In Sarah Wang’s debut novel New Skin, a Chinese immigrant mother in Los Angeles spends her benefit payments on backstreet cosmetic procedures. When things go catastrophically awry, her daughter discovers that some of the substances being illegally injected into faces would be more at home on building sites. 

Wang, who researched the novel partly through immersion in the American reality show Botched, which documents cosmetic surgery disasters, found the truth required little embellishment. She describes women who woke from surgery to find procedures had been performed on them without consent. Meanwhile, a surgeon whose practice consisted almost entirely of debriding flesh rotted by Brazilian butt lifts told her that most get botched.

The UK, too, has witnessed an alarming explosion in cowboy procedures – often marketed as non-surgical, but actually invasive and high-risk – with the government announcing new regulations to protect people and save NHS resources from fixing botched interventions. Among the most shocking cases was Alice Webb, a 33-year-old mother of five who died in 2024 following a liquid BBL from Jordan James Parke, AKA the self-styled “Lip King”, a now-deceased rogue practitioner. 

Part of an emerging subgenre dubbed “Goop horror”, New Skin (published by Picador in June) is part of a wave of novels that expose the beauty and anti-ageing industries as systems that exploit, consume and ultimately erase the women they claim to serve. In The Take by Kelly Yang (published by Constable in April), a broke young Asian American writer sells her youth to a powerful Hollywood producer via experimental blood transfusions. In Turn Back Time by Eleanor Tucker (published by Canelo in April), a beauty journalist trials a miracle anti-ageing treatment which dissolves her identity dissolves as well as her wrinkles.

The novels arrive amid a broader cultural reckoning with the dark side of beauty: satirical body horror is exploding messily on screen, with Coralie Fargeat’s film The Substance and Ryan Murphy’s TV show The Beauty processing the same anxieties through a more visceral lens, while LA noir thriller Skincare, inspired by true events, stars Elizabeth Banks as a celebrity facialist driven to extremes by her rivalry with a competitor. But fiction, working at the level of interiority, does something that spectacle cannot – it gets inside the minds of women prepared to take huge risks for the promise of youth or a certain aesthetic.   

Through the desperation of their characters – for cash, cultural assimilation or social or professional acceptance – these novels uncover the class, race and feminist issues underpinning the lunchtime tweakments sold on Instagram. Anita Bhagwandas, beauty journalist and author of Ugly: Why The World Became Beauty Obsessed and How To Break Free, says the industry has reached cultural saturation. “For decades, beauty operated as a soft power. Now, with the rise of injectables, tweakments and algorithm-driven faces, it’s become impossible to ignore. Fiction is a natural place to process that – because, mentally, we haven’t had time to process what’s happening. These novels are less about beauty and more about who truly puppeteers the commodification of the body.”

This conversation has been building in fiction for some years. Frances Cha’s If I Had Your Face (2020) follows four working-class Seoul women navigating a city where cosmetic surgery is positioned not as vanity but as necessity. Ling Ling Huang’s Natural Beauty (2023), inspired by her experience of working in a beauty store, sent a Chinese American narrator into a New York wellness company whose products conceal a disturbing truth – proof, as Huang has it, that looking beautiful has less to do with how well you are than how well off you are.

The elixir of youth is one of literature’s oldest MacGuffins, but what makes its appearance in these novels so contemporary is the insistence on mundanity. Tucker, a former beauty journalist, wanted her protagonist’s experience to echo a lunchtime treatment. Yang, whose research led her to Silicon Valley, where entrepreneurs such as Bryan Johnson conduct anti-ageing blood-transfusion experiments, notes that her biohacking premise – also featured in Madeline Cash’s novel Lost Lambs – barely needed fictionalising. 

The fear of ageing has become an arms race, says Yang. “We think we can control [the process], but we really can’t, and we shouldn’t have to. We’re constantly being told as women that our time is up, and as soon as that shadow is cast, we have a really hard time proving that we still deserve to be heard.” Tucker sees it as a double bind: “If you do too much, you are seen as vain or plastic-faced. But if you let the grey come in, there’s a sense that you’re a bit lazy.” 

Bhagwandas observes that the messaging starts much younger now, with twenty-somethings being told to prevent ageing. “Botox is presented like getting your nails done. Fillers are discussed in the same breath as skincare. That reframing removes the psychological barrier – but these are still medical procedures with real consequences. Who we trust, and can afford to trust, becomes crucial.”

The class politics are as confronting as a scalpel to the nose. New Skin illuminates how unlicensed clinics exploit marginalised women, turning them into addicts. Tucker makes the same point through the softer violence of influencer culture: “The people selling these things are doing it from a place of privilege, but telling the story that you’re just one product away. You're not just one product away.”

Dr Jessica Andrews, a novelist and creative writing professor specialising in gender and social class in relation to the body, is precise about the mechanism. “For working-class women, beauty often serves an aspirational function, holding the false promise that it might change our lives and circumstances. The beauty industry places the onus on the individual to change their own appearance – a flawed, neoliberal ideology that shifts focus away from systemic change.”

“For working-class women, beauty often serves an aspirational function, holding the false promise that it might change our lives and circumstances”

The racial dimension is equally unsparing. Both Wang and Yang locate cosmetic alteration within a longer history of assimilation’s poisoned promise. Wang is direct. “The goals of plastic surgery – a thin, high nose bridge, high cheekbones, bigger eyes – are Caucasian features and standards. For me, it was a metaphor for the dangers of whiteness,” she says. The Take makes the racial power dynamic its central architecture: a young Asian American woman selling her most intimate biological resource to a white producer. In Bhagwandas’s analysis, “a beauty industry built on Western ideals doesn’t just exclude women of colour, it actively reshapes them. For women of colour, altering your appearance can feel like a way to reduce friction in a new environment. What’s particularly insidious is how this plays out in less regulated spaces where vulnerability is exploited for profit.”

The authors agree that culpability lies not just with the beauty industry but with the society that enables it. “We think women need to look youthful because they look fertile and useful,” says Tucker. When a woman doesn’t care what men think of her, “it suggests she might have some wisdom. That’s unsettling to some.” Wang, meanwhile, gives her protagonist Fanny a “badass” spirit that prevents her being cast as a victim. 

Tucker surmises that we remain trapped in the beauty industry’s clutches “because we don’t want to look old.” The industry, by this reading, is a mirror that reveals something far more uncomfortable about ourselves than crow’s feet. Subject to these forces, the female body becomes a site of transaction in these novels: bought, sold, harvested, gradually collapsed. What they leave behind are questions less about beauty than power and patriarchal control: What are we so afraid of? And who exactly is profiting from that fear?