How deep does beauty sickness go? (july 2024)
A frank discussion on beauty and its contradictions.
Picture this: Around the age of fourteen, you become pretty. You know it happens because people start treating you differently. Your whole life up to this point, you were known for your good grades and bookishness; now, people meeting you for the first time think you’re something special just by looking at you.
This stirs something inside you. You had yearned for beauty as a child, and now by some miracle you’ve got it and must do everything to keep it. Intelligence always came naturally; beauty is the thing to fight for, to spend hours watching YouTube tutorials for and starve yourself for and define your relationships around. Beauty’s the thing you come to resent and desire with equal fervor.
Psychologist Renee Engeln coined the term “beauty sickness” to describe the ways people, especially women, invest so much of their time, money, and mental and emotional energy caring about their appearance. She emphasizes that we do this in spite of knowing better—that even smart women who should supposedly know to value accomplishments over appearance still get beauty sick, indicating that the actual sickness is much bigger and harder to heal. You as an individual can decide to stop caring so much, but the reality constructed around you will enforce itself frequently, insidiously, in every aspect of your life.
We have created a culture that tells women the most important thing they can be is beautiful. Then we pummel them with a standard of beauty they will never meet. After that, when they worry about beauty, we call them superficial. Or even worse, we dismiss their concerns altogether, saying, “Everyone is beautiful in their own way,” and admonishing them to accept themselves the way they are.
Engeln’s 2017 book Beauty Sick explores the full cost of our culture’s obsession with beauty. (She reminds us that even though people of all genders suffer from this, women suffer disproportionately, and so the book focuses on the experiences of women and girls at different stages in life; her youngest interviewee is seven.) She writes about the psychological impacts of “body monitoring”, also known as “self-objectification,” where “your appearance is so chronically observed by other people that over time you internalize that perspective. You become an observer of yourself.”
This constant awareness of how the world perceives you takes up a lot of mental energy, with actual negative consequences on cognitive processing. She cites a study where researchers have women take a math test before and after going into a private room with a mirror to try on a bathing suit. Nobody else sees the women but themselves. After the bathing suit try-on, the women’s math scores drop.
As I was listening to this book on Audible, I was walking out of the gym and did the first thing I always do: remove the bobby pins that tightly pin back my bangs. I need my hair out of my eyes to exercise, you see, but the coarse texture of my hair makes it so that when it’s pinned in one position for too long, it gets stuck in an undesirable shape that’s more difficult to style later. This tiny gesture, performed almost unconsciously, is one of possibly hundreds of gestures accumulated through a lifetime of self-observance, cognitive molding, behavioral tics; this paragraph is the most thought I’ve ever dedicated to it.
In the 1988 novel Cat’s Eye by Margaret Atwood, middle-aged artist Elaine Risley returns to Toronto, the city where she grew up, for a retrospective of her own work. We’re immediately introduced to Elaine as someone who is accomplished and witty, but incredibly self-conscious. She agonizes over what jogging outfit to run errands in, and observes other women with a sharp eye.
I am transitional; some days I look like a worn-out thirty-five, others like a sprightly fifty. So much depends on the light, and the way you squint.
I eat in pink restaurants, which are better for the skin. Yellow ones turn you yellow. I actually spend time thinking about this. Vanity is a nuisance; I can see why women give it up, eventually. But I’m not ready for that yet.
In her hometown for the first time in decades, Elaine is overcome by memories of her childhood and adolescence. With Atwood’s gift for stunning, vivid detail, the novel portrays all the subtle and toxic ways a woman is inducted into womanhood, mainly by other women, through constant surveillance.
Contradiction of beauty number one: Seeking external validation is the real poison—you should just try to look good for yourself.
There is genuine emotional truth to being happy with your appearance, to feeling beautiful. When you’re wearing a nice outfit or when you’ve done something a little extra like fixing your hair, you feel confident and good about yourself. You can tell yourself that it’s not necessarily for anyone else and have it be true.
