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For centuries, beauty was something to be crafted — through corsets, cosmetics, and the careful choreography of femininity. Today, it’s something to be calculated. It’s no longer just about admiration but optimisation, where desirability is measured in data points: likes, engagement rates, the golden ratio of a face. Beauty isn’t just seen — it’s ranked, analysed, and fed back to us through an algorithm that always finds something to fix.
Beauty has always been a social currency, but never has it been so aggressively capitalised. If your face is your brand, your body an asset, then self-worth is just another fluctuating stock. The “glow-up” industrial complex tells us we can always be better — skinnier, clearer, tighter, more symmetrical. A little tweak here, a filler there. We remake ourselves in pursuit of an ideal that keeps moving further away. You can always start again. You can always be brand new.
But what happens when the pursuit of beauty erases the self entirely?
In The Substance (2024), the ageing former A-list Hollywood star Elisabeth (Demi Moore) injects herself with a miracle serum that creates a second version of her — Sue (Margaret Qualley), a younger, hotter, more perfect self. Sue is everything Elisabeth once was: taut-skinned, fresh-faced, desirable. At first, Elisabeth believes she has found a way to have it all. She can live her life without the burden of performing beauty while Sue takes over the hard part — being seen.
But Sue does not stay in her place. She becomes the preferred version. People treat her with more warmth, more admiration, more respect. Even Elisabeth herself cannot resist watching Sue with the kind of longing usually reserved for unattainable beauty. The longer Sue exists, the less space there is for Elisabeth. She watches herself become obsolete, irrelevant, and eventually discarded.
The horror of The Substance is not just about ageing or irrelevance — it is about self-annihilation. Elisabeth is not allowed to coexist with Sue; there can only be one. Just as in real life, where beauty is a constant battle against time, against flaws, against uniqueness, there is no room for deviation. The woman who conforms the most wins, but what was all that for? What did Elisabeth and Sue gain from beauty? The prize for being the most beautiful girl is your own dissolution.
This is beauty as a process of elimination. It is not just about looking better; it is about removing whatever does not conform. And in the digital age, this process is constant. Filters smooth skin and reshape features, apps allow us to edit ourselves before posting a single photo, and aesthetic trends cycle so fast that one beauty standard replaces another before we can even catch up.
We don’t like to talk about pretty privilege, even though we all know it exists. It’s the unspoken advantage of symmetry, of clear skin, of features that align with the cultural moment. Studies show that attractive people are more likely to be hired, promoted, and even found innocent in court. The world is kinder to the beautiful.
And yet, beauty is rarely acknowledged as a structural advantage. Beauty is treated as self-improvement rather than social bias. If you’re not pretty, that’s a you problem. And if you’re aware yet comfortable with the fact you’re not pretty? That’s even worse. Women are conditioned to either be beautiful or to aspire to be beautiful — anything else is framed as failure. It’s why conversations around desirability are so tense. To admit that some people benefit from their looks is to acknowledge that others suffer for theirs.
But even those who “win” at beauty don’t really win. A beautiful woman is visible, but only in the ways that serve others. Her desirability is never for her own enjoyment. As John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing, “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself.” The cost of being seen is constant self-surveillance.
And the more we self-surveil, the more we begin to look the same.
Because the beauty ideal is not just about looking good — it is about looking the same. Beauty ideals do not just dictate what is attractive; they dictate what is acceptable. A single viral TikTok can declare that a particular nose shape is “unattractive”, or that a certain lip-to-chin ratio is ideal, and within weeks, hundreds – if not thousands – of people are scheduling consultations to 'correct' themselves accordingly.
We say we want to be more beautiful, but what we actually mean is that we want to belong. Beauty is assimilation. It is the flattening of individuality into something palatable, something unthreatening, something easily recognised as desirable. When every face begins to look eerily similar, we are not celebrating beauty — we are mourning the loss of difference.
This is the silent tragedy of the modern beauty standard: the more we try to become the most ideal version of ourselves, the less of ourselves remains.
A woman’s body is never just a body. It is a project. Women are taught to live in a state of eternal self-improvement, to view their bodies as something to fix. “Beauty” has evolved from a passive trait into a performance, a brand to be curated. And in the age of digital beauty culture, the lines between personal choice and social conditioning have never been more blurred.
Somewhere along the way, self-care became indistinguishable from self-surveillance. We exfoliate and inject, we contour and conceal, we compare and correct. The glow-up industrial complex has sold us the idea that beauty is a moral virtue — something you can achieve if you just try hard enough.
This is why beauty advice so often sounds like self-discipline: drink more water, cut out sugar, work out until your body conforms. Beauty is never just about looking good; it is about proving that you have control over yourself. The girl who maintains a strict skincare routine is responsible. The woman who ages “gracefully” has dignity. The one who lets herself go? Lazy, undisciplined, morally weak. To be beautiful is not just to be attractive, but to be seen as worthy.
And yet, the more you try to fit into the mould, the more you realise the mould will never accommodate you. The standard is a moving target — today’s perfect is tomorrow’s passé. You achieve the ideal weight, only to be told that your face now needs work. You finally clear your skin, and suddenly it’s about bone structure. The process never ends because it was never designed to.
So what does it mean when the pursuit of beauty becomes indistinguishable from the pursuit of morality? It means that being beautiful is not just an aspiration — it is an obligation. Women are not simply encouraged to be beautiful; they are expected to be. And if they fail, they are judged not just for their appearance, but for their character. This is why a woman who gains weight is seen as having let herself go, while a man who does the same is just a guy who enjoys his food. This is why we call cosmetic surgery for women “empowerment” and for men “vanity”.
It is not enough to be beautiful. You must be the right kind of beautiful. And once you achieve that, you must maintain it. Forever.
It’s so easy to say “love yourself”. But how do you love something you’ve been trained to critique? How do you see your body as home when you’ve spent your whole life rearranging the furniture?
Maybe the real question isn’t how to be beautiful, but how to exist outside the obsession with it.
These days, I’ve been trying to exist outside of the mirror. There is a strange relief in stepping outside the algorithm. When you’re not looking at yourself all the time, the pressure eases. Outside, there are people with wrinkles and bad haircuts, people with cellulite and unfiltered faces. People who do not perform beauty; who exist beyond its grasp. And they are fine. They are happy.
The streets are full of people who do not measure their worth in the size of their jeans or the sharpness of their jawlines. Women who laugh with mouths unposed. Men with soft stomachs and uneven stubble. Couples in love despite their double chins and unstyled hair. All these people who still go on dates, get promotions, live full lives, unbothered by their lack of a Beautiful Face and a matching Beautiful Body.
It is easy to believe that beauty is the ultimate currency, until you step outside and realise that life is happening, chaotically, imperfectly, without it.
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