Ulta Beauty Is Encouraging Women To Be Fat

Tristan JusticeDecember 12, 2022

Ulta Beauty is getting on board with the pro-fat movement.

In September, the women’s cosmetics company inaugurated its “Beauty Of…” podcast with a half-hour interview featuring Virgie Tovar, an author and activist who promotes the pro-fat movement under the guise of “body positivity.”

The “Beauty Of…” Podcast, according to its host, celebrity hairstylist David Lopez, is a podcast that hosts the “dreamers and visionaries pushing our ideas of beauty forward.”

Lopez and Tovar started off their conversation with an honest reflection on their own insecurities, breaking down the emotional roller coasters that overweight young people face as they grow old enough to be conscious of their own appearances.

“You emanate joy,” Lopez says to Tovar at the top of the interview, and she does. Her oversized glasses — tinted pink, topped with bangs, and complemented by low-hanging earrings so big they can’t be missed — express a colorful and charismatic yet confident activist who’s not afraid to show some vulnerability to make her point.

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“For me, fatphobia, which is a form of bigotry against higher-weight people, is what took me out of my body,” Tovar said of her own experience.

“Once I learned fatphobia, I had a sense of ‘this is my body, and this is me,’” Tovar added. “There was a separation, and when I was a kid, those two things weren’t separate ever. They were one and the same, and I think the truth is that was all of us on some level.”

But she also probably appears confident and comfortable in her own skin because she’s written a book to justify obesity. Most obese people aren’t comfortable, and they’re usually not comfortable with their obesity for good reason. Because being obese isn’t comfortable. Try going on a walk wearing an extra 100 pounds in weight and see if you’re comfortable.

Tovar goes on to break down so-called “fatphobia” in greater detail, explaining how “‘fat activism’ is sort of the response to ‘fat phobia.’”

“In fact,” she says, “fat phobia is an actual legitimate form of discrimination. It aligns with other types of discrimination, like around race or gender, or, you know, or any number of marginalized identities.”

But the problem with “fat activism” is that its message is one of apathy and helplessness on the most pressing public health crisis of our time. Tovar says this herself (emphasis ours):

[‘Fat activism’ is] essentially kind of an intersectional politic that looks at ‘fat phobia’ and says ‘this is wrong, there’s nothing wrong with being fat, this is totally a natural part of body diversity. Yes fat people have thriving, wonderful, beautiful lives, yes fat people are desirable and absolutely fat people should be protected from things like medical discrimination and the wage gap.

There’s nothing wrong with being fat so long as there’s nothing wrong with being unhealthy,