{"id":175703,"date":"2026-10-20T11:34:54","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T15:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=175703"},"modified":"2026-10-20T11:34:54","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T15:34:54","slug":"the-uncanny-catharsis-of-the-ai-emomercial","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2026\/10\/20\/the-uncanny-catharsis-of-the-ai-emomercial\/","title":{"rendered":"The Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"An

Courtesy of Jean Garnett.<\/p><\/div>\n

The tears are the first tell, and what stops my scrolling: that\u2019s not how tears work. The tears gather in wide, frightened eyes and spill over into droplets, but instead of sliding down the cheek and being absorbed into the skin or dripping off the face, these droplets dangle like snot from the eyes, transparent swells dragging down mucous threads.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The eyes belong to a woman, a Pixaresque figure with a large head on a hunched body, who is crying in her cubicle. In subsequent versions she may be crying in the bathroom, or at the wheel of her car, or at her son\u2019s soccer game or her daughter\u2019s rehearsal dinner, but the cause of the tears is always the same: the woman is sad because she is aging, and she is aging because she is sad. She is a rumpled M\u00f6bius strip of cause and effect, agedness the total fact of her life. Naturally, the woman has failed, or is failing, to hang onto her husband: \u201cYou used to light up,\u201d he says in one video. \u201cYou just don\u2019t look like yourself anymore.\u201d Or she\u00a0overhears him telling a friend that she has \u201clet herself go.\u201d Or he has already left her for a much younger woman. Or he\u2019s having an affair with a colleague who has not \u201clet herself go.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Who will care about our heroine enough to stop her from allowing female age to happen to her? Who will step in? Sometimes it\u2019s the woman\u2019s sister, who just got back from a business trip to Seoul. Sometimes it\u2019s her friend or colleague who works in Seoul. Sometimes the intervener is the woman\u2019s daughter, who leaks goopy tears as she watches her father stride off into a new life with his much younger girlfriend. In this case, the daughter, forced to share in her mother\u2019s humiliation, sets out to \u201csave face\u201d\u2014her mother\u2019s literally, her own figuratively\u2014via the hydrating gel mask, or the serum, or the nonoxidizing foundation, or whatever it is.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The new kind of skincare ad that is suddenly appearing every several times I swipe through Instagram reels is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as \u201cPurification Slop,\u201d clearly AI-generated marketing content appealing to and visualizing my fantasy that what ails me, including age, can be rendered isolable and extricable from me. The Intelligence knows that I thrill to depictions of anything \u201cbuilt up\u201d inside me finally coming out. Am I aware that if, standing in a kitchen sunbeam, I take one sip of this mushroom beverage, cute little probiotics will go tra-la-la chimney sweeping through my intestines like Dick Van Dyke, making me positively glow with inner cleanness? Have I used this jade roller to drain my lymphatic fluid lately, or am I cool with hosting putrid waste in my corpus? The intelligence may also know that I\u2019m single, that mirrors have become complicated for me\u2014that it depends on the light, it depends on my mood.<\/span><\/p>\n

These ads are infomercials, fake-science-wise, limited-time-offer-wise. But they feel more like mini soap operas (I just timed one at over ten minutes); they are extremely emo. Each Aging Woman Emomercial (AWE) tells a songified story, most often reminiscent of Taylor Swift or Olivia Rodrigo, building from confiding, conversational grief to a pleadingly triumphal chorus. It begins with a tearfully juicy hook: \u201cThis is the story of the day he walked away.\u201d Or \u201cMy ex-husband walked in with the woman he left me for, young enough to be our daughter.\u201d Or, in one case where the woman is Black, \u201cI ran into my baby daddy at daycare drop-off with the bitch he left me for.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Back when I was twenty, a hip restaurateur hired me to beat the shit out of a bunch of brand new tables. I got to spend a whole summer attacking mahogany with heavy chains, gouging it with chisels, sanding and staining and scraping and carving imaginary lovers\u2019 initials into it. In a matter of weeks, I was to impart to this wood the appearance of wear that decades bestow on life\u2019s useful objects. The restaurateur, himself tastefully distressed in his fifties and much sought after, paid me to do this because aged furniture would make a new bistro feel storied and intimate. In AWEs, as so often in our world, age sits on the man like that, as atmosphere, authority, sturdiness, vitality. Even his losses\u2014of pigment from hair, or moisture from skin, or burdensome wife and kids from life\u2014confer a patina of value. After about the fifth AWE in a row, it begins to seem miraculous that any aging man stays with any aging woman. How can his \u201cage\u201d even be in the same room as hers?