And yet, as Engeln explores in her book, it’s hard to separate that confident, good feeling from the value system that presents physical beauty as something to feel confident and good about. “How do you know that your idea of what it means to look good is really your own, since that idea could never develop without input from your beauty sick culture?”
Or, as Susan Sontag wrote in an essay about beauty and aging: “Rules of taste enforce structures of power.”
The flipside to this, of course, is that when you look bad, you feel bad.
Contradiction number two: Beauty is a lifeline when mainstream society sees you as ugly.
The rhetoric of beauty is deployed as a means of empowerment for marginalized people. Postcolonial consciousness encourages us to think critically about the negative psychological impacts of Eurocentric beauty standards on formerly colonized people in the West, and so, as part of our unlearning, we try to reclaim those beauty standards for ourselves. We teach our children to redefine beauty as dark skin, curly hair, curvy bodies, and broad noses. We tell ourselves this is how we undo white supremacy.
“Black don’t crack” and “Asian don’t raisin.” The way we undo white supremacy is by punching up at white people, who are invariably protected from insult by their position of power. This means we can poke fun at the way they age, which means that the insult is: aging. To wrinkle is ugly.
Femininity, as it is currently constructed, is synonymous with beauty practices, and therefore to ascribe to femininity is to care about your appearance—hair, makeup, clothes. This complicates beauty sickness for those on the margins of the heterosexual/cisgendered norm, such as trans women, who find affirmation and empowerment by intentionally taking on physical feminine features. In a 2022 interview on The Financial Diet podcast, transgender YouTuber Abigail Thorne discusses how her budget and finances changed after her transition—how much more she now spends on her wardrobe, makeup, and skin care, and how her stylist is the highest paid person on her show.
Contradiction number three: To not care about your appearance is to be left out and isolated.
In Beauty Sick, one of the interviewees shares her experience attending a party hosted by her running coach in college. She throws on what she thinks is a nice outfit, “my nicest khakis and my nicest sweater,” only to arrive at the party to find all the other women in dresses and skirts. The ensuing shame and discomfort is so intense as to prevent her from enjoying the party at all—she can’t stop wondering how she could have been so wrong. Dr. Engeln empathizes with this, saying, “I too often feel I missed some sort of orientation, a woman-specific training on what to wear, when, and how.”
They’ll tell you that it’s okay to care about how you look, you just can’t let it be the only thing that matters. But the world, as you move through it, with its dangling carrots and sticks, will constantly remind you that how you look is the only thing that matters.
Contradiction number four: We want to break the cycle by empowering girls to have autonomy over their choices and appearance.
In another chapter of the book, a woman recounts, at age twelve, being scolded by her mother for wearing a tight shirt to school. The mother apologized later for shaming her body, but explained that “if you wear this outfit, people are going to interact with you as a woman, and that’s not always the best thing.”
She learned that looking like a woman, that being a woman, was a safety issue. She learned that her fashion choices could put her in danger and should thus be monitored closely. She learned that she needed to spend more time worrying about how she looked to other people—a terrible lesson, but one that parents can’t help passing onto their daughters.
How do you teach your daughter that there’s nothing wrong with her developing body, but tell her she still needs to hide it sometimes if she wants to be safe?
This speaks to a universal and critical moment in every young woman’s development, a web of questions we will spend our whole lives asking. The truth is that liberal feminism, the kind that defines empowerment as individual choices, does not have answers for women seeking autonomy when all their choices have been defined for them.
In her book of essays, My Body, supermodel Emily Ratajkowki writes as someone trapped by her own beauty. She began her modeling career at a young age and shot to fame in 2013 when she appeared as one of several naked models in the music video for Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” It immediately sparked controversy for its sexual objectification of women in the video and lyrics.
The truth is that being beautiful has its downsides, especially for women. Ratajkowski is frank about her beauty sickness. Her essays describe complicated experiences with men, ranging from objectification to non-consensual fondling to rape. She describes publishing a picture of herself modeling a bikini on Instagram, a sponsored post she was hired to do, and the subsequent ill-feeling and desperation she felt as the tens of thousands of likes and comments poured in.
