A 70s special of Top of the Pops recently re-aired on the BBC, with music fans dancing unselfconsciously to artists like Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper. Aside from the unique 70s fashion and retro tunes, what stands out the most is how normal everyone looks – both those in the audience and on stage. The textured skin, misaligned teeth, receding hairlines and make-up free complexions with the occasional sheen of sweat sit in stark contrast to what we see on our screens today.

Beauty standards in TV and film have never felt more extreme. Consider the casting of Jacob Elordi in Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein. In Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, the titular creature is so repellent that “no mortal could support the horror of that countenance”. Elordi is tall, yes, but he couldn’t be further away aesthetically from a monster – something that didn’t go unnoticed by audiences or the press. “So you’re attracted to Frankenstein’s monster. Now what?” a headline by Glamour UK asked, while the BBC’s reviewer complained that the monster was too handsome: “Giving him a makeover is like having a vegetarian Count Dracula.” 

Emily Brontë wrote Cathy in Wuthering Heights as a strong, striking teen with brown hair – rather than a conventional beauty – but in Emerald Fennell’s adaptation, she’s played by Margot Robbie (an actress many audiences were first introduced to as the “hottest blonde ever” in The Wolf of Wall Street).

Shakyra Dowling, a casting director for independent British film and TV, says there has “always been an element” of prioritising beauty in casting. “This isn’t necessarily coming from casting directors – we’re actually looking for individuality and authenticity – but from a wider culture that’s become very image-driven,” she tells Dazed Beauty, while conceding that there are always conversations about “marketability” from financiers and broadcasters. “Younger actors are growing up in the same ecosystem as their peers: Instagram, TikTok, very filtered ideas of beauty. Sometimes actors come to the industry having altered themselves to fit a perceived standard, even before they’ve had the chance to develop as performers.”

But it’s not just the professional actors and celebrities who are being yassified – members of the public who appear on our screens are becoming just as shiny. While romance reality shows like Love Island have always attracted contestants who put effort into their appearance, the 2025 UK cast reportedly spent thousands on procedures before entering the villa, including hair transplants, veneers and filler in the lips, chin, cheeks and tear troughs. One contestant of 2023’s The Golden Bachelor, meanwhile, had the veins in the back of her hand minimised to prepare for the show.

Even programmes like Survivor, where people are stranded on an island with no personal grooming items, aren’t safe from soaring beauty standards. One 2025 contestant told Allure she’d had Botox, laser hair removal, a gel manicure and a hair appointment to appear camera-ready, while fans speculated that other contestants had a host of treatments including microblading, lash lifts and even cosmetic tattoos. “Why does this cast seem so well-groomed and polished?” asked one Redditor in r/survivor.

It’s not surprising that actors feel pressured to adhere to certain beauty standards. Bella Ramsey received death threats and was forced to delete their social media for playing the lead in The Last of Us after members of the male gaming community deemed them not attractive enough for the role. Over the years, numerous actors have spoken of how they were told they would never make it in Hollywood because they weren’t attractive enough. And once celebrities start normalising cosmetic surgery and procedures it has a knock-on effect on beauty standards, trickling down through reality TV and then to the general public. In 2024, a cosmetic aesthetics doctor told Sky News that requests for filler went up 12-fold after the latest season of Love Island aired. When Kylie Jenner first admitted to having lip fillers in 2015, there was famously a 70 per cent rise in enquiries for the procedure within 24 hours.

“Our research with body perception suggests we can have our ideas about what’s a desirable weight or muscularity level dialled up or down even just by showing lots of images that aren’t necessarily appealing but are extreme in some way,” says Professor Lynda Boothroyd, a body image researcher at the University of Durham, on the impact of seeing so many stars shrinking to increasingly tiny sizes.

But people are increasingly pushing back against the glossy, plastic faces filling our screens. “I was watching The Rings of Power and I don’t want to see a hobbit with fake tits and perfect teeth,” British comedian Al Nash recently stated on a viral Subway Take where he argued that “we need to stop beautiful people from dominating the entertainment industry”.  And while she’s never confirmed having had any cosmetic tweakments, Millie Bobby Brown drew criticism for her “stiff” facial expressions in the fifth series of Stranger Things. 

The extreme reaction to Aimee Lou Wood’s teeth in White Lotus (Vanity Fair called them “inspiring” and “a revelation”, Grazia called them “radical”, Harper’s Bazaar “the real star of the show”, the New York Times “a novelty”) suggests viewers were hungry to see ‘imperfections’ on screen. One of the top-rated Letterboxd comments for 2023’s The Holdovers, starring Paul Giamatti and Dominic Sessa, is “perfect casting, no remnants of Instagram face”. In a discussion praising the Safdie brothers’ casting – the nine-time Oscar-nominated Marty Supreme featured 140 non-actors – one Reddit user argued that normal faces are refreshing. “I wanna see [a] regular person. I want the store clerk to look weird... I wanna see [a] homely-looking, 57-year-old woman be the hero and defeat the monster with a shotgun in her suburban neighbourhood.”

One reason why viewers might have a negative reaction to watching people with cosmetic tweakments is that, as we explored in ‘Is Botox ruining cinema?’, by freezing your facial muscles, you hinder your ability to emote – a vital element of acting. Dowling says this issue has “come up recently” in her line of work. “Acting is such a subtle, emotional craft, and the camera picks up the smallest movement in someone’s face. If those muscles can’t move naturally, it can limit what the actor can communicate on screen,” she says. “When you watch a brilliant performance, so much of it is happening in tiny shifts of emotion.” 

This is also impacting reality shows: Survivor contestant Sage Ahren-Nichols spoke about feeling misjudged by her fellow contestants, in part because her Botox made her appear unempathetic – and accusations of shows like Real Housewives being staged become more potent when its stars can barely move their faces.

If we continue to hold aesthetic standards for entertainers at impossible heights, there’s no question we’ll miss out on some of the finest talent of our generation. We’ll likely also see more performers freezing and fine-tuning their faces – a trend that, unless it serves the story, can instantly shatter the fourth wall. And what about working-class actors who can’t afford to pay their way into beauty? If we truly value great, meritocratic entertainment, we need to move beyond this fixation with on-screen perfection. “What I hope we protect in casting is individuality,” says Dowling. “Film and television are at their most powerful when they reflect the world back to us in all its variety. That includes faces that are unusual, lived-in, and characterful. When I’m casting, the most exciting moment is when someone walks in and they are totally individual and authentic. They bring something unexpected. That’s often where the magic is.”