Self-care or self-erasure? Welcome to the age of bio-optimisation

The other day, while scrolling through Instagram Reels, I came across a guy rubbing dog paw medicine onto his hands. He then demonstrated a planche, an already difficult calisthenics move where you lift your body into a horizontal hold above a pull-up bar. But he wasn’t gripping the bar. His palms were open, and his entire body weight was balanced on the tiny patches of sandpapery skin touching the metal. I clicked onto his account (@swholeanimal) and watched as he contorted his body in all kinds of freakishly inhuman ways, all part of something he calls ‘Biomoding’. The account is rapidly growing, closing in on a million followers. People are invested.

Biohacking has existed on the fringe for decades, from Professor Kevin Warwick giving himself ultrasonic abilities in the 90s, to Lepht Anonym implanting magnets which allow her to sense electromagnetic radiation. These experiments remained mostly within niche but fervent communities. What’s new is how modifying our bodies has become a mainstream cultural preoccupation. Figures like @swoleanimal’s Samuel Carr now pull massive audiences – and actively influence followers to replicate their hacks. Of course, most people aren’t doing plasma transfusions with their children in an attempt to live forever, or shuffling their veins around on social media. But over the past year, a wave of new tech, procedures, and products has entered the mainstream, fuelled by a widespread, almost obsessive fascination with personalised bodily upgrades, whether aesthetic or performance-based.

Do you remember the first time you saw a set of mouthguard-looking turkey teeth, or spotted an obvious BBL? What about the time you came across the terms ‘looksmaxxing’, ‘tweakments’, or ‘morning shed’? Probably not that long ago – and yet, none of it feels shocking anymore. With celebrities reportedly spending $150,000+ on facelifts, this aesthetics culture has trickled down to the rest of us, who, unable to afford Hollywood plastic surgery prices, are turning to “non-invasive” procedures like filler instead. The tweakments market is growing so fast that it is expected to more than triple between 2022 to 2030, from $61.2 billion up to a projected $190.5 billion. 

Even the seemingly harmless practice of layering your face with skincare, lip masks, mouth tape, jaw straps, and whatever else is lying around to “work their magic” overnight (AKA the morning shed) starts to feel weird when you really think about it. The originator of the term, influencer Devon Kelley, later posted a TikTok clarifying the then-hyperbolised trend, defending herself with the line: “self-care is my favourite hobby.” It’s a broad, inoffensive phrase that’s difficult to argue with. But these expensive, time-consuming rituals all point towards a single goal: constant optimisation, with not a second of the day left idle. Should we really have hobbies whose sole purpose is to beautify in our sleep, like a TikTok glow-up jump cut? And who are we really performing the ritual for, when it’s broadcast to millions?

How about performance? Do you remember your parents stockpiling endless wellness gadgets? Wearing Oura rings, tracking their gut health with toilet cameras, taking supplements and adaptogens like clockwork, always striving to get a perfect sleep score? We’ve become obsessed with quantifying our existence, from sharing scores on Goodreads and Letterboxd, to eagerly awaiting our yearly listening stats on Spotify Wrapped. The body is no exception. In the years since MyFitnessPal launched in 2005, these trackers have evolved far beyond basic calorie and step counters. 

Many of these gadgets – from smart rings and stool trackers to glucose monitors – can genuinely be helpful, particularly for those with pre-existing medical conditions they’re designed to support. But once they’re marketed to the masses under the glossy banner of private healthcare, the goal shifts: companies need more customers. Suddenly, we’re being told that any healthy person needs to monitor their body in quantifiable, borderline forensic ways. For some, that extra data is harmless. For others, it can send things spiralling fast.

“The best biohacks are the free biohacks. So that’s eating healthily, getting exercise, getting your sleep right. When it starts shifting into cosmetic procedures, you’re entering the realms of a Magic Bullet,” says Thomas Midgley, founder and psychiatrist at the Body Image Treatment Clinic. The ‘Magic Bullet’ refers to an easy fix remedy – something too good to be true. “Things like that have the potential to be helpful, but we’re always incredibly aware that some individuals can become obsessed by them,” continues Midgley, who says he’s never encountered anyone who has had a positive experience with MyFitness Pal. 

