Introduction

This chapter will focus on the consumption of counterfeit and illicit beauty products, including how consumers buy counterfeits, the importance and symbolic value of buying branded beauty and the contexts in which cosmetic enhancements are used. Alongside this, the broader instrumental motivations that drive the research participants’ beauty consumption will be examined, including how beauty and bodily enhancement products are an act of self-transformation connected to professional and socio-economic success. In this chapter I assess the lived experiences of consumer lifestyles in the context of an absence of meaningful opportunities for fulfilling employment in order to examine the extent to which young people are governed by competition and hyper-comparison. This work provides an extensive view of the nature of beauty and counterfeit consumption to exemplify some of the harms generated from commitment to and conformity with the norms and values of consumer culture in late-capitalist society.

Far from adulting

As set out in Chapter 2, the significant restructuring of both the economic and political sphere in the UK has impacted young people's entry and initial experiences of paid labour. Compared to previous generations in which there was a relative fixity in relation to geography and jobs across a working life (Kumar, 1988), many young people are forced to take insecure and low-paid work, often within the service sector, and generally experience greater levels of precarity across their working lives (Kalleberg and Vallas, 2018).