In a new column for Highsnobiety, writer Sable Yong explores how the culture of beauty impacts our lives.There’s this John Waters quote that gets a lot of lip service: “If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” He later amended this: “If they have books in their bathroom, not only don’t fuck ’em…run,” Waters told W in 2020. “It’s really disgusting to go into someone’s bathroom and see a basket of old Us magazines lying there.” I don’t know how Waters feels about e-readers. But if we somehow found ourselves in the same bathroom discussing his pronouncement, I might suggest that he cast his eyes away from the dusty basket in the corner full of wrinkled reading material and toward the item hanging right above the sink: the medicine cabinet. These days, we leave so many clues in our digital wake that true mystery is hard to come by. And certain demographics (22-year-old girls in situationships) are more adept at getting to the bottom of people’s business through their Instagram stories than your average deep-sea submersible. To me, though, there’s only one way to get a glimpse of someone’s true, unvarnished self. It’s been said before, but I have it on good authority that people — myself included — are still engaging in good, old-fashioned medicine-cabinet snooping. The contents of our most accessible bathroom fixture say a lot about our psychopathology — and leave plenty of room for speculation. There’s a reason it has become a jokey content trend to examine “boy rooms” through an anthropological lens. Staged or not, the “rating the bathroom of the guy I’m hooking up with” videos had their viral moment on TikTok. So did the “someone cooked here” audio clip, which is used to imply that men who own skincare products must have come by them through a woman. (This is known colloquially as “the girlfriend effect.”) The burgeoning men’s beauty industry and general consumer “taste” apparatus has worked to ensure that men get inflated kudos for o