Session 469: The Problem with Pretty

When Dr. Allycin Powell-Hicks wanted to write her dissertation on Black women and beauty, her graduate program told her the topic wasn't serious. Her research went on to reveal something the field didn't expect: Black women reported a stronger sense of control over their bodies than white women, and the more connected a Black woman felt to her culture, the stronger that sense of control became. More than a decade later, that "unserious" research has become The Problem with Pretty (Hachette), a book about how beauty standards get wired into the brain — and how to get free of them. Dr. Joy sits down with Dr. Ally — psychofuturist, beauty and perception expert, and founder of Doux Consulting — to unpack what's happening to self-image in the social media era. They cover the looksmaxxing phenomenon pulling in Gen Z, how "Instagram face" is flattening the diversity of faces we see, why the confidence boost after a cosmetic procedure tends to fade within months, and the difference between beauty and glamour. Dr. Ally also shares her own story, from scrubbing her skin with Comet as a kid to falling in love with her complexion at an HBCU, and makes the case for beauty as ritual, resistance, and a tool for self-definition rather than a performance for everyone else. Resources & Announcements Want to reflect on this conversation in community? Join us inside our Patreon https://community.therapyforblackgirls.com/ community where we’re unpacking this episode together. You can now catch episodes of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@therapyforblackgirls. Be sure to subscribe to get new episodes every week. Did you know you can leave us a voice note with your questions for the podcast? If you have a question you'd like some feedback on, topics you'd like to hear covered, or want to suggest movies or books for us to review, drop us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls https://memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls and let us know what’s on your mind. We just might share it on the podcast. Grab your copy of Sisterhood Heals. https://www.sisterhoodheals.com/ Where to Find Our Guest Instagram https://www.instagram.com/allycinhicks/ Website https://www.allycinhicks.com TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/@dr.ally Grab your copy of The Problem with Pretty https://bookshop.org/a/20534/9781538772713 Stay Connected​https://click.convertkit-mail.com/27uv20p9mpioh8edr34s8ug63w344hg/58hvh8ug08p6wzc6/dGhlcmFweWZvcmJsYWNrZ2lybHMuY29tb3JibGFja2dpcmxzLmNvbS9wYXRyZW9u Is there a topic you'd like covered on the podcast? Submit it at therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/mailbox. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, check out the directory at https://www.therapyforblackgirls.com/directory. Grab your copy of our guided affirmation and other TBG Merch at therapyforblackgirls.com/shop https://therapyforblackgirls.com/shop. The hashtag for the podcast is #TBGinSession. Make sure to follow us on social media: Instagram: @therapyforblackgirls https://www.instagram.com/therapyforblackgirls Facebook: @therapyforblackgirls https://www.facebook.com/therapyforblackgirls Our Production Team Executive Producers: Dennison Bradford & Gabrielle Collins Director of Podcast & Digital Content: Ellice Ellis Producers: Tyree Rush & Ndeye Thioubou Production Assistant: Bria Mosley See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:10Speaker 00

  Welcome to the Therapy for Black Girls podcast, a weekly conversation about mental health, personal development, and all the small decisions we can make to become the best possible versions of ourselves. I'm your host, Dr. Joy Harden Bradford, a licensed psychologist in Atlanta, Georgia. For more information or to find a therapist in your area, visit our website at therapyforblackgirls.com. While I hope you love listening to and learning from the podcast, it is not meant to be a substitute for a relationship with a licensed mental health professional.

• 0:56Speaker 00

  Hey, y'all. Thanks so much for joining me for session 469 of the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. We'll get right into our conversation after a word from our sponsors.

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  Do you remember the dress? The one that broke the internet? Half of us were swearing it was blue and black, the other half ready to fight over gold and white. My guest today says that dress holds a clue to everything. If two sets of eyes can look at the same photo and see two different colors, what else has the world trained us to see when we look at a face? Or in the mirror? That's where Dr. Alison Powell Hicks comes in. You might know her as Dr. Ally, a psychologist who has been studying beauty and perception since graduate school, back when her program told her the topic wasn't serious enough for a dissertation. Her new book, The Problem with Pretty, is her answer. In this conversation, we get into why your brain responds to a beautiful face the same way it responds to dessert?

• 5:25Speaker 00

  What Instagram face is doing to a whole generation? The surprising thing her research revealed about Black women and body image? And how to keep the joy and ritual of beauty without performing for everybody else's eyes? This one will change how you look in the mirror in the best way possible. Press play and let's dive in.

• 5:48Speaker 00

  Well, thank you so much for joining us again, Dr. Ally.

• 5:51Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me. I'm always excited to talk to you and your audience.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, the community so appreciates all the things that you have to share. So you have been in this business for quite some time and done a lot of work at the intersection of neuroscience and beauty. I'm curious to hear what made The Problem with Pretty feel so urgent for you to write right now?

• 6:13Speaker 06

  Listen, it's a little dualistic for me. One, I feel like it's, it needed to happen right now because of what's happening on social media. What we're seeing in the ways in which we are internalizing society's messages at breakneck lightning speed? Because the messages that we absorb maybe in our childhoods, because you know, I'm a girl of the eighties. I'm a gal of a certain age, right? So I've been blessed, because you know, you're like 22, so. I've been blessed to have gotten messages in a number of different packages over the course of my life. And I'm watching it come faster and faster and faster at people. And it's changing the way people see. themselves, it's changing the way people relate to themselves because beauty isn't just

• 6:57Speaker 06

  something that is external, it is something that reshapes the ways in which we relate to our own internal existence and our own being. And it starts from really young. So that's one's reason why I think it needs to happen now. And on the other hand, I wrote my dissertation on this. I wrote my thesis on this. So I've been talking about this for over 10 years. This is something that I've seen as a challenge in the ways in which in particular women, but obviously everybody, but in ways in which particularly women see themselves. And so the connection of this having been a problem for a long time, plus the added speed right now, I felt, hey, there's no time but the present.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  Hmm. Is there anything in particular that you feel like you've seen, especially on social media, that really felt like, okay, this needs to be addressed?

