Awkward and unattractive bank teller Stacey Chapman (Kate Micucci) is invited to a Christmas party by her co-worker, Gina. At the party, Stacey feels excluded by her vain and gossiping colleagues and is further humiliated when her Secret Santa gift of a taxidermied duck is received unenthusiastically. Gina gifts each party-goer a box of Alo Glo, an expensive and popular skin lotion. Upon applying the lotion, Stacey finds that it severely irritates her skin. Stacey's husband Keith (Martin Starr) tries to reassure her that she's fine the way she is, but is unsuccessful. Discouraged and unable to sleep, Stacey stays up watching television, only to happen across a commercial for Alo Glo. Stacey soon realizes that the ad's spokesman (Dan Stevens) is talking directly to her, promising her that Alo Glo will make her beautiful if she continues to use it, going so far as to say that it will make her a "new you." Stacey secretly orders a case of the lotion and continues to use it, despite the irritation. Stacey soon finds that the tubes of Alo Glo have begun bursting, creating a puddle of lotion in her basement. A humanoid figure emerges from the puddle, mirroring Stacey's movements. Sensing familiarity with the figure, Stacey kisses and embraces it. Keith finally attempts to confront Stacey, but she stabs him in the forehead before killing him with an axe. Stacey then finds the lotion figure in the bathroom, where it disintegrates back into lotion in her bathtub. Stacey submerges herself in the lotion and re-emerges as a beautiful woman. Stacey taxidermies Keith's body, disposing of his organs in the garbage. The next day, Stacey's co-workers are struck by her newfound beauty. Stacey laughs and gossips with them, but as a radiant glow surrounds her, her laughter starts to sound more forced, and her expression seems overtaken with a sense of unease.
Tropes
- Adaptational Personality Change: Stacey is completely different from the short webcomic the episode is based on. In the webcomic, Stacey was a Stepford Smiler who was extremely sociable (in fact, she was not a bank teller, but worked on direct sales hosting parties to sell Alo Glo), but had deep insecurities about her aging looks as well as depression. In the episode, Stacey is much younger, and her insecurities are regarding her looks in general as well as her incapacity to fit in among more glamorous women.
- Ambiguously Human: Stacey's new beauty is so captivating that literally everyone at the bank is staring at her in adoration, to the point that she appears to give off an unearthly radiance in the final moments of the episode (assuming this isn't all a hallucination), suggesting that her new self might not be strictly human.
- Ambiguous Time Period: The time setting of the episode is vague, to say the least.
- Everyone drives modern 2010s cars, except for Stacey, Keith, and a few others.
- With the exception of the TV, everything in Stacey's house from the furniture to the telephone looks like something out of The '70s or The '80s.
- The clothing and fashion are all over the place. While at work and at Gina's party, Stacey and her colleagues wear fashion that appears more suited for the 1980s than the modern era. Keith also dresses like the average American man of the time period, wearing an oversized pair of glasses and a caterpillar moustache.
- Gina uses a flip cell phone towards the end. Additionally, the bank where Stacey works also uses what appears to be computers from the late 2000s.
- An Aesop: Do not choose beauty over your health, listen to the people who love you as you are, and attempts to reassure people can be patronizing and invalidating, and sometimes, the best thing you can do is listen to them.
- Beauty Inversion: Kate Micucci is made into a convincingly awkward-looking outcast with unflattering outfits and certain make-up and prosthetic pieces.
- Beauty Is Bad: Stacey's co-workers are beautiful but bitchy, gossipy, and obsessed with looks. Once the process is over, Stacey becomes just like them - and in many ways, even worse.
- Black Comedy:
- Keith's murder is darkly comical thanks to the reactions of both him and Stacy - the former in shock and asking for a towel to clean up his bloodied glasses, the latter responding with the kind of sympathetic bemusement normally reserved for bumps and bruises.
- Keith's ultimate fate as a taxidermied mimicry of his former self is played for morbid laughs, especially since he's been posed to make it look as if he's still alive and watching TV.
- Body Horror: Stacy's worsening skin condition has shades of this; her body gets covered in red rashes as she keeps using Alo Glo in spite of obviously being allergic to it. Towards the end, large swathes of her skin start peeling off altogether.
- Disconnected by Death: Keith is killed while in the process of radioing for help.
- Downer Ending: Whatever process has happened to Stacey, has reached its conclusion. She is beautiful, but now as bitchy as the rest of her coworkers, her husband has been killed by her, and whatever happened to her in the end, it's unclear and possibly unlikely that she has found happiness that way, as the final shot shows brief moments of her horrified and confused face between fits of laughter.
- I Just Want to Be Beautiful: Stacey is extremely insecure about her looks and desperately wants to be accepted by her pretty, but shallow colleagues. It drives her to very drastic measures.
- Just the Way You Are: Keith repeatedly tries to assure Stacey that she's a beautiful and wonderful person, physical appearances aren't everything, and he loves her for who she is. However, he doesn't realize that this isn't the love she wants — she wants to be sexy and popular.
- Laughing Mad: As she begins laughing with her fellow co-workers in the finale, Stacy's laughter begins to sound forced and deranged.
- Light Is Not Good: The advertiser for Alo Glo in "The Outside" wears bright white clothes, has platinum blonde hair and appears in the TV light, but is evil and exploits Stacey's insecurities to mold her into a worse person. This goes greatly with the Beauty Is Bad message of the segment.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: It's possible to interpret Alo Glo as a somehow supernatural substance with a will of its own; boxes of it appear in Stacey's driveway with no sign of a delivery van, its commercials directly address the viewer and towards the end, it begins to leak out of its bottles to assume a humanoid form. Not to mention that the physical transformation it causes its user would normally require professional makeup and plastic surgery. But the commercial also states that hallucinations are one possible side effect of the product, so it's also entirely valid to assume that all the impossible events only happen in Stacey's mind.
- Only Sane Man: Stacey's husband is the only person in the episode who appreciates her for who she is and shows reasonable concern for the horrible side effects of the beauty product. He ultimately ends up murdered for his troubles.
- Reveling in the New Form: Stacy is immediately overjoyed when she metamorphoses into her beautiful new self, especially when she sees that her lazy eye has been corrected. Once she's finished dressing, she makes for her workplace and revels in the attention of others, clearly taking great delight that she's now so beautiful that people can't take their eyes off her... but in between spates of delighted laughter, her expression shifts to one of confusion and horror.
- Riddle for the Ages: What was up with the commercials that were capable of talking directly to Stacey? How does the lotion turns into a person and then back into lotion and why does it happen? Did any of this relate to the strange noises she'd been hearing in the house when alone?
- Sanity Slippage: Continuous use of Alo Glo renders Stacey increasingly obsessive and detached from reality, until she finally snaps from her husband's repeated pleas to seek help and murders him with an axe.
- Taxidermy Is Creepy: Zigazagged. Stacey's like for taxidermy is less of a case of her being portrayed as creepy than of her being portrayed as an awkward outsider to the people she is usually around, with her husband talking about her taxidermy as her artistic skill to turn something usually ugly into something beautiful. That said, when she finally breaks under the full effect of Alo Glo, she kills her husband and taxidermies him.
- The Television Talks Back: The blond man in the Alo Glo commercials repeatedly addresses Stacey directly by name and tells her that using the product is the only way for her to become a worthwhile human being.
- True Beauty Is on the Inside: Keith believes this and he keeps trying to reassure Stacey of this. It doesn't exactly soothe her insecurities about her outward appearance however.
- Was It Really Worth It?: Stacy's thoughts at the end, if the facial expressions she makes are any indication.
- What Have I Become?: Stacy's realization at the end speaks clearly.
