diff --git a/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.provided b/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.provided
index a7fb521eff..1d15adda9c 100644
--- a/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.provided
+++ b/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.provided
@@ -34,3 +34,9 @@ llvm-core/clang-9999
 # Pulled in by sys-apps/texinfo, contains only an info file, which
 # will get masked anyway during installation.
 app-doc/info-manual-9999
+
+# Pillow is a dependency of docutils. Ebuild unconditionally requires
+# it, but docutils actually autodetects pillow. So let's skip it then
+# - it is only used for docs, which we don't ship in production
+# images.
+dev-python/pillow-9999
diff --git a/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.use.mask b/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.use.mask
index b635b4660b..b68b16acd4 100644
--- a/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.use.mask
+++ b/sdk_container/src/third_party/coreos-overlay/profiles/coreos/base/package.use.mask
@@ -13,12 +13,6 @@ sys-libs/ncurses cxx
 # Pulls dev-python/sphinx, which in turn pulls a lot of other python stuff.
 sys-fs/btrfs-progs man
 
-# The dev-python/pillow package is pulled in by dev-python/docutils.
-# As the name suggests, it's for generating docs, which we don't even
-# put anywhere. Thus avoid pulling more dependencies than necessary
-# for throw-away things.
-dev-python/pillow jpeg
-
 # Gentoo force-enables X for app-emulation/qemu, because qemu is doing
 # some automagic detection of gtk ignoring whether we want to use gtk
 # or not. We don't have gtk on Flatcar, so it is not an issue here,