• 7:41Speaker 06

  Everything, everything I've seen on social media. But I think the looks maxing phenomena is something that has particularly alerted me. Are you hip to looks maxing?

• 7:50Speaker 00

  I've heard this term. I don't know that I completely know what you're talking about, though. Do inform us.

• 7:56Speaker 06

  Listen, we don't have time to even really start talking about this. It is a dive that will consume you. But to be brief, it is a population of younger people and they're this is like teenagers, early twenties, Gen Z, that are experiencing this rejection from society. There's some connection between looks maxing and incel community, but they're not necessarily the same community. But it's basically this perspective that if I'm not six foot five and have a chiseled jaw and I'm super buff, I'm never going to date. So either give up entirely, that's the incel community, but the looks maxing community says, no, I'm gonna take steroids and do things that might be a little risky. There's this phenomenon where they're doing like hitting

• 8:41Speaker 06

  themselves in the face with hammers. And it's called bone breaking. So they can like make their bones more dense. Yeah, girl.

• 8:47Speaker 00

  Wow. Wow.

• 8:48Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:49Speaker 06

  And so what I'm seeing is, I'm not diagnosing anybody, we're not diagnosing anybody, but like this contagion of a dysmorphia. Right? A lot of people who are feeling very alien in their body and are connecting their bodies very rigidly to the ways in which their lives will turn out. And so I was like, okay, we've got to do something. We've got to help people understand that beauty is something that society judges us for, but we're a part of society too. And we can start to create this change and this shift and help people understand that what you see on the outside is not necessarily an indication of what's happening on the inside, by any stretch. And so I wanted to start the conversation in a really real way so we can actually start talking about it and hopefully creating change.

• 9:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you already mentioned that the term beauty doesn't just refer to what's on the outside. So for the purposes of this conversation, how are you defining beauty?

• 9:38Speaker 06

  There's a number of different ways, but I'm defining beauty as, on one hand, what society sees in your face, your body. There is obviously that definition that we can't escape from, right? But one thing I highlight in the book is that beauty isn't static. It doesn't stay in one place. And I literally have an entire chapter where I just break down the like 100 years worth of beauty and show you how just about every seven to 10 years, we're seeing major pivots. We've seen the girls get the BBLs and we've seen the girls get them taken out, right? We're, we are watching the norms change. So there is that externalized perspective on what beauty is. But then there's the very real societal definition of what beauty is. There's this, these ebbs, these flows, these transitions. And then there's how it is we actually feel about who it is we are on the inside, who

• 10:22Speaker 06

  it is we are really, and how we as a culture identify what is beautiful for us and to us.

• 10:28Speaker 00

  So I'm glad you brought up your dissertation because I definitely wanted to ask you about that. And I think it's beautiful because most of us do not use our dissertations to then create a book. So I love that you're actually creating a book that's almost like a spinoff of your dissertation. But your dissertation compared black women who had pursued cosmetic surgery procedures with those who hadn't. And it started with two hypotheses about how their self-image might differ. Can you talk about the results of that study and how it really shifted you in thinking about women who choose surgery?

• 10:58Speaker 06

  Let me tell you, the outcome was not as sparkly as I wanted it to be or as clean because maybe I was a grad student.

• 11:03Speaker 00

  A baby researcher.

• 11:04Speaker 06

  Didn't know, didn't know. But.

• 11:08Speaker 06

  My first study looked at the black women as compared to white women. What I was really interested in was how black women had a higher sense of body control. So when we're talking about objectified body consciousness, the ways in which we view our bodies as objects or as not objects, there are like three factors. There's surveillance, which is how much we observe ourselves and compare ourselves to others in society. Then there's shame. Do we internalize a level of shame from not coming up or not aligning with society in a way that we think we should? And then there's a factor that's the opposite of that, which is control. So how much control do we feel over creating change in our body? Does that mean I can go work out or I can change my hair or I can do whatever? So I found that black women had higher levels of body control than white women.

• 11:53Speaker 06

  And I don't know why, but in my brain, I just didn't feel like that was going to be the case. I felt society is so hard on us that we're going to feel worse. And so actually reinforcing some of the research that black women actually have higher self-esteem. And it's partly, I didn't find this in my dissertation, I wasn't looking at this, but it's partly because we integrate other things, other than just physicality, into our sense of beauty, like personality, character. So there's more to beauty in the black community than just looking at like the width between of a person's eyes or the length of their philtrum, right? We're seeing all this stuff. And in my second study, I did my dissertation. I looked at just African-American women and I focused on ethnic identity. What I found was that if an African-American woman's ethnic identity was higher,

• 12:38Speaker 06

  so the more she felt connected to her culture, the more she felt she could participate in things that people in her culture did, the more body control she had over women who felt less connected to their culture. And then my school did not want me to study beauty.

• 12:54Speaker 06

  It was not a serious topic and some of the professors were very unhappy. Luckily, the head of my department was very supportive. And so I think I turned it into a book because I'm petty. And I was looking like... Right. I was like, okay, y'all didn't think I could do it, but I'm going to do it and I'm going to make it something marketable. And I felt like it was something helpful, right? Because as we talk about culture and we talk about how, especially in the black community, those of us that were impacted by the diaspora and slavery, our culture was ripped from us. And this starts to give me a little bit more insight as to why. Because if we don't know who we are, you as society, you, white society, patriarchal society gets to tell me.

• 13:35Speaker 06

  And then who gets to be in control of my body? If I have higher body control when I know who I am and who my ancestors are and where I came from. So now who's in control of me when I don't know anything about myself?

• 13:47Speaker 06

  And I feel like we, we've got to take that control back and be really honest with ourselves about it and be really like, like strategic. Like we're not just taking back our culture because it feels good. It's because it also has so many psychological benefits.

• 13:59Speaker 00

  Hmm. I'm curious, Dr. Ellie, and I don't think you've done an update to this research. But do you feel like if you did a study now examining black women's kind of ideas about cosmetic surgery? Do you think you'd find something different than what you found when you did the dissertation?

