If we want to predict the next big trends, we should look inside a casket. The return of gothic fashion, the renewed popularity of vampires in media, and our growing obsession with longevity all suggest that death is never far from our minds. Recently, though, death seems to have become a defining feature of the beauty world beyond the trend cycles of gothic make-up or deathly niche fragrances: it now exists as an aesthetic, a mood, and a mode of contemporary beauty.

One obvious place to start is the increasingly widespread use of GLP-1 medication and the return of the ultra-skinny body. While we are all still debating whether it is right, or helpful, to comment on women’s bodies, it is undeniably unsettling to see celebrities appear to waste away before our eyes. This body trend goes beyond slimness, toeing the line of starvation chic, with certain celebrities seeming to display the visible effects of extreme thinness. While there is no way of knowing who is using GLP-1s, the advent of a weight-loss medication that is easily available – for celebrities and the masses alike – means that skinniness can appear attainable without the rigorous diet and exercise plans usually reserved for those whose looks are their livelihood, and who therefore have the time to dedicate to that pursuit. In this climate, does deathly frailty become a status symbol, signifying a life unencumbered by daily work and strenuous activity? A life in glamorous suspended animation?

Alongside this comes the trend of ‘numb femininity’, seen most clearly through the girlification of beta-blocker medication and Rachel Sennott’s proclamation on the Oscars red carpet that “numb is in!” Numb femininity recalls the ‘lobotomy chic’ of a few years ago and, indeed, a long history of female tranquillisation, especially during politically tumultuous periods. The golden age of tranquilisers in the 1950s saw medications like Valium marketed to women as aspirational commodities akin to refrigerators and TV sets (“mother’s little helpers”). Women’s tranquilliser use was even noted by Betty Friedan in the pioneering feminist text The Feminine Mystique as one way women coped with the gender expectations and restrictions of the period.

The growing use of facial Botox is also creating a curiously numb and unmoving facial effect. Botox can literally suppress our ability to emote, particularly through micro-expressions, and may therefore impair our ability to feel and express these emotions, or to recognise them in others. This flattening of emotion pushes us towards a kind of death-mask-like tranquillity, which may be calm and wrinkle-free, but is worrying in its implications.

Patriarchal culture has long labelled women as emotionally volatile – “hysterical” – and punished them for it. In the 1770s, French physician Francois Boissier de Sauvages included “tears, laughter and yawning” among the symptoms of “hysteria”, a condition for which many women over the centuries would be committed to asylums. Viewed through this lens, rejecting outward signs of emotion through an injectable stoicism begins to look like a capitulation to what patriarchy has long desired. With the rise of AI girlfriends and the apparently ever-looming, though never quite here, fully automated female robot companion, removing our emotions moves us closer to an affectless and robotic femininity: compliant, smooth, and untroubling. A death of the flesh-and-blood woman in favour of silicone and the digital.

Death not only informs the aesthetic and mood of contemporary beauty culture; it is also incorporated into the methods we use to achieve our mortal perfection. Some of the most recent innovations in beauty treatments have been achieved using cadavers or their by-products. Cosmetic surgery conferences use cadavers as practice models for procedures, creating dead bodies with snatched jawlines and perfected noses, while donated tissue from dead bodies is increasingly being used in cosmetic procedures, from Renuva and AlloClae to breast augmentations and BBLs. That cadaver fat injections are becoming more mainstream at a time when the ultra-skinny aesthetic is back in vogue is no coincidence. How can you get a BBL if you have no fat of your own to transfer to a more desirable area? In the era of Ozempic, to paraphrase Ina Garten, if you don’t have homemade body fat, store-bought is fine.

In some ways, death has always been tied to beauty. Think of the tubercular pallor favoured in the Victorian era, the ornate decoration of bodies for burial in Ancient Egypt, or the satirical critiques of the beauty industry in Death Becomes Her (1992) or Ryan Murphy’s The Beauty (2026). What seems most disturbing about our current moment, however, is how these beautified versions of death are presented alongside images of very real and visceral death around the world. On our phones, we can scroll past skinny celebrities on the red carpet, followed by emaciated bodies of people in Gaza. We read about the latest cosmetic procedures in articles placed beside the latest developments in the war in Ukraine. The feed collapses aestheticised death and actual death into the same visual field, making the contrast between them feel both obscene and strangely ordinary.

The divide between those who face real death and those who can aestheticise and profit from it has rarely seemed clearer. Political theorist Achille Mbembe pioneered ‘necropolitics’ in 2003, a theory of sociopolitical power which argues that, to preserve the lives of one group, others must die. Mbembe coined ‘deathworlds’ to describe “new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to living conditions that confer upon them the status of the living dead”. His theory was based on observations of colonisation, and he argued that racism is a driving force of necropolitics, as can still be seen around the world today.

Beauty culture is not the same as the colonial and racial state violence Mbembe describes. But his framework helps name something about the current moment: the way certain populations are pushed closer to disappearance while others are sold death as an aesthetic fantasy. The beauty industry’s current fixation on death and deathly aesthetics creates its own kind of deathworld within the West; specifically, a gendered deathworld. Through these beauty procedures and ideals, women are encouraged into a ‘living dead’ existence which favours numbness, starvation, and the literal incorporation of dead tissue into the living body.

Of course, like Mbembe’s theory, beauty’s deathworlds are racialised. The beautiful version of death offered by contemporary beauty culture is not the violent or emaciating death seen elsewhere in the feed, but a whitened and privileged fantasy of stillness: numb, thin, preserved, and untouched. But Mbembe’s necropolitics does not just refer to literal death; it also encompasses social or political death. In the current moment of manosphere culture, rollbacks of gender-based rights, a turn towards ‘traditional’ values, and outright claims that technological advances are meant to disenfranchise women, women are increasingly pushed into this state of social and political death. Beauty’s deathworlds are just another way in which we are encouraged to remain stuck in a state of living death: marginalisation sold as innovation, detachment, or aspiration.