She was twenty-one when she appeared in “Blurred Lines.” In interviews afterward, she would say that rather than feeling objectified, she felt empowered, free, and confident in her own body. But when she revisits the experience in 2021 with My Body, she reveals that the situation was much more complicated. It was true she felt free and confident on set, at first; she had arrived to find the entire team comprised of women, including the director. They made her laugh and made sure the models were comfortable—a rare occurrence in the industry. Then Robin Thicke arrived, and the atmosphere soured. At one point during filming, he grabbed Ratajkowski’s breast. The women on set, who had tried so hard to create a safe environment and who checked in with her afterwards to see if she was okay, were still powerless to speak against the man whose payroll they were on. It was still his world.
And yet, the other side of this truth: for all the downsides and dangers of beauty, no one who has it would ever trade it in.
“So even when I felt scared and uneasy at the apartments of middle-aged male photographers who had me change in their tiny bathrooms, asked me whether I had a boyfriend or made comments about my body, I told myself I was lucky,” Ratajkowski writes. “I had photographic evidence of my value.” Because of her successful modeling career, she is also very wealthy.
Contradiction number five: You can’t have depth and be pretty.
The high value placed on beauty is double-edged; society dictates that you be attractive to be seen, but being too attractive means you might be seen the wrong way.
So picture this: In the years after college, when you land your first Big Girl jobs, you’re painfully aware of the relation between how you want to dress—in that fashionable, creative way that always brought you joy—and how you will appear in the workplace. Getting dressed in the morning is an acrobatic feat of toeing the line: Subtract one piece of jewelry. Nice button-up but with jeans, simple T-shirt but with slacks. Mascara, but no lipstick. Look like you care, but not like you put in effort. You need your coworkers to value your skills, to take you seriously.
After starring as a mega-hot female lead in movies like the The Wolf of Wall Street, Margot Robbie took on the role of Tonya Harding in the biopic I, Tonya. The figure skater Harding was no great beauty; she was criticized during her career as low class and tacky, and the movie portrayed this by smearing garish makeup on Robbie and using prosthetics to simulate weight gain. This role was essential to Robbie’s career, allowing her to escape the Hollywood “bombshell” trap that robbed the autonomy of many talented actresses from Marilyn Monroe to Megan Fox. (Notably, this was only possible because Robbie produced the film herself.) The underlying assumption, which proved to be true, was that she needed to let herself be “ugly” to be taken seriously as an actress—the role earned her multiple international film awards and nominations.
In Susan Sontag’s essay (written in the 1970s) “A Woman’s Beauty: Put-Down or Power Source?”, Sontag writes that beauty was seen as a virtue by the ancient Greeks, but in the past few centuries the influence of Christian values has denigrated beauty as superficial. “We not only split off the ‘inside’ (character, intellect) from the ‘outside’ (looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.”
She goes on to say: “It has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: the sex which, however Fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.”
And so we arrive at another contradiction: That a woman’s sole value is in her looks, but for her to care about her looks makes her vain and superficial. This is painful for the woman who feels the need to hide just how much work she puts into her appearance, the shame associated with it, but to feel that to stop working on her appearance altogether is also wrong.
French cosmetics company Guerlain, when developing their lipstick packaging, tested the clicks of ten to twenty lipsticks to find one that clicked at a suitable noise level. Their creative director once said: “We didn’t want our lipstick to click so loudly that it would draw attention to a woman who’s touching up in public.”
The takeaway is that vanity must be discreet—we must maintain that mysterious allure behind a woman’s beauty, after all—but if women were to do away with their vanity altogether, of course, the company would go out of business.
Contradiction number six: You can have depth and be pretty.
In an essay about Joan Didion, author Elaine Castillo writes that “many of the articles praising Didion’s work take pains to mention, quasi-fetishistically, the author’s physical build—often emphasizing the combination (not quite contrast) of her appealingly laconic, ‘masculine’ prose with her sylphlike thinness.” (Castillo hates Didion, not for her looks, but for her haughtily oblivious white colonial female perspective in all her writing.)