• 14:14Speaker 06

  Well, I would say specifically with cosmetic surgery, absolutely. Because what I did find was that there were particular procedures that black women were getting. And I think the term I used and the term they were using at the time, so if it's old school, please don't cancel me, was uh, de-ethnification, which was kind of like procedures that were all about looking more mainstream, air quotes, white, more Eurocentric, narrowing noses, narrowing, I think, I don't think there was like lip surgeries, but I think I was just starting to talk about like the non-invasive procedures. But there was definitely a lot of rhinoplasty that was being done and procedures that were assumed to, to make people look less African American. And now, just from what I see in the zeitgeist, that is not what is happening.

• 14:57Speaker 06

  You do see some people getting rhinoplasty, but it's for black features. Like people don't want to look more like a person of another culture group. They want to look more like themselves just five years ago or after having a really good nap. And so it's not so much like, I want to reshape my face and become another culture. I want to be a best version of me. So that's what I would assume I would see. And I am trying to get another study going if you want to really like quietly know. I'm really trying to do something cool, so.

• 15:22Speaker 00

  Okay, you heard that exclusive here first. We love it.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  So in the book, you write that when we see something beautiful, it activates the same reward centers in the brain as things like food and sex. How does that biological response shake the ways that we treat people in real life?

• 15:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, we release dopamine, we release oxytocin, we release endorphins when we see someone beautiful, something beautiful. And what that does is it causes us to want to do it again. So when we see someone that is beautiful to us, because it doesn't have to necessarily be just what society tells us is beautiful. It can be anyone that is stunning to me. You want to interact with them again. You want to be around that person. You want to do it again so you can feel the experience. And so it creates this reinforcement loop, positive reinforcement.

• 16:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, you mentioned earlier the images that we were able to see when we were younger, right? We had things like Moesha and Sister Sister and like different kinds of images around like black girls being beautiful that I think we were able to connect with. And I think that is largely missing kind of in media today. And so something else that you talked about in the book is that many of us are able to trace the point at which when we were young, we realized we were not society's ideas of beauty. Can you talk about the impact that has on the psyche for young girls, but also for what that looks like when we become women?

• 16:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it is obviously it's jarring to you from like to a spiritual level. Because what happens is it's not just, oh, I'm not cute. It connects to our sense of survival. Because as humans, we need one another to survive, right? We develop these great frontal lobes so that we can mirror one another, connect with one another, empathize with one another, because we do really bad at surviving by ourselves. We need our community. I can't build this house. I don't know what I'm doing. I need to convince someone to come here and do it. And so beauty has become paired to our survival. Because it makes it more likely that people will help you. Like there was a study that literally showed that when you had an attractive woman on the side of the road and her car was broken down, more people stopped for her than a less classically attractive person or less attractive woman.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  So literally your sense of survival, and I think that we can sense that when we're young. And so being raised, there's even these studies in differential parental solicitude, which is a complicated way of saying parents invest in the kid they think is the most valuable. And so if that parent's sense of value, let's say, aligns with beauty, which unfortunately kind of happens, like, you know, talking about colorism in black families and Asian families, so they might pour into the child that they think would be more successful. So it reshapes the ways in which we see ourselves, which can reshape the way we see how we're going to succeed in life, and we begin to absorb that. They talk about how, when you have like a pretty baby, I'm using a lot of air quotes here, y'all, y'all, please watch this.

• 18:06Speaker 06

  When you have a baby that's considered more attractive, people smile at them more. They hold them longer. And so that child begins to absorb this idea that I'm important. My presence makes people smile. My existence makes people happy. And this is referred to as the beauty is good principle, that we assume goodness of people that are considered beautiful in our society. And the inverse, right, when you realize like, oh, maybe I'm not that, right? The inverse is the, and there it's not a term for it as far as I know, but I'm sure there is someone has coined something, is that we can actually be in a sense in danger if we do not align with our culture's beauty standards.

• 18:50Speaker 06

  And this might seem like a stretch, but I even think like Black Lives Matter. The conversations that we were having around black folks, black bodied folks, being assaulted, injured, killed more by police officers, it didn't have anything to do with any records. It didn't have anything to do even with actions, because it was happening within milliseconds of officers showing up. It had to do with appraisal. They saw someone with a particular aesthetic, with a particular look, and they immediately reacted based on the way society has taught them to react. And that's what I want us to start to dismantle, is this knee jerk, immediate survival response, so that we can start to sit down and actually process, yeah, I may have been excluded because of dark skin, but what does that actually mean?

• 19:35Speaker 06

  Does it mean that I'm actually not worthy of love or care just because I'm more melanated than somebody else? Of course not. Let me assess what that means for me. And then in society, obviously, we've got to stop treating people like this.

• 19:48Speaker 00

  And so what does it look like to actually slow that down? Because as you mentioned, it is such a knee jerk reaction a lot of times. So what does it look like to actually slow that down?

• 19:56Speaker 06

  Yeah, it looks like taking a breath. When you're walking down the street and you're in a reasonably safe place, that doesn't mean that you're immediately judging someone and saying, oh, that person's this, this height, bad height, this, whatever you're judging off of. And just really sitting down and getting, taking an opportunity to say like, what is this person's behaviors? Not just their appearance. Because we put ourselves in danger when we just judge how a person acts based on how they look. And in the book, I use examples of like serial killers, right? When you're watching the news and like something horrible has happened, people say, oh, you never would have thought that we would have been this guy. He just always looks so nice. And I, it always makes me think, well, what does a nice person look like?

• 20:38Speaker 06

  What does a mean person look like? Help me understand how a character trait or an attitude can become evident on a person's face or in their body. And I don't think there is a look of a nice person. I think that can lull us into a sense of comfort that can be dangerous. So it's about, is this person making furtive movements? I call it being squirrely, right? Are they being a little squirrely on the street? Maybe you avoid the squirrely person. Not just a person who looks a certain way, right? So you're looking at, or if you're dating, has this person done some red flags? Have there been some incidents that would lead you to believe that like, hey, maybe this isn't a really good match for me. It's not just about how they look. And so it's about slowing down that immediate kind of like amygdala limbic system response and allowing ourselves to tap

• 21:22Speaker 06

  into that frontal lobe, that executive network, that processes a little slower, but gives us a little bit more information from multiple areas of our brain. So it's about behaviors, not just aesthetic.