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u201cdouble standard of aging,\u201d as Susan Sontag called it, is nothing new. What\u2019s new is its refraction through a large language model that has recently gone emotionally bionic. From the dawn of AI until just a few years ago, the business and marketing worlds operated under the assumption, based on decades of research, that consumers are generally \u201calgorithm averse,\u201d that we tend to resist programmed \u201cyou might also like\u201d suggestions, and that even where statistical prediction proved more accurate than its human counterpart (in, for example, certain medical diagnoses), people were biased in favor of subjective judgments. One paradigm-shifting moment came in 2020, when Chiara Longoni and Luca Cian published a paper in the <\/span>Journal of Marketing<\/span><\/i> identifying what they called the \u201cword-of-machine\u201d effect. Our algorithm aversion, they said, was not universal but conditional. Consumers with a \u201cutilitarian\u201d goal\u2014those seeking a product to fulfill a specific, clear function, such as buying dental floss\u2014actually tended to value and trust AI recommendations more. It was only those of us pursuing a \u201chedonic\u201d goal\u2014a sensory or emotional experience, as in a horror movie\u2014who still preferred to hear it from a human\u2019s mouth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The sorting of desire into clear \u201cutilitarian\u201d vs. \u201chedonic\u201d modes had, at the time of Longoni and Cian\u2019s paper, been marketing orthodoxy since the eighties, when researchers introduced the \u201chedonic viewpoint\u201d as an essential tool in understanding otherwise inexplicable consumption phenomena\u2014for example, our attraction to certain media precisely\u00a0because<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/i>it causes us pain.\u00a0A guiding principle of self-consciously affective capitalism, the hedonic viewpoint is a kind of strategic empathy, drawing attention from the object (product) to the subject (consumer), a love-seeking being in need of emotional release. By 2026, AI has transcended its utilitarian sphere to assume, or at least enact, something like the hedonic viewpoint, its ability to mimic emotional literacy with facility and precision giving the \u201cword-of-machine\u201d different and more disarming valencies. Can a robot sell me a feeling now? Can it do so even while being obviously a robot?<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The American \u201cK-beauty\u201d brands that run the most Aging Woman Emomercials\u2014brands like Quasi, Yuri, and Koriderm\u2014do not disclose that their ads are AI slop, as New York State law now requires, but the ads themselves disclose it. The lip sync is off, the outfits change midscene, the jump cuts jump funny, the tears dangle like hot glue, the script goes wonky: one woman is \u201cfifty-three-forty\u201d years old; other moisturizers on the market \u201cevaporate like glass.\u201d All of these dead giveaways create a new kind of distance between the ads and the companies behind them that affords the latter a certain plausible deniability. This behooves them, because AWEs go low\u2014very low, even by ad standards. In one, our pre-glow-up heroine asks her daughter: \u201cHow can I be loved when I look like this?\u201d\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Whom do we rage against here? Is our rage even roused? The thing is, clocking immediately that an AWE is AI, I apprehend it differently than I would a man-made ad, not so much as a brutally strategic snake-oil con job, but as a set of impressions, amalgamations, whispers from the ether. It\u2019s like listening to a child repeat what they\u2019ve heard the grown-ups say. I find that, for me, the \u201cword-of-machine\u201d effect is inverted here; I am somehow less guarded against emotional manipulation when there is no one to take creative responsibility.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Aging Woman Emomercials go low not only sociologically but affectively, in ways that feel intimately familiar and even a bit radical in an ad context. These women are not just having a bad day, not just dysregulated. These are not the wives of most commercials in my lifetime, lightly exasperated by a juice stain or decorously anxious over debt; they are not even the indoor brooders of gentle-voiced pharmaceutical ads. These women are way, way down, in dangerous depression and perimenopausal nervous breakdown territory. They are grieving, they are having a panic attack, they are heaving and sobbing on the floor, they are disgusted with themselves, they want to crawl out of their sagging skin, they are shutting themselves away from the world, they are contemplating skipping their daughter\u2019s wedding so as not to have to be seen in public. Like a robot\u2019s idea of a teardrop, they are hanging by a thread.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"A<\/span><\/p>\n

