It’s fall fashion season, when film-festival red carpets in Venice and Toronto are a parade of eternally youthful stars, and hefty magazines full of the latest style and beauty trends hit the newstands. In the September issue of Vogue, filmmaker Lena Dunham tries glass skin, a facial look created by makeup artist Pat McGrath that went viral after she coated models’ faces in layers of gloss for the John Galliano couture show in February. 

The dramatic, porcelain-doll effect, with its improbably smoothed versions of women’s faces, is extreme, but it’s a useful illustration of how the US$571-billion global beauty industry (as of 2023, according to the online data platform, Statista) sells skin care and cosmetics to women with adjectives like flawless, poreless, ageless and wrinkle-free. You’ll notice these beauty goals describe what’s absent. Glass skin, for example, erases all character and expression in favour of a blank and youthful ideal.

It’s been more than 30 years since American feminist writer Naomi Wolf published The Beauty Myth, contending the quest for physical perfection was a tool to oppress modern women newly liberated by second-wave feminism. The internet era further complicates the double-edged sword: the social capital conferred by meeting the accepted standards versus the anxiety and critical self-monitoring required to meet them. In a backlash, a new wave of books explores the paradox of beauty culture for a new generation.

With Pixel Flesh, former British beauty journalist turned brand consultant Ellen Atlanta channels her insider knowledge and disaffection into an exposé of toxic beauty culture that explores how it’s harming women. The title came to her early in the pandemic lockdowns, as she spent time sunbathing with friends and “seeing women’s bodies as they are,” she says in a recent phone interview from London. Until then, she had “been