Brittany Luce

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Do you care or are you so over it?

Because people on and offline have started bragging about how numb they are to pretty much everything these days.

You can see it in the Gen Z pout, the pride of expressionless Botox chic, the boastful statements from people saying, I don't follow the news.

I'm thinking about this now because a few weeks ago, I had this conversation with beauty writer Jessica DeFino about this lifeless aesthetic that's all over social media and the beauty world.

Here's how she describes this cultural obsession with numbness.

a culture writer who wrote a piece about why we are so obsessed with lobotomies, which is very relevant to this conversation, and you'll find out why soon.

Rain, Sophie, welcome to It's Been a Minute.

Hello, hello.

I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident.

Okay, I want to start off with just kind of like a survey of the land.

The numb girl aesthetic, which is what we've been calling it on our team.

What would you say are the top three defining features?

Give us a picture of what this is all about to you.

It's like there's a desire to be seen or a desire to be seen in a certain way, whether that is beautiful or cool or even just to have people acknowledge your presence.

But without seeming like you want those things, that seems like that's a big part of it as well.

sort of saying that you don't actually care when you um you bring up charlie xcx in this like very much like ironic cool girl detachment it also makes me think of gabrielle like the model who's like a friend of hers i've seen photos of gabrielle like before she's famous she's always been beautiful but there is this kind of like clean cut

sort of healthy, tan, all-American sheen to her in a way before she became famous.

And now after, very often she's adopted this like, almost like Lauren Bacall, like putting the chin down, letting the eyes float up so that there's some white space underneath like her irises.

And she has like this, you know, like kind of notable pout.