The Beauty Industry Discovers the Last Frontier

At some point someone in a product development meeting said: we’ve covered the face, the neck, the décolletage, the hands—what’s left? And then they looked further south. The Danish brand The Perfect V sells a product called VV Cream, a highlighter designed specifically for the vulva. A glow-up for the area between the legs. Luminosity where previously there was only darkness and, presumably, expectation.

I’ve been trying to figure out how I feel about this and keep landing in different places. The beauty industry has spent decades convincing people that every visible surface of their body requires intervention—now it’s moved underground, so to speak, which is either the logical conclusion of a decades-long project or a step too far even by those standards. Skin texture is not a malfunction. Razor burn is not something requiring correction. The intimacy of getting undressed with someone is supposed to involve some departure from the curated, illuminated reality of the above-the-waist world.

And yet. If someone I’m in bed with wants to put shimmer on her pussy, I’m not going to file a philosophical objection. That would be an insane thing to do. The product’s marketing is careful to note that oral contact post-application is not recommended, which is the kind of caveat that makes the whole thing feel like a metaphor—beauty designed to be seen rather than touched, glamour that requires distance to be maintained. It’s very twenty-first century. It’s very something.

The real market for this, I suspect, has nothing to do with men at all. It’s about the ritual itself—the privacy of a beauty practice that exists entirely for its own sake, self-directed, nothing to do with whether anyone is watching. The industry figured out long ago that the best customer buys for herself, not for an audience. The last frontier is always personal.