The attention to Didion’s looks by her fans sends the message that a woman who’s both “smart” (even as a bad writer) and good-looking will always have these two traits conflated or at odds with each other, one being used to explain or contrast with the other, as if this impossible combination were a mystery to be solved.
From Gloria Steinem, who was known for being the “pretty one” in the feminist movement, to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is praised for her progressive ideas but who herself has admitted that being telegenic has helped her popularity—beauty still feels like a prerequisite for respect.
An accomplished woman who is plain-looking may be admired, but a beautiful woman who is accomplished transcends, her intelligence fetishized in fascination.
Picture this: You’re in college taking Formal Methods in Linguistics at 8:30 a.m. twice a week. There’s a girl who always arrives early and has all the right answers. She’s slim, olive-skinned, with soft green eyes. Her medium-length brown hair is always pulled back in a classic French twist. As a bad feminist, you’re conscious of your envy. Not because of the way she breezes through material that you’re struggling with—others in the class do too, and you don’t envy them the same way—but because she dares to be pretty while doing it. Each time she gives a correct answer, or neatly completes a proof on the whiteboard, you watch and wonder how she found time that morning to twist her hair so perfectly.
Here’s another, deeper contradiction. Various comments throughout my life have indicated to me that others might see me the same way I saw that girl, and the thought of this makes me cringe. I desperately want to be seen this way but also despise it; or maybe I despise the desperation and, subsequently, its validation. Being perceived as beautiful and smart is both gratifying and deeply embarrassing. Why?
Contradiction number seven: We find sisterhood in beauty and beauty in sisterhood.
In high school, developing in my feminist consciousness and my love for my friends, I trained myself to see the beauty in every girl I knew. We all knew that society’s ideal beauty standards were oppressive and unattainable, and so we sought to uplift our friends by letting each other know just how brilliant, kind, funny, and beautiful we were. We gushed about one girl’s hair, another girl’s style, another girl’s charming freckles, on top of providing emotional support and praise for each other’s accomplishments. As girls with a growing awareness of the cruelties of the world, we knew that we needed to show each other as much love as possible, as frequently as we could.
Looking back, I see this only fed into my sickness; all the wonderful compliments from others only served as a constant reminder that I was being seen. That I could exist outside of myself, as some representation in someone else’s mind. The more I was told how smart and pretty I was, the more desperately I needed to be.
In writing this, I find myself less organized, more rambling than usual. The paradoxes of beauty are circular and feed into each other and are both glaringly obvious and frustratingly opaque. Furthermore, one doesn’t arrive at these conclusions in one great epiphany; the fraught lessons of beauty ensnare you again and again, just when you think you’ve matured beyond them for the last time.
In one scene in Cat’s Eye, Elaine is thirteen years old and riding the bus with her friend. They look at the old ladies on the bus, some “respectably dressed,” others “bulgy, dumpy, with clamped self-righteous mouths,” and the ones “who have not yet resigned themselves, who still try for an effect of glamour.” The latter women have bright, stage-y outfits and dyed hair and blotchy blush and lipstick drawn too big.
“This is the kind we like best,” Elaine says. “They have a certain gaiety to them, a power of invention, they don’t care what people think. They have escaped, though what it is they’ve escaped from isn’t clear to us.”
For women, the thing about getting older is that society tells you it’s the worst thing that can happen to you because of what it does to your sole source of value: your beauty. So we spend our lives dreading the wrinkles and weight gain and sag, and we spend our money and mental energy fighting it. The irony of this scene on the bus is that while Elaine is observing these women, taking careful note of their garish and tacky appearance, the women couldn’t care less—that’s why they look so garish and tacky. In their old age, they’ve managed to free themselves from beauty sickness. Freedom is found in the thing we dread most. This, I think, is beauty’s greatest contradiction.