The celebrities are serving vampire
13.11.2023 - 17:51
/ polygon.com
/ Kim Kardashian
Vampires have an excellent PR agent. They’re being thirsted after in Baldur’s Gate 3, they have us watching Twilight again on TikTok, and even Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer is getting a second shot at fame with a new audio series. It’s undeniable: Vampires are in again, even while the lore surrounding them is still complex and at times contested.
Does their skin sparkle sexily in the sun or turn to ash? Can they cross moving water? Are their fangs permanently on display? What we can all agree on, however, is that vampires, whether they’re hot, grotesque, or living on Staten Island, drink blood. Queen Regent of Pop Rock Olivia Rodrigo bit down on the pulse of culture when she released her single “Vampire” over the summer, crooning about bloodsuckers, and K-pop group ENHYPEN’s cinematic release of the concept album Dark Blood pulled no punches, inviting listeners to remember one thing: “Bite me.” Nowhere is the influence of vampires now more evident than in celebrity culture and its obsession with youth, glamour, sex, and, of course, blood.
Even though it’s been over a century since Bram Stoker published Dracula, the vampire myth lives on in innumerable cultural adaptations, remixes, and interpretations in films, video games, television shows, and books. But where vampires are most alive and scarily closest to reality is in the sphere of celebrity. Core components of vampire lore — eternal youth, aristocratic glamour, and of course, a kind of dark sexiness — are still haunting us, but this time in Hollywood. To begin with this serious pop culture inquiry of celebrity bloodsucking, one must start at Kim Kardashian’s infamous “vampire facial” way back in 2013, immortalized forever on Instagram. The post has been lodged in my millennial-Gen Z-cusp brain for over a decade. The silent generation might have had sexy-scary Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula, but we have Kim.
If the words “Kim Kardashian vampire facial” mean little to you, allow me to tell you a tale. Kim, to promote the E! spinoff series Kourtney and Kim Take Miami, snapped a shot of herself receiving a vampire facial — smiling coyly at the camera with her perfectly sculpted face covered in blood. Vampire facials are not far off from Bioré pore strips, except, well, it’s blood. A vampire facial involves a microdermabrasion of the skin followed by a blood draw, then an application of platelet-rich plasma (PRP) slathered back onto the skin for absorption. All this to keep the skin smooth and youthful, just like our good-looking undead friends. Price tag? Between $1,000 and $2,000. And if you want to spring for the more intense vampire face lift where you get to inject your own blood, that’ll run you about $3,000.
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