32-year-old Londoner Em Griggs relies on her Oura ring as a kind of outsourced intuition. “My ADHD means I have impaired introspective awareness,” she explains. “I don’t really know when I’m tired or sick. Understanding sleep, stress and readiness has been invaluable.” Still, she’s wary of letting it dictate her life. “It’s ‘broad strokes’ useful… ultimately, you need to do the work.” Oura rings start at £250. Griggs described it as “a big investment,” but justified it fairly easily, given all the benefits she aimed to gain from wearing it. However, it’s worth noting that the price is unaffordable for most.

What’s striking is how both extreme and low-key forms of biohacking are gaining traction at the same time. Influencers are using social media to normalise radical procedures, creating a gateway for the average person to step into that world. Meanwhile, others are unknowingly weaving lighter forms of biohacking into their daily routines, blurring the line between casual self-care and low-grade body modification.

This is in part thanks to the infiltration of the wellness space by manosphere influencers like Joe Rogan, who have rebranded self-optimisation with a more aggressive, performance-driven vocabulary than the soft-focus “self-care” language popularised by Goop. It’s the language of incel forums and looksmaxxing subreddits, which preach bodily self-improvement as a shortcut to power and desirability. Midgley confirms the recent gender shift he’s spotted in the clinic: “The marketing side of [the wellness space] has got its act together over the last decade with men, exploiting them the way women have been. What’s aspirational for men has always been about attainment, how much money you earn, what house, car, watch, suit, sexual partner, body, and job you have,” he says. “But what we’re finding in young men is that if they’re not able to achieve in all of these areas, the thing they can achieve easiest is attaining a sexual partner and the body. And to attain the sexual partner, they need the body.” 

Amid this cultural shift – where people are selectively editing their bodies like Sims in character-creation mode – contemporary media is beginning to mirror that impulse. It showed up in the conversation sparked by last year’s film The Substance; in the upcoming 2026 Met Gala theme, Costume Art, which explores the dressed body as canvas; and in the rising use of prosthetics across runways, editorials, and album covers.

“Societally, it feels that the body is almost outdated in comparison to the rest of the world. Comparing yourself to the things that you use every day, you feel as if you’re not enough, you don’t have the same capabilities,” says Mia Cain, an artist who has embedded orbs into the spine of FKA Twigs and created heatmap-style body paint on Mowalola. Her practice aims to make the body fit into the surrounding landscape, whatever that may be, resulting in work that is “shocking in the sense that it feels so correct”. 

Clers Bow has a similar stance: “Even having a phone is kind of like having a body extension, without it you can’t work as well”. Bow also explains how much harder it is to find reference points and images she’s shocked by, describing it as a “desensitisation” due to the amount of content she consumes, referencing a video she saw advertising light-up breast implants – eerily similar to the glowing bikini-style prosthetic she made last year – only to realise later that the video was AI-generated.

Cain describes her view of the body as “almost like how you see a video game character... a vehicle to navigate the world,” which is equipped with “what you need to stay alive.” In many ways, that mindset has already permeated society. Pretty privilege clearly brings certain advantages, so the impulse to become a more efficient, beautiful, calm, toned person makes sense. Some even see it as a step toward a utopian, transhumanist future.

But there’s also the risk that we’re moving toward a point of no return, towards a future where appearance and performance are shaped more by the technologies we use than by any human baseline. Where we’re hooked on upgrading, and only the wealthy can afford access to the latest enhancements. Tailored bodies risk becoming status symbols. We’re already seeing glimpses of this with GLP-1 shortages, where diabetes patients are unable to access vital medication due to cosmetic demand. It’s becoming harder to tell where self-improvement ends and self-erasure begins.