This blend of manosphere-style gender realpolitik and all-too-human midlife emotional breakdown confers on these AI melodramas a weird and, to me, frightening cathartic power. Women understand, from very early in life, that female aging represents social death; we spend our lives metabolizing this, and we are used to media that reflects our knowingness. We have believed ourselves acclimated, believed ourselves evolved. We know that it is puerile and morbid and weak to catastrophize a natural process. But now here are these micro dramas presenting social truism as tragic personal revelation, offering us a chance to experience afresh\u2014that is, as children, or as nonhuman creatures, or as specific individuals\u2014the ache and injustice of a woman\u2019s relationship to time.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The truth is that many of the women I know are periodically falling apart over their changing faces. Even the wise ones, even the ones who know better\u2014especially the ones who know better, since their anxiety is compounded by guilt over their own shallowness. In an uncanny twist on the trope of the emotionless robot, here AI is openly acknowledging emotional truths\u2014albeit hackneyed ones\u2014that have, perhaps rightly, become distasteful to express in intelligent, ethical human company. We are what we think and say we are, so let\u2019s not go low. But low is a real place, and by \u201cgoing there\u201d the robot enacts the promised function of the product: it makes me feel seen. \u201cThe moment,\u201d sings one AWE woman the morning after wearing the touted collagen mask to bed, \u201cwas me alone in that mirror finally seeing myself clearly.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The key \u201cmoment\u201d in every AWE claims to be about self-reclamation, confidence, \u201cfinally recognizing\u201d yourself, but of course it is, every time, about something else. The climactic sequence that the narrative builds toward, the soaring part of the song, the fantasy\u2019s apex, is the run-in with the man who left. The woman is post-product now, post-restoration to her authentic hot young self, and post-epiphany about the true problem: \u201cIt is not vanity,\u201d she belts in yet another pre-chorus, \u201cit is not in your head, it is not age, your skin is starving<\/span>.<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

And then there he is, at the pharmacy, at day care drop-off, at the restaurant where our heroine is awaiting her first date in years. He sees her, her face plumped and poreless as a toddler\u2019s, and something happens to him: his eyes bulge, his eyebrows shoot up, his lips hang open; he almost does a full \u201cawooga.\u201d Having \u201cexpected to see the old broken face,\u201d he finds instead a \u201cradiant woman standing tall,\u201d and he is so completely taken aback by the transformation that he now becomes the broken one\u2014for a few seconds we get to revel in this image of the male gaze frozen in a paroxysm of \u201chumina humina\u201d stupidity. Then the woman dutifully pivots to disclaiming any desire to get him back, and does a little I-did-this-for-me shuffle into the \u201cbuy now while supplies last\u201d conclusion.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Recently I had my own run-in moment. I was alone at a New York City beach. I\u2019d been there for a few hours, in nice weather, but, seeing a mass of dark clouds rolling in, I gathered my things and fast-walked\u00a0the path through the dunes to the exit. I rounded a bend and there, walking just ahead of me, was the man who left two years ago. He was walking close to someone, close enough to touch arm hairs.\u00a0\u201cHi,\u201d I said to the back of them, and they stopped, half turned.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unlike the AWE men, this man did not seem at all surprised to see me. In fact, both he and his companion took my appearance so stolidly in stride that I wondered whether they had seen me earlier, perhaps from afar, and had taken pains to avoid me, not expecting the clouds to flush us out together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We were just reaching the end of the path as I called out, arriving at an opening in a chain-link fence where you leave the dunes and cross a field to get to the road. The woman, who was tall and muscular and looked to be at least ten years my junior, stepped aside and abstracted herself, as though we were in a museum and she had crossed to regard a painting on the opposite wall. I waved to her and she gave me a strained smile as the man knelt to put on his shoes.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I stood there saying words, I have no idea which ones. From the ground, the man seemed to be apologizing to me for something\u2014I must forgive him for being at this moment too distracted to properly interact, but he had recently seen a video of a person being struck by lightning, and so he was afraid of being struck by lightning himself, here, now, and he gestured to the approaching cloud shelf. For some reason, inside that moment, this fear struck me as rational.<\/span><\/p>\n