• 21:33Speaker 00

  More from our conversation after the break.

• 21:40Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions, each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help like the way forward? How do we best show up for each other? Tune in to find out. Listen on the iHeartRadio app,

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  Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Keeping your money safe from fraud deserves to be a priority, and Cash App treats it that way. With security lock, Cash App requires a successful Face ID or biometric authentication to access your account. It's like your money is protected by your own personal bodyguard, even if your phone is lost or stolen. Plus, if you're about to send money to someone new and Cash App notices something looks a little bit off or that you might be falling for a scam, it'll send you a warning before the money is sent to confirm that everything looks right. Download Cash App and spend with peace of mind today. Download Cash App today and make your money work for you. Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App's bank partners, prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank,

• 23:14Speaker 00

  Member FDIC, Cash App Visa Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and the Bancorp Bank, N.A., pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton Prepaid Card, Sutton Debit Flex Card, and Bancorp Debit Flex Card. Discounts and promotions provided by Cash App, a Block Incorporated brand. Visit cashapp/legal/podcast for full disclosures.

• 23:41Speaker 03

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• 25:49Speaker 00

  You mentioned, Dr. Ali, that a part of the writing of the book is a petty revenge for people talking about your dissertation not being very serious, but I really appreciate that because I think that's so often the things that it feels like most materially impact women, and Black women in particular, are often seen as frivolous, right? So things like beauty and like makeup and those kinds of things. But we know, as you just outlined, like there are real impacts to our mental and physical health related to beauty. So what would you say to people who talk about like, oh, this is so frivolous? Like, why is this even something important for us to look at and talk about?

• 26:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I think that's a big part of the conversation, right? Because people are like, girl, is this really, we're at war, honey. We're like.

• 26:32Speaker 06

  But because it shapes so much of everything we do, think and say, because it shapes how safe we are in the world, there's like actual real life impact, right? For example, with the Crown Act, we as Black women really understood how our lives were being reshaped by the way we wear our hair at work. What, are you guys kidding me? Whether I'm wearing a curl one day, a braid the next, a bun the third, or hair extensions, I should be allowed to wear whatever I want. And the fact that there was actual penalization of people weren't getting raises, people were getting fired, they weren't being able to climb up the ladder just because of something as silly as hair. It seems silly, but it actually changes things for us. And so, and I think it's like a little bit of gaslighting that happens to us.

• 27:16Speaker 06

  They tell women, it's not about how you look. You just didn't cut the muster. You weren't there enough. You weren't paying enough attention. You didn't go to the right school. When in reality, you start to look at who's actually in these C suites. For example, are they actually more talented? Often not. Often they make people feel the dopamine when they come into the office. It's, oh, you remind me of myself when I was your age. They feel the dopamine, they feel the endorphins, they feel the oxytocin when they're in that person's presence. And they attach that good feeling with they must be good at their job. That's called the halo effect. When there's one thing about a person when you're initially introduced to them that is positive to you. So if it's beauty, if they have the right, you know,

• 28:00Speaker 06

  the education that you really want them to have, it can be that thing. But once they have that initial thing, it's hard for you to see anything else. You're like, oh, they must be super qualified because they're stunning. They look just like me when I was 25. And that's why the more of us we get in those positions, the more opportunity we'll have to spread out the positivity. But it's not something that is trivial. It feels trivial. I wish it was more trivial. But it actually is very real and we are actually treated very differently when we present in different, like we wear different outfits or when we're like you wear makeup, you get dressed up. People actually treat us differently. Unfortunately, they shouldn't. I'm not supporting that.

• 28:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, and I'm glad you said that because that's the next question I want to ask you is given what we know about, oh, if I make these people feel comfortable, then I may be more likely to get a promotion or even get the job. But we also know that causes, I think, some internal tension around like, okay, I don't really feel like this is me. So how do you navigate that tension when we live in a capitalist world, right? We gotta work, we gotta do these things. Like, how do you navigate that tension?

• 29:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think this, the central concept for me is de-centering. Right? Because I'm not here to tell women, like, this book is not about, wear this hair, you'll get a better job. Wear this makeup, you're, you'll get a boyfriend. That's the exact, that's not the message for me at all. It is about aligning with your true beauty. It is about acknowledging, yes, we have this world in which this is what's happening. I break down the biology, some of the, you know, evolutionary things that are behind it. I break down the sociology, the ways in which we perceive and how our perceptions are shifted by society. But I by no standard or by no means believe that it's correct. I actually believe a lot of our perceptions of beauty are faulty. And are bathed in white supremacy, bathed in capitalistic perspectives.

• 29:44Speaker 06

  They had to minimize and kind of like truncate beauty and make it this very small thing so they could sell us products so we could try to get it. Right? It's a hustle. The beauty standard system is a hustle. And so my goal is to liberate women from beauty. So that you can actually find beauty in things that are beautiful to you on your actual human body that you have right now. Not the body you think you want to have in 10 years after you do X, Y, and Z. The actual body right now with the fupa and with the lopsided boobs and the eyes, one of my eyes is higher than the other, like this one's a little lower. Who, love it. Wabi-sabi is great. Like to learn to truly and authentically find beauty where we are, where it is, because there actually is beauty there.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  Like, I'm not trying to do some like gaslighty, oh, everything is, no, actually and factually. If you can change your perspective to see something is not attractive, you can change your perspective to understand that it actually is. Do you remember that golden white dress versus the blue and black dress?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  Mm-hmm, yes. I was like, golden white, because I always saw it as blue and black.

