As the beauty industry morphs to meet shifting gender dynamics, rising conservatism, and constant surveillance, why do our self-care treatments look more like self-harm?
I recently went through a major heartbreak, and found myself experiencing a sudden storm of wellness-adjacent impulses, ones that arrived in lockstep with each painful emotion. Should I go on a keto diet? Get Botox? An eyebrow lift? Or an acid peel? True, all of these exercises feel consistent with “glowing-up”, a breakup rite of passage. Except they came with distinct feelings of anger, shame, and even violence. Why was it that these beauty treatments, which are sold to us as self-care, could feel more akin to an urge to self-harm?
By now we’re all too familiar with the old adage ‘beauty is pain’. Traced back to at least 1800s France (‘il faut souffrir pour être belle’, or ‘one must suffer to be beautiful’), the phrase has been used for generations to justify the physical suffering many women endure to maintain society’s beauty standards. “If suffering is beauty and beauty is love, she cannot be sure she will be loved if she does not suffer”, as Naomi Wolf wrote in The Beauty Myth back in 1990, unpicking the ways a modern patriarchal society leverages beauty standards as a way to oppress women – even while gender equality grew in the eyes of the law.
We’ve seen this truth play out throughout history, through extreme grooming acts such as wearing corsets and fontanges, hairline plucking and foot binding, disordered eating, and surgeries. But it’s also embedded into the very standards themselves. Today’s trends for thinness – whether via Ozempic or #SkinnyTok – come with the same message as 00s heroin-chic, or the Victorian obsession with the aesthetics of tuberculosis. A malnourished body, a controlled and surveilled body, an addicted or diseased body – i.e. a body in pain – is an intrinsically feminine body, and a beautiful one at that.
But as the beauty industry morphs to meet the current cultural order, both women and men are now being encouraged to self-optimise in ways that feel increasingly violent. With rising conservatism, enforced binary gender dynamics and the obsession with wellness, we’re not just seeing a subversion of beauty, but of health and self-care. Across the board, we are being told that a beautiful body is one that requires a huge amount of self-surveillance and self-mutilation to achieve.
Take the rise of looksmaxxing, the male grooming practices with roots in incel forums that cover everything from mewing to steroid use to plastic surgery and hair transplants. Much like women’s historical relationship with beauty, this approach seems to be accompanied by a sense of self-control or self-punishment, an attempt to redeem ourselves to society, rather than self-love or self-expression.
What if modern beauty standards aren’t so much a war between genders, but a symptom of a system that preys on human weaknesses? It was philosopher Michel Foucault’s 1975 essay “Discipline and Punish” that famously illuminated the state of the human body under capitalism. “The new discipline invades the body and seeks to regulate its very forces and operation, the economy and efficiency of its movements… to increase the utility of the body, to augment its forces,” he wrote. Today, the same rings true. In a recent interview on Joshua Citarella’s Doomscroll, Professor Quinn Slobodian explains how we live under neoliberal power that upholds a capitalist economy by prioritising marketability at all costs. To survive in such a climate, it’s necessary that we, as members of this society, consider ourselves as marketable goods too. Ones that are as strong, healthy, beautiful, and optimised as possible.
Under capitalism, the idea that we need to suffer at work to both achieve success and enjoy our lives is one that is driven home constantly, and the same is true for aesthetics; the more committed we are and the more we suffer to achieve them, the more we deserve them. Think of how we might believe that the more a skin treatment stings and burns, the more effective it must be. Labour is a good thing, under this view, and required of all of us to take part in the economy.
I realise now that the impulses I felt to improve myself came from a deep instinct to repent for my failed relationship, to regain my value in the eyes of society.
The emotions that come with this demand for aesthetic labour are familiar to all of us: shame, anger, catharsis, relief, pride. The pursuit of self-betterment through violence feels eerily similar to the self-flagellation practiced by devout religious worshippers to repent for their sins. Except our God is late-stage-capitalism, and our moral compass is not good vs bad, but a new binary between market success and market failure. It makes perfect sense that we’d internalise these pressures into a constant state of self-surveillance, the subtlest form of self-harm inflicted by ourselves as a redemption for any social failures, or simply to decrease the friction we experience as we move through the world.
It feels inevitable that we’d begin to experience beauty (or wellness) burn-out, a by-product that we remedy with dopamine-hitting aesthetic quick-fixes rather than the much slower, more generous, more forgiving care truly required for ourselves and our communities. This isn’t helped (of course) by the internet which, as well as proliferating beauty standards, has created a newfound ease with which we can edit and control our online presence. It’s through the internet that we’ve found ourselves with a new kind of familiarity with self-mutilation, one that goes hand-in-hand with our increasingly intimate relationship with machines. The normalisation of invasive beauty treatments including injectables, surgeries, medications, lasers, and acids feel like a direct extension of our day-to-day comfort with using vapes, ChatGPT therapists, Apple Watches, running apps, period trackers, or AI facial analysis, while the ease at which we can edit images of ourselves have bred a comfort with instant self-editing.
I realise now that the impulses I felt to improve myself came from a deep instinct to repent for my failed relationship, to regain my value in the eyes of society. Today, as this truth expands to impact everyone, it seems like a good time to remember that “self-care cannot be an ‘act of political warfare’ if the only battle you’re waging is against your frown lines,” to quote Kathleen Brown’s 2021 essay “Reclaiming Audre Lorde’s Radical Self-Care”. The only solution, really, is an entirely political one: to recognise the powers that we’ve internalised, and to re-embrace a love that extends beyond our own self-image.