Dear Gossips,
As we’ve seen, nostalgia is having a pop culture moment. You know what else is having a pop culture moment?
Grossness.
Oh so NOW you’re all over my sh-t? If you’ve been reading this site since the beginning, you are familiar with my obsession with gross sh-t: pimples, poo, and all manner of nastiness. But suddenly it’s trendy – please, where have you been?
The CBC just aired a documentary this weekend about The Power of Poo, pretty much my favourite subject. Every day for years I’ve been wanting to talk to people about poo, my poo specifically – how I wait for it, how long it takes to brew, whether or not it was worth it. Poo is finally being appreciated, which is great. But what about the poo crusaders, like me, who’ve spent years being mocked for our early adoption? Do we get credit for being ahead of the curve?
The best article I read online yesterday was at Vox, about farts. Farting is a human necessity. You can pretend you’re too elegant to fart, you can ignore its existence, but then you’d be missing out on a really interesting discussion about what qualifies as a true fart and how a fart, in some animals, isn’t actually air but… liquid!? This is what’s non-scientifically called a “pseudo-fart”. Octopuses are pseudo-farters. They fart out a stream of water to move around. And some snakes use farts as a weapon – literally. Jacek has weaponised his farts in our home but there’s a certain kind of snake that farts to ward off predators.
And finally, my hero, Sandra Lee, aka Dr Pimple Popper, who has taken her career to the next level by going global with pus extraction. One day, Duana and I will dedicate a segment on Show Your Work to the work of Dr Pimple Popper because what she’s done with zits and blackheads and cysts is, quite simply, revolutionary. Think about what they say about entrepreneurs, about vision, about maximising on opportunities. She put well-produced close-up videos online of herself AT WORK, using her education, showing off her skills, and all of that is now becoming a television show. They’re casting it now. They’re casting people… but really, they’re casting people’s pimples.
Refinery29 did a great interview with Dr Pimple Popper a couple of weeks ago about her business, about how she came to build her brand, and there’s some gossip in there too – about an Oscar-winning actress who refuses to admit she’s a popoholic.
Every popaholic knows the feeling, that rush, the full-body sensation that comes over you when you watch one of these popping videos, the moment of exhilaration combined with nausea that courses through your veins when the money shot oozes out. For me, it’s the tingling in my extremities, I get short of breath, sometimes to the point of actually gasping. In a way, it’s like an orgasm.
We are a community now. Of gross sh-t worshippers. Thanks to the internet.
Yours in gossip,
Lainey