• 30:49Speaker 06

  White. I only see this golden white. Right? So if two people right here, two, you're a very intelligent person, right? Our two eyeballs can see one image as being two different colors. Who in the world is to tell us that we are not seeing a face differently, a body differently, based on societal cues? Because there's evidence to show that society can actually reshape the way we perceive. So the reason some people see it as gold and white and some people see it as black and blue, one explanation is the time of day you wake up. If you wake up earlier, you tend to see it as gold and white because you see more daylight hours. And if you wake up a little later, you tend to see it as blue and black because you assume it's under internal, like it's lit by a light inside of a room.

• 31:34Speaker 06

  And the dress is blue and black, by the way. If something as trivial as being an early morning person, being a slightly later morning person can change the way we perceive things, why wouldn't something else change the way we perceive things? It's a hustle. And I want us to be free of it because I think that as Black women, we are often the ones who are penalized under this system. And to me, that is fundamentally unfair and untrue.

• 31:59Speaker 00

  What do you say, Dr. Ellie, about how like our self-image is created and how these conversations around beauty actually inform that?

• 32:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think our self-image is created in a number of different places, right? It starts with our, the nuclear group, whoever kind of starts our life with us. That could be siblings, that could be cousins, that could be friends, caregivers, whomever is around us. And that we start to see ourselves in their reflection. Because children unconsciously, right, we're always, we're absorbing, they say we take in 75% of the knowledge we're ever going to know by the time we're around seven years old. And we're taking in things like cultural, unspoken things, we're taking in how men treat women, how women treat men, how adults treat children, and language, and the dynamics of language, and the dynamics of hierarchy. If you have come from a community with hierarchy. And so you can start to absorb those things just by observing early in life.

• 32:50Speaker 06

  And because when you're young, you don't have a ton of language, a lot of those assumptions we absorb from society just sit in our unconscious. And we don't have an opportunity to really challenge them because we just assume that they're normal, typical, the way things are. And so as we get older, we just, we just carry these narratives, you know, we call them a lot, like these stories, these tapes, we just carry them around with us and we never question them. And so I'm saying, I think it's time for us to really sit down and question like, what is attractive to me, to us? Why can't we construct it to be more reflective of a real person? It shouldn't be this AI-generated person that doesn't actually exist. It's the real person that is actually standing in front of you.

• 33:35Speaker 00

  Oh, now you bring up a great point around AI, right? And, you know, oh, so many questions swirling now. Because you kind of started the conversation talking about like how social media has really kind of lit this with gasoline, right? Like, because we are so often performing in ways and kind of sharing pieces of our lives on social media, we are kind of really forced to see ourselves through the perspective of other people's eyes. So can you talk more about like how social media really has impacted the ways that we even see ourselves? And is there like, can we go back from this? Because as you mentioned AI, like it feels like now there's even more beyond just the social media. Now there are like additional stories and like realities being created by things that are not actually real.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is exhausting. Listen. So one way in which I think we've really seen this is back in the day when I did my research, right? People were going to cosmetic surgeons offices because obviously I had to spend time in cosmetic surgery offices to get my research done. And they were bringing in pictures of celebrities. They were like, give me Halle's nose, give me Beyonce's cheeks, right? And now they're bringing in filtered photos of them from Snapchat or Instagram or TikTok. And they're like, can I look like this filtered version of myself? Or they're putting themselves through an AI and they're saying, can we just perfect this and bring this here and da, da, da, da? And so like you've said earlier, it literally, we're working with gas now. Like it has increased so much. And so what we're actually also seeing is, have you heard of Instagram face?

• 35:01Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 35:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so we're now.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Tell us more for people who have not heard of Instagram face.

• 35:06Speaker 06

  So Instagram face or like, I really think it's TikTok face because that's where I be.

• 35:13Speaker 06

  I'm a TikTok rat. Anyway, but basically what you're seeing is these, because we have a lot of different filters, but they're all doing the same thing to our faces. They are making our chin smaller, lips are puffier, they're minimizing everyone's nose and making your eyes look like you're two years old. And so people are seeing these facial features that are Eurocentric in nature. And so everyone's getting the same surgery. So we're seeing kind of the same face being churned out again and again and again. Some people also refer to it kind of as like the Kardashian face because they marketed the template for the Instagram face. And then I've also identified the Mar-a-Lago face. There is also that on the conservative side. Yes, girl.

• 35:50Speaker 00

  Oh, kind of like the Erica Kirk kind of face, that kind of thing. Got it. Okay.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  Heavy eyeliner, lots of filler. It's a, it's a little bit, it's Instagram face adjacent, but it's a little bit more, I don't want to use the word harsh, but it is a little bit harsher, more angles. So we're starting to see these kind of like facial features, these types emerging and we're getting less diversity. Like, you know, when we were younger, you saw so many different types of faces. In media, you got to see the heart shaped face girls, the round, the oval, the square jaw, everyone was a little different. And now we're seeing like more of a unification, which does concern me when it comes to young girls because we're all born different.

• 36:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  And I want us to be able to appreciate our differences and actually, factually love them and understand that they are actually stunning.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  Mm hmm. What happens to women who are perceived as too beautiful?

• 36:41Speaker 06

  Okay, so I did a little video about Megan Thee Stallion. Okay, I don't want to bring no drama to your page.

• 36:48Speaker 06

  Christian, you talk about the wrong thing and everyone's gonna be mad about something that you didn't talk about.

• 36:51Speaker 00

  It's okay.

• 36:52Speaker 06

  But there's like a lot of really interesting studies that are out that talk about how women that are like very beautiful, very attractive for their culture. People assume they must just have all these relationships and they're just always dating and they're like doing all the things and they're with the best quote unquote guys. Whereas in reality, they end up getting a lot of attention. So there's a higher level of attention. They walk in a room, a lot of people are like, oh, look at her, look at her. But less people actually approach them. And there's no guarantee that they will have a better quality, long-term relationship. What actually is happening is there's a pullback, and this is like heterosexual relationships too. That's what I'm speaking about. But there is kind of like a pullback where men, and there's evolutionary theory behind this as well, may get a little bit more worried about them.

