Paloma El Cesar on Building a Body Care Brand Beyond Body Positivity Tokenism

Paloma El Cesar became the face of body positivity not by choice but by timing, and she’s deliberately distancing herself from movements she didn’t create while launching her own body care brand rooted in personal ritual.

Summary of Paloma Elsesser on Purpose, Representation and the New Rituals of Body Care. Every timestamp links into the original audio.

The short version

• 00:02:30 — Beauty was central to her origin story, starting with Pat McGrath discovering her and launching her as the face of Pat McGrath Labs before she became known for modeling.
• 00:04:43 — The fashion industry was desperate for something new because people were exhausted by restrictive beauty standards, and her timing aligned with that cultural hunger for change.
• 00:06:36 — She refuses to claim the body positivity movement because it was actually started by queer Black women with larger bodies, and she doesn’t want to take credit for work she didn’t originate.
• 00:08:40 — Movements like body positivity and diversity and inclusion are trends that come and go, often becoming aestheticized and losing their connection to real lived experience and precarity.
• 00:12:49 — Her apparent confidence actually comes from being forced to figure out what she liked about herself at a young age because the world wouldn’t tell her, leading her to develop a distinctive personal aesthetic.
• 00:15:19 — Her new body care brand is inspired by cultural rituals from her African-American mother, who taught her that moisturizing after showering is essential self-care practice.
• 00:18:09 — She’s designing her brand to be object-forward, science-backed, and deeply personal rather than mass-market, because that’s who she is and what she knows.
• 00:20:45 — She acknowledges she needs to learn the hard business side of entrepreneurship, including metrics and organization, beyond her natural strengths in creativity and emotional leadership.

In depth

An accidental icon, not a chosen one

Paloma Elsesser’s account of how she became a face of the body positivity movement is built almost entirely around the idea of timing rather than intention. She describes fashion in the mid-2010s as an industry that had exhausted its own restrictive standards and was, in her words, desperate for something new, with an audience actively hungry for a different kind of body and a different kind of voice 00:04:43. Her argument is that she didn’t engineer her entry into that moment so much as get swept into a vacuum that was already forming, because she had grown up occupying a bigger body and had, out of necessity, become fluent in articulating her relationship to it in a way the industry hadn’t previously had access to 00:05:39.

What’s notable is how firmly she resists being cast as an author of that movement rather than a beneficiary of its timing. She’s explicit that body positivity was started by queer Black women in much larger bodies than her own, and she treats it as a matter of basic fairness that she not claim credit for a lineage she didn’t originate 00:06:36. This isn’t false modesty performed for the room — she frames it almost analytically, as an anthropological observation that cultural pendulums swing on their own logic, sucking individuals into significance regardless of their personal intentions, and that her role was incidental to forces bigger than her 00:09:38.

The unresolved tension here is that she simultaneously insists her impact was real and meaningful — she calls the platform a profound privilege and describes her imagery as a form of activism she doesn’t take lightly 00:06:09 — while also insisting she shouldn’t be seen as the movement’s origin point. She holds both claims at once without fully reconciling them: grateful for the visibility, uneasy about the credit, and clear that the two aren’t the same thing.

When movements become merchandise

Elsesser’s sharpest and most pointed argument in the conversation is about what happens to political movements once they succeed commercially. She traces a pattern across body positivity and the broader DE&I wave that followed George Floyd’s murder: an urgent, high-stakes cultural moment gets absorbed by industry, and in the absorption it gets flattened into aesthetics — a neon swimsuit, a stretch-mark close-up, a seasonal marketing cue — stripped of the lived stakes that made it matter in the first place 00:08:40.

Her clearest illustration is Pride, which she uses almost as a cautionary parallel: what began as a matter of queer survival has, in her telling, been rebranded into something closer to a flavor or a color palette, evacuated of the danger and precarity that originally animated it 00:10:35. She extends the same critique to body-related discourse, insisting that the real substance underneath body positivity isn’t a slogan about self-love but concrete, often painful realities — desire, sex, eating disorders, the daily friction of living in a body the world judges 00:11:05. The gap between the slogan and the substance is, for her, the actual scandal.

She stops short of saying the movements were failures or that participation in them was a mistake — she still credits the era with real, if partial, gains in representation. But she’s candid that she finds the commercialization genuinely dispiriting, describing a kind of sadness at watching something urgent get turned into an

Summarised automatically. Listen to the original for the full conversation — this is not a substitute for it.