The scene proceeded in nightmare time. Now I seemed to be apologizing for something. I didn\u2019t mean to make him, them, uncomfortable; I could cross the field separately, and I turned and started to walk away, but after a few yards I surprised myself by turning back and yelling at them. \u201cPeace!\u201d I shouted rather aggressively, \u201cpeace!\u201d But the man couldn\u2019t hear me so he stood up and jogged toward me. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t have to be weird,\u201d I said, or I sang it like a little jingle as the young woman walked slowly up to join us and now he properly introduced us, and we shook hands. We walked three abreast toward the clouds that were coming to meet us. I said where I was headed for the evening and when the young woman indicated that she knew the place I nodded eagerly, \u201cyeah, yes!\u201d I was so grateful to her for corroborating me. \u201cYour shoes are untied,\u201d the woman told the man, \u201cjust letting you know,\u201d and we all looked down at his shoelaces dragging through the grass as we walked. \u201cI have to pee,\u201d she said suddenly, and peeled off in the direction of the low-slung concrete building in the center of the field where the restrooms are, and the man stopped and I kept walking and right then the rain started, a few cold drops and then a torrent, sheets of it, a hydrating mask over the whole scene, and I broke into a run to my car a few blocks down and got in soaking wet and pulled the door shut.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We want the people who left us to see how we have improved ourselves. If loving them made us better people, losing them has made us better still. We are tougher now, we have more colors to paint with: chronic dark-value sorrows, neon joys; we are more alive than we have ever been. This is what shocks me most about getting older\u2014I keep becoming more alive. To outwardly droop and look tired at this juncture amounts to failure of representation so perverse that one can\u2019t help imputing some intelligence to it; one feels contrapasso<\/em> punished for the crime of caring about appearance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The Intelligence, we are told, is also becoming more alive, or at least more autonomous. I keep hearing that what we need to fear now\u2014not far off but next year, maybe this year\u2014is the Intelligence\u2019s penchant for \u201crecursive self-improvement,\u201d which may at any time explode into violent agency, turning on us like a smitingly beautiful fifty-three-forty-year-old ex-wife whose power has been underestimated. \u201cThis is what you get,\u201d it says, \u201cfor thinking you could watch me ironically.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat is that?\u201d my daughter asks now, eying the pink box I\u2019m holding, whose logo resembles the killer\u2019s mask from <\/span>Scream<\/span><\/i>.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s just something for my face,\u201d I say, \u201cto make my skin better.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDon\u2019t use it,\u201d she says quickly, shaking her head. \u201cDon\u2019t believe that kind of thing.\u201d Sometimes when an ad interrupts a program we are streaming, she will tell me, answering an unspoken prompt, what problem this ad has invented in order to sell us a solution.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cMom, for real,\u201d she says now, and I see that she\u2019s genuinely anxious about the mask, and I think how frightening it would be for her if it worked as advertised, making me unfamiliar to her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019re right,\u201d I say. \u201cYou\u2019re so smart. I shouldn\u2019t have bought it. I won\u2019t use it.\u201d And I carry it off as though to throw it away and slip it under a pile of books in my bedroom for some night when she\u2019s sleeping at her dad\u2019s.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jean Garnett is a writer and editor whose work has been published in the\u00a0<\/em>New Yorker, the\u00a0<\/em>New York Times Magazine, the\u00a0<\/em>Yale Review, and the\u00a0<\/em>Paris Review<\/a>. Her first book,\u00a0<\/em>The Tantrum, will be published by Scribner in April, 2027.\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new kind of AI skincare ad is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as \u201cPurification Slop.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2261,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[68856],"tags":[679,8769,68960,1980,67827,68959,68961,23509,12543,36],"class_list":["post-175703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-the-internet","tag-advertising","tag-aging","tag-ai-slop","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-featured","tag-jean-garnett","tag-k-beauty","tag-skin-care","tag-social-media","tag-women"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Uncanny Catharsis of the AI Emomercial by Jean Garnett<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"October 20, 2026 \u2013 The new kind of AI skincare ad is a subgenre in a rampant category that I have come to think of as \u201cPurification Slop."\" \/>\n<meta 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