• 37:36Speaker 06

  Because men may actually be a little bit more concerned about those women because they feel like, because they're so attractive, there are a lot of other men interested in dating them. And that because of that, they won't have as good of a chance at being with them. So there's actually this phenomenon where people actually step back and aren't as interested in having long-term relationships with women who are considered highly attractive.

• 37:57Speaker 00

  Are there other places this shows up? Like are women who are perceived as too beautiful impacted in the workplace or in other areas of their lives?

• 38:05Speaker 06

  Um, I think it can happen in the workplace as well because there can be a heightened level of sexualizing. But also, we all know that abusive men are going to abuse you no matter what society says about your appearance. And it is assaults and things like that are not necessarily connected to appearance. But there can be sometimes, women's hostility towards women can be a phenomenon. But I ain't about that life, so I don't think we good, we ain't doing that to each other anymore. But yeah, women's hostility towards women can definitely be a phenomenon that people do see.

• 38:33Speaker 00

  So I'm curious to hear the theory you had around Megan Thee Stallion. Was this kind of post-breakup that you talked about, like her being too beautiful? Or how did, what did you say?

• 38:42Speaker 06

  Well, what happened was I heard a lot of people saying like, so even Megan Thee Stallion gets cheated on? So even hot girls, like, oh my God, this is crazy. Because you know, you kind of have this phenomenon of like everyone wanting to be like, super hot, super hot, super hot. We're getting baddie bodies, everyone's doing their thing. And I think there's this assumption that if you're super hot, you're going to be able to get the relationship. You're going to be able to have the thing you've always wanted, right? We connect goodness again with beauty. We connect positive outcomes with beauty. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, right? Cola, the main character, believed that her life would be better if she only had blue eyes. She was beautiful. And so we begin to assume, oh, life is going to be great for me. And then you realize life is just life. No matter how you look, life is still life. You still get cheated on, you still get dumped, you still get your heartbroken.

• 39:26Speaker 06

  People aren't necessarily going to treat you better every single day. And so I think, because I think that there is this misconception, and even with like cosmetic surgeries and stuff like that, there's this hedonic adaptation, which basically hedonic adaptation is you want this thing. So let's say the thing you want is like surgery, you're like, okay, if I get my boobs done, then the world's going to be great. Things are going to be so much better. So you get them done, and people tend to feel better about themselves about maybe two to three months. They're actually like, yeah, this feels great, this feels wonderful. But then the effect starts to decrease, and you start to feel like yourself again. One of my supervisors used to always say, no matter where you go, there you are, right? You still bring yourself with you, even when you

• 40:08Speaker 06

  get the procedure, you've done the makeup, you've done the thing that makes you feel really beautiful, you're still present. And so if you haven't done some of the internalized work to actually love yourself, to love the parts of yourself that you've worked to make better, your character, your talents, your skills, and maybe you are like someone who trains and you really value the effort that you put into it, right? If you don't have that, this, I call it like this diversified self-esteem, then you are going to find yourself in this wheel of constantly saying, well, let me do the another big change, let me fix this, let me alter this, and then I'll love myself more. And you don't, so you don't see people's lives actually improving that much, just based on external changes.

• 40:50Speaker 00

  You mentioned earlier, Dr. Eli, and I want to go back to this, this kind of dysmorphia that you feel like is kind of taking shape, especially based on people's use of social media kind of showing up there. What is the research saying? Because I know for a long time, like especially for gastric bypass surgery, like before you had that, you had to have a evaluation with a psychologist to make sure that you understood, okay, this is going to drastically change your life, are you psychologically kind of stable enough for the change that's going to happen? And I don't think that that same kind of evaluation exists for like cosmetic surgery kinds of things. So what are you seeing in the research? Because this is in my lane, and you probably are more well-read in this area. What is the research and kind of the field talking about in terms of dysmorphia?

• 41:32Speaker 00

  As it is related to the ways that people are kind of using social media and getting cosmetic surgery to kind of keep up with those things.

• 41:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think that we're actually seeing it spreading out because before it was very focused on women, right? Women were like 95 to like 85% of people who are getting these procedures in the first place. And so we're really focusing on the ways in which women experience and express body dysmorphia. And a lot of people who go on for cosmetic surgery, most people know dysmorphia, totally healthy. They're just like, you know what? Fix this little thing. It's been bothering me for a while. Diastasis recti, I've had a little tweak here, never becomes a problem, right? That's the vast majority, but there is that small segment of people who are using it as a mechanism to heal an inner wound. And that is still the minority, I would even say today. But what we've also seen is a widening in the male population.

• 42:22Speaker 06

  Right? So now we're seeing way more guys getting some invasive procedures. We've really seen a lot of movement towards the minimally invasive, like the injections, the botox, the fillers and things like that to like masculinize. We're seeing men who are also using things like steroids. But there definitely has been an uptick in people engaging in non-invasive procedures. But I think we've seen a decrease in invasive procedures since the early 2000s. But dysmorphia, I'm not sure if there's actually a higher amount of people with actual diagnosed body dysmorphia. But I can imagine that there's more people who have symptoms, features, right? Of that would align. So I'm not, because for y'all out there, when it comes to diagnostics, there's people who actually meet clinical criteria for a diagnosis.

• 43:07Speaker 06

  And then people who just have features and aspect or symptoms of a diagnosis, but wouldn't actually make that criteria. So I could imagine that there's probably more people with symptoms, but maybe not actual clinical diagnostic.

• 43:18Speaker 00

  Got it, got it. So for people who just really love the like ritual of beauty and like the fun and play of beauty. Is there a way to opt into kind of, you know, participating in that without also participating in the body surveillance? Performative nature of it that we've already been talking about?

• 43:35Speaker 06

  Absolutely. And I think the perfect word is ritual. I think beauty is magic, right? I think it is a magic that we engage with in ourselves, right? Where we get to, because magic and kind of the sense of it is placing an emotion or an intention onto something. Making it something special, something revered. And so it doesn't have to be like. Something that is meant to even really alter your appearance all that much. It can be a lotion and you just tell yourself at the end of the day, I'm using this lavender lotion. I'm going to put it by the edge of my bed and I'm just going to remind myself, you're that girl. You're amazing. You're so strong. You're so smart. Oh my goodness. You're, you know, you are so gentle and sweet.

