, as the USSR did, and make this real simple and safe?

Ready.gov. | Photo: Ready.gov" data-portal-copyright="Photo: Ready.gov" />

Since I started researching for this article, the page that warns people not to use conditioner on their hair after a nuclear blast has gone from standard text with a zoomed-out blast thumbnail to something resembling a MySpace homepage for a death metal band. The new presidential administration doesn’t have time for appointing government officials that would actually track down and dispose of stray nuclear material that could be fashioned into dirty bombs, but there’s always time for setting stock mushroom clouds as webpage backgrounds. Said cloud appears to be a Getty image used frequently around the web on apocalyptic articles such “We All May Be Dead in 2050,” and there’s a wolf face in there if you look at it after reaching caffeine saturation.

Wary of the bureaucracy, I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to determine how the government came to the conclusion that nuclear blast warnings should mention hair conditioner. Shortly after filing my request, FEMA let me know that the information had come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). I filed a FOIA with the CDC, but the agency closed the request and said that its information came from a fairly obscure report.

If you actually view the report, you’ll discover that the only section that mentions conditioner is credited to an earlier handbook, published in 2006. Had I not confirmed with outside experts, I don’t know how I’d feel about getting my current disaster advice from people from 2006 who put emergency service vehicle cartoon clip art in radiation warning symbols — something about this doesn’t feel very well thought-out.

Handbook for Responding to a Radiological Dispersing Device, 2006. | Photo: ORAU.gov" data-portal-copyright="Photo: ORAU.gov" />

A report I found on the CDC’s website called “Detonation of an Improvised Nuclear Device” details how the CDC and FEMA, in partnership with Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE), tested media messages about what to do after the detonation of an improvised nuclear device (aka a dirty bomb, the kind meant to spread fallout and panic).

“In February 2011, six 90-minute focus groups were conducted” at market research facilities “to explore the relevance, comprehensibility, credibility, and effectiveness of selected messages” about what to do after the detonation of a dirty bomb. The focus groups responded positively to the advisement about hair conditioner and overall said that the messages helped them realize that dirty bombs are survivable, and that the advisements would help them feel calm in the event of an emergency.

While not perfect, the Ready.gov recommendations on your post-disaster haircare routine have been made after far more planning and deliberation than the recent statements that could lead to that haircare routine becoming a necessity.