Beauty is terror. The pursuit of beauty can be terrorising. Flesh pulled back and cut open, bodies constricted, poison injected, hair burnt, skin bleached. Our biggest insecurities magnified, our natural bodies sold back to us for profit. The history of the industry is just as horrifying; tales of exploitation, discrimination, fascism, deforestation, unpaid child labour.     

When they were first conceiving of their debut book, The House of Beauty, Arabelle Sicardi turned to horror stories and haunted houses as a lens through which to navigate the world of beauty. “Horror houses are always alive; they’re actively trying to harm you. And that is ultimately how I also see the beauty industry. It’s something that understands your greatest fears and is able to adapt,” they tell Dazed. “I wanted to understand the mechanics of horror and apply it to this thing that we all experience and endure in different ways.”

It was because of the horrors, not despite them, that Sicardi became so fascinated with beauty at a young age, when the idea was irrevocably tied into their queer desire. “I learned about beauty because finding something beautiful scared me and made me curious about the power beauty holds,” they write in the introduction to the book. Curiosity became a lifelong journey that has taken them from running a popular Tumblr account to being a founding staff writer of Rookie, the beauty editor at BuzzFeed, and now the writer of the “You’ve Got Lipstick on Your Chin” Substack and founder of the Perfumed Pages scent event collective which aims to create connection and community through a focus on writing and fragrance.

They are also working on the Museum of Nails Foundation, a digital-first museum which aims to be a formal archive for nail art and beauty labour, sharing and celebrating the untold stories of nail workers. “I think that beauty as a story and as a technique and a tool for navigating the world is really undervalued and misrepresented, and it’s a life’s work to honour the people who tell that story in a way that doesn’t treat them as disposable,” says Sicardi.

Because for all the harm and horror beauty can inflict, it also has a boundless capacity for artistry, creativity, self-expression, community, care, comfort and connection – aspects that are just as celebrated and explored in The House of Beauty. Stories of the bonds formed through beauty – friendships created as nails are being painted or hair braided – and the healing it can bring sit side-by-side with investigations into the exploitation of Vietnamese manicurists and beauty's ties to fascism. Beauty, as Sicardi tells Dazed, is “a beautiful mythology that we’re living in. It’s the best and worst things in the world, and in humanity, and we’re just vibing on both ends all the time". 

I’m going to immediately out myself as a long-time fan of yours. I was following your Tumblr in about 2015.

Arabelle Sicardi: So we grew up together, basically.

I was looking back through my Tumblr and I’d saved these two posts of yours. In one you are giving someone advice about products for cystic acne, and the other is a compilation of extracts from female writers about screaming and rage. Those two themes are still so pertinent and so reflective of the book – finding a balance between the practical advice and then this wider feeling of horror and violence. How do you navigate that?

Arabelle Sicardi: I view beauty and being feminine-presenting in the world as like a snake eating its own tail. You can’t escape the trials and tribulations of both. I’m grateful that there’s so much mythology – the Ouroboros is older than civilisations and countries, and it’s part of human history. So whenever I feel really overwhelmed or frustrated by any of it, I’m like, ‘One, I’m not alone in this; two, other people have navigated this; and three, we have each other to commiserate with because of it.’

I think a lot of people really loved my Tumblr era because we were all going through the same thing collectively, and I was just one of the people archiving it. I’m really grateful that so many people grew up with me. Almost every day someone comes up to me and is like, ‘I used to love your work and you helped me as a teenager.’ To be able to say that I had that link with someone, it never makes me feel lonely. I think a lot of the suffering that I had when I was really young had to do with loneliness. And now I’m not lonely anymore, so I think it’s a blessing.

For all the harmful sides of beauty that are in the book, the thing that comes through in all the chapters is these moments of connection and the community. You call the beauty technicians in the book ‘care workers’, tell stories about being fed empanadas at the nail salon.

Arabelle Sicardi: I think beauty can hold many different stories at once, and that’s the good and bad thing about it. So on one hand, for me personally, there’s more community and collective gathering than I’ve seen in a really long time. For example, the perfume swaps that are happening pretty much everywhere. There are people doing their own picnics and book clubs around beauty. It feels like there are more people reaching out for one another than there have been in a really long time, and that’s really cool.

At the same time, we have overconsumption. We have constant new brands. There are more products, more brands, and more capital trying to seize our own personal capital and our wallets than ever before. It is an ocean of things, and we are all trying not to drown in the things, and to find someone else’s hand in the detritus. I think both can be true, you know, and the hard thing is how to handle it.

In the chapter that looks at sustainability, you talk about how terms like ‘organic’ and ‘sustainable’ are actually quite opposed to each other, and just how complicated it is to consume – even if you’re really trying your best – in a way that’s ethical or environmentally sound. Do you have any advice for people who want to do it the right way? 

Arabelle Sicardi: I would suggest being patient and curious and forgiving, both to themselves and others, because there is no right way to consume under capitalism. The system is set up to make you feel out of control. We are going to fail sometimes, and the best thing for us to do is to learn from our mistakes and move forward with that information. The science of things changes all the time. We get new information and new advancements constantly. What we knew yesterday may not apply today. So it’s important for us to pay attention, to stay curious, and to be able to adapt to new information as it presents itself.