• 44:16Speaker 06

  And just placing that intention and that reminder of like who it is you are into that part of the ritual. You know, or as your ritual goes from like your teeth and you can even be reminding yourself of the amazing words that you've used that day or the words that you will use the next day. So it doesn't have to be a ritual of be beautiful for others. Be beautiful. So you can get this from the world. It's just take care of yourself. Align with yourself. Come back to who you are. Like I was saying, my key here is to de-center the world in the ways in which we see ourselves because the world is always going to change and move. But the ritual of engaging in something that is organically beautiful to you, a lotion, a product,

• 44:59Speaker 06

  a trip, going somewhere that is just a stunning environment for you and just sitting and bathing and basking in somewhere beautiful. Those are the types of ways in which we can engage in beauty that actually allow us to like strengthen ourselves for this world that rejects us. To remind ourselves like, actually, no, I can use beauty as a form of resistance. As a buffering against a world that doesn't really want me to be able to be my beautiful self.

• 45:27Speaker 00

  More from our conversation after the break.

• 45:35Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. Tune in for season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, a Ruby Studio production in partnership with Argenx. Hosted by public health and policy expert, Dr. Martine Hackett, Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition pushes the conversation within the rare disease community forward. Featuring guests living with MG, CIDP, myositis, SMA, and other rare autoimmune conditions. Each episode explores hope, progress, and connection. How does research create new opportunities? How do shared experiences help light the way forward? How do we best show up for each other?

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  Hey, it's Niall Rogers, host of Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series. I'm driving across the country, meeting some of today's most fascinating artists. We're exploring the stories before the moment that changed everything. This week, I'm joined by my friend, John Legend. So you're helping Will.i.am write hooks. What made "Ordinary People" become the one song from those sound checks you knew you had to make your own?

• 48:03Speaker 07

  I was just writing for the Black Eyed Peas. I wasn't expecting to write something for myself in that session, but I wrote the hook for "Ordinary People", and I recorded a demo, and I'm like, I would rather keep "Ordinary People" for myself. The station in Chicago, WCCI, they start playing it before we're promoting it. The song spoke for itself. It became the defining song for my first album. I knew it was special, but you never know how special it's going to be and how much impact it's going to have in people's lives. And you never believe that you're going to actually change people's lives with a song.

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  Experience Before the Moment, a Lincoln original series on the iHeart Radio app.

• 48:39Speaker 00

  YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Host Nora McInerney is back for an all new season of The Head Start, embracing the journey brought to you in partnership with AbbVie. In each episode, Nora has honest conversations with real people living with chronic migraine, people who are figuring out how to adapt, advocate, and stay connected to the things that bring them joy. This season, she's revisiting familiar voices and introducing new ones who will share their stories about what it means to live with this condition. From the missed moments to the strategies that help them keep going when things feel uncertain. As always, she'll be joined by headache specialist Dr. Christopher Rhine, who offers insight into these challenges and the questions many of us have.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  If you're new to the podcast, check out the three previous seasons, each one offering a different perspective on this condition and the theme of resilience, displayed while navigating it. So don't miss season four of The Head Start, Embracing the Journey. Listen on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  In the book, you make a distinction between glamour and beauty. What's the difference between those and why did it feel important to you make that distinction?

• 49:50Speaker 06

  Partly because of magic, but yeah, it's, I like the word glamour. But beauty, from my perspective, was looking at the muscles, the bones, the things that we see when we look at a person, right? The things that you're born with, bone structure, all of that stuff, skin color. And those are the things that we can change, but really don't. This is who we are. And so that's kind of a beauty and glamour is what we put on top of that. It's the fragrance, it's the clothes, costume. Maybe if you wear makeup, the makeup, it's the countenance, the way we carry ourselves, right? If you carry yourself and you walk in a room like this as opposed to walking in like this, those are two different glamors. That's two different ways in which you present your body. And so it's something that we add on top of it.

• 50:35Speaker 06

  And I think I like talking about it because I think that's where our personal preferences come in. And I think that's where our personal power comes in, right? When you're like, this is what I love, like I love all the girls that love all the color, right? I'm a very black and white girly, like.

• 50:53Speaker 06

  Black, white, you might get a little blush pink from me right about now. But like when you see women walk in and they have all this color, it's a mechanism. Right? You notice them, you're like, okay, sis. Right? And that's the glamour. Right? Because we're all kind of born with the same stuff, but you get to add on to it. And I think it's something that allows us to turn ourselves into art. And it shows me what type of artist you are.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  So, speaking about preferences, can you talk about how our preferences are actually shaped? And are there things that actually are, oh, this is innate my preference versus like, society has actually shaped a lot of what we see as a preference? Can you talk more about that?

• 51:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, this could be a long conversation too. But we do have evolutionary things that evolutionary psychologists and folks like Darwin talk about. So, on an evolutionary level, aesthetic beauty is connected directly to procreation. Right? It's like, okay, you have birth and hips. So, a baby could come out easier. And so, I'm going to choose someone with slightly larger hips so that you're more likely to have a safe and healthy childbirth, right? So, within the biological side, there's like these, a number of indicators of fitness. And fitness means fit to pass along genes. So, waist-toHip ratio was one. A person with a smaller waist and larger hips is more likely to be a female than to be a male.

• 52:17Speaker 06

  And when you're 10,000, 20,000, 100,000 years ago, you need to have that indicator so you know who to procreate with and who not to. So, you're not wasting your time procreating with someone who can't give you babies, right? And so, that is one thing that we've kind of supposedly biologically built in to identify as a difference. There's things like pathogen resistance. Basically, looking healthy as opposed to not looking healthy, which can change over time. So, I'm not necessarily going to go through every last one. But the way I look at it is that these things that are built into us biologically from our ancestors that tell us, hey, this is someone you can have sex with and have a child with. The genetic things are impacted by the societal things in this way. That genetics are, to me, the banks of a river.

• 53:02Speaker 06

  Right? The river couldn't exist if you didn't have these genes that kind of like locked it in and made it into the shape of this river. But society is the water in the river. And water has the power to erode and to change DNA and to change the banks. But still, if the banks were gone, you'd no longer have a river. And so, society can reshape the ways we evolve over time. And it can reshape and change the ways we see things like pathogen resistance, for example. It's a little less important than it used to be. It used to be really important to find a partner that's healthy, but now we live in a country right now where people tend to be healthier than we have been in the past 10,000 years. And so that's not something we're looking for as much as we used to. And so you see how

• 53:45Speaker 06

  it's very difficult to even parse one out from the other because they co-create each other. And if we really wanted to go into epigenetics, we could. But yeah, so they impact one another very heavily. So it sometimes can be even difficult to know which is which.

• 54:03Speaker 00

  So something else that you do in the book is you share the story about when you were younger trying to lighten your skin. So when you think about that story today or that experience today, what do you feel like you know now that you of course did not know then?

• 54:17Speaker 06

  First of all, just for me, I look better. The tanner I am, the better I look. That's me. That's me. I can't speak for nobody else. Me. Actually, what was interesting was that was like junior high. Yeah. So I was like scraping my skin with Comet in the shower. Was really impacted by my brownness because I'm an outdoors kind of girl. I'm always outside and I'm particularly my arms. Man, I'm brown. And what happened was I took a trip to Europe. And you would think that'd be the place I would not fall in love with my complexion. But I came back from Europe and for some reason I had just been outside so much and I'd gotten so, so tan. And I went the summer before I went to college. So I showed up to college and I just like looked at myself and I was like, oh my God, like for the for the first time, for some reason, after the trip, I had really seen

• 55:01Speaker 06

  myself. And I had attended an HBCU. So I was finally in a space where I was surrounded by all kinds of black people. I was like blown away by how many black people I met. I was like, what Bermuda? Bermuda?

• 55:16Speaker 06

  I don't know why that blew me away the most. And I just was able to look at my richness and see that it was so stunning. And I got lost in my complexion. And I was just like really appreciating it and focusing on like every minute detail. And like, I'm like a multi-colored person. I've got one color here, I've got one color here. The side of my boob is a whole other person. My cheek is something different. And it was just like, it was almost like, you know, when you have, I don't have kids. But when you have a baby, people talk about how the pain of childbirth just goes away. And it almost felt like now that I had emerged into this cultural space where there's so much more acceptance. I could, the pain of this childhood that was so rejecting, where people had told me so often how ugly I was,

• 55:59Speaker 06

  how hideous and horrible I was just because of my complexion, it just melted away. And I was just able to see myself for who I actually was. And I was like, and it reshaped me. I really, I started doing better in school. I started taking myself more seriously intellectually, socially. I was a little bit more brave at that point. I was never timid, but I was even more brave in college. And I just want that experience for all of us. To be able to really say like, no, no, the world doesn't even need to change for me to understand how stunning I am. I don't need anyone to acknowledge it.

• 56:32Speaker 00

  And I feel like this is like a glimpse of what this answer to this question is going to be. But what is it that you hope people will leave your book with? What message would you like them to take away?

• 56:42Speaker 06

  I think the prime word is liberated. I want people to feel like they've gotten the information because this book has info in it. Okay, buckle up, we're going to learn things about perception, qualia and all that kind of science stuff. But I want black women to, to be able to function without having to think about this. There was this scene in X-Men where Mystique, the woman who's blue, was being talked to. She was like younger, I think it was, they were like in high school or something in college. And she was trying to look typical. She was like looking like it was Jennifer Lawrence or something that played her. And Professor X had come up to her and said, you understand that you're decreasing your power by focusing so much of your energy on just looking like everyone else?

• 57:26Speaker 06

  And if you could let that go, then you'd be able to really focus in on who you actually are. And so I want for us, I want people who read this book to be able to say, okay, I want to figure out what I like. So I can really become integrated in my own concept of what is beautiful to me. Instead of having to expend all this energy to figure out, but what will the guys want when I'm out with my girls? What do I think they want from me? Because it can take up so much of our time. It can take so much of our spirit. It can take so much of our psychology. And it can batter us so much that I just really want freedom and liberation for people from that.

• 58:05Speaker 00

  Beautiful. I think that that is a message that will resonate with lots of folks. So please let us know where can we get a copy of the book? And what is your website as well as any social media channels you'd like to share?

• 58:16Speaker 06

  Absolutely. My website is allisonhicks.com. And that's spelled A-L-L-Y-C-I-N. And you can get it on basically anywhere, Amazon, Hachette, anywhere. So you just look up The Problem with Pretty and it is available. And you can see me on my socials also at @allisonhicks on IG and @drally on TikTok.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Thank you for joining us again today, Dr. Ally. We always appreciate learning from you.

• 58:36Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 58:40Speaker 00

  I'm so glad Dr. Ally was able to join me for this conversation. To learn more about her or to grab your copy of The Problem with Pretty, be sure to visit the show notes at therapyforblackgirls.com/session469. And don't forget to text this episode to two of your girls right now and tell them to check it out. Did you know that you could leave us a voicemail with your questions or suggestions for the podcast? If you have movies or books you'd like us to review, or want to share your thoughts around other topics you'd like us to discuss, drop us a message at memo.fm/therapyforblackgirls and let us know what's on your mind. We just might feature it on the podcast. If you're looking for a therapist in your area, visit our therapist directory at therapyforblackgirls.com/directory.

• 59:24Speaker 00

  Don't forget to follow us on Instagram at @therapyforblackgirls. And you can also join us on Patreon to get more exclusive updates, behind the scenes content, and much more. You can join us at community.therapyforblackgirls.com. This episode was produced by Elise Ellis, Inde Chubu, and Tyree Rush. Editing was done by Denison Bradford. Thank y'all so much for joining me again this week. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you all real soon. Take good care.

• 59:58Speaker 00

  A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories, Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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