Kylie Jenner and Meta's Girlboss Glasses Problem

There’s something deeply ironic about using a celebrity known for building an empire on image and aesthetics to rehabilitate a product actively being weaponized against women. Yet that’s exactly what Kylie Jenner and Mark Zuckerberg are banking on with their Meta Glasses collaboration—a partnership designed to make surveillance tech feel fashionable and empowering.

The pitch is simple: slap a lifestyle sheen on it, get an influencer to co-sign it, and suddenly invasive technology becomes a statement piece. But here’s the catch. While Meta plows forward with this new collaboration, the glasses continue to be abused by users taking advantage of their covert filming capabilities, often by filming women without their knowledge and posting it online. The product’s fundamental problem—its capacity to violate privacy at scale, almost invisibly—doesn’t disappear when you add celebrity endorsement and designer framing.

This is the pattern we’re watching play out across tech and corporate America. When a company faces criticism for being exploitative, extractive, or outright harmful, the playbook is increasingly to rebrand through the lens of empowerment. Slap“girlboss”language on it. Partner with a woman in a position of cultural influence. Frame the product as a tool for creative expression or personal agency. The irony, of course, is that women are statistically the ones most vulnerable to the specific harms these products enable.

Kylie Jenner’s involvement sends a particular message: that building a personal brand and aesthetic appeal can somehow neutralize concerns about the technology’s darker applications. But rebranding isn’t the same as accountability. The glasses will still record without consent. They’ll still end up on social media in videos posted without permission. And no amount of celebrity styling changes that fundamental misalignment between the product’s capabilities and the safety of the people most likely to be targeted by them.

The real question isn’t whether this rebrand will work—it probably will, at least for a moment, in certain demographics. The question is whether we’re going to keep accepting marketing makeovers as substitutes for actual responsibility. Because that’s the girlboss energy Meta is really selling here: the idea that the right image, the right influencer, and the right narrative can make anything acceptable.