Are we heading for a beauty burnout?
Beauty is not good capital. It compounds the oppression of gender. It constrains those who identify as women against their will. It costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied. It is not useful for human flourishing. Beauty is, like all capital, merely valuable.
Tressie McMillan Cottom • Thick: And Other Essays
If we imagine a future where the majority of people have smoothed their wrinkles away with Botox, plumped up their lips with filler, sucked out their cheeks with buccal fat removal and straightened their teeth with veneers, will it become desirable to have the natural features that are becoming increasingly rare; the crooked teeth, the smile lines
... See moreDazed • Will Being ‘Ugly’ Be Aspirational One Day?
The default assumption tends to be that it is politically important to designate everyone as beautiful, that it is a meaningful project to make sure that everyone can become, and feel, increasingly beautiful. We have hardly tried to imagine what it might look like if our culture could do the opposite—de-escalate the situation, make beauty matter... See more
Jia Tolentino • Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
Beauty, or our idea of it, is always rooted in deep desires, capitulations, and pathologies. It makes certain things so obvious. How we spend the present trying to secure the future, and thus squander what’s in front of us. How we fail to appreciate what we may later understand as an experience of unbelievable plenty: unlined skin, spare time on
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