You can decide to buy one less beauty product. You can decide to use up the products you have before you buy more things. Those decisions are enough to actively improve the lives around you. You don’t need to completely radicalise everything and create a self-sacrificing narrative. You can simply choose differently, and then help someone else choose differently, and operate that way. It’s a collective decision-making process. It’s not self-immolation. There isn’t only one way to save the world. There are a million trillion ways.

You talk in the introduction about exploring the things that frighten you, and you connect that to queer desire – how finding girls beautiful had danger attached to it. Does your queerness give you a different perspective on beauty?

Arabelle Sicardi: The book is dedicated to my wife. I speak to her at the very end of the book in the acknowledgements. This book is sandwiched in the fact that I am a queer person writing this book, and that’s intentional. You cannot speak of the beauty industry without acknowledging that queer people have shaped this. I mean, you can, but you would be ahistorical and wrong. Queer people are fundamental to the story of beauty, even if we’re not explicitly talking about it.

The amount of make-up artists who are queer drag queens defining beauty culture, the amount of queer perfumers who have shaped history, even if they have not explicitly been queer first… you don’t need to say your queerness out loud for it to still be part of your identity. I kind of wanted the book to just operate that way, to know that I don’t need to over explain or justify it. The work is woven with my queer identity, and the fact that in spite of the world being inhospitable to queer and trans people, this story is for us too. It’s our story. We are not side characters. We have created this industry as much as anyone else. It is our legacy too.

Beauty is being so prioritised right now. For me, it seems like it’s not sustainable, how quickly we’re cycling through trends, how much we’re consuming, all the procedures people are undergoing. How do you think this is going to end?

Arabelle Sicardi: This is a great thought exercise. I have a question in return – what do you think it means to get off the ride? Because just because you refuse to use something doesn’t mean the system stops. Your refusal to use a product does not mean the entire industry has stopped mattering or affecting you. It’s kind of like the Cerulean monologue in The Devil Wears Prada. Just because you don’t drink the Kool Aid doesn’t mean everyone else isn’t. There’s no way for you to get off the ride. We’re all on it together, whether you like it or not. It’s a matter of dismantling the ride while you’re on it, and I don’t know when that will happen.

Truly, there is a cliff in terms of how the planet can sustain our demands, and we are already falling off it. We just haven’t hit the ground yet, but it will happen within the next ten years. In fragrance, we have already over-farmed multiple ingredients and there are materials that will no longer be used in perfumery within the next decade. That’s to say nothing of the fact that places around the world are already experiencing drought, and that’s only going to get worse and faster because of AI usage. I don’t think we can sustain it, and it’s a matter of figuring out how we adapt and survive the results. But I also think that humanity is full of ingenious people. Some of the greatest innovations and acts of human kindness come from navigating a lack of resources and finding ways to protect each other in impossible circumstances.

You say in the conclusion that this book was meant to be crueller, and then, in the face of all the cruelty we’re experiencing, you didn’t want to be part of that. As much as we challenge the industry or talk about all the harm it’s doing, you also have to celebrate the joy and the community and the artistry and all the good sides of it. 

Arabelle Sicardi: It’s really easy to be selfish or cruel and let the world break your heart. I think it’s actually so much harder to be hopeful. The informal epigraph of this entire book is ‘hope is a discipline,’ that quote from the organiser Mariame Kaba. It’s really hard work to make sure the world doesn’t break your heart, and it’s really hard work to understand that beauty exists even in ugly things. You have a choice to find meaning in that or not. For me, it’s important to be able to find meaning in it.

So yeah, cruelty is always an option for many people. But why not comfort each other in the face of it? What else is the point?

The way we look doesn’t just exist in a vacuum. There’s so much politics around it. Your appearance determines how you move through the world, the laws that are enacted against you, how you’re treated by people. Even if you decide to stop using a product, or stop wearing make-up, or don’t get the Botox, you’re still existing and trying to navigate a world where those rules still apply to you and affect how people approach you.

Arabelle Sicardi: Yeah, at the end of the day, beauty is so intertwined with capitalism, the economy, and discrimination in various ways that the idea that simply stopping using products would somehow protect you from any of that feels a bit naive to me. Ultimately, a lot of the people who propose these ideas of ‘let’s just stop using these products’ are often white women who are protected by the fact of being white in professional spaces. Even just looking at the economy right now, the majority of jobs lost in the past year have been women of colour. White men have gained jobs, and Black women have lost jobs. 

So the idea that tapping out or opting out would affect everyone equally or create a fair ground doesn’t really exist, because racism does, ageism does, classism does. All of these things are intertwined with our definitions of what beauty looks like. You can’t opt out, because all of these things are involved. There’s so much respectability politics entwined with what professionalism looks or even smells like. It’s a very complicated conversation that we’ve just ingested and integrated into our daily lives. My role as a writer is to understand the systems at play and try to untangle them – and that’s what I hoped to do in the book.

The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry by Arabelle Sicardi is published by W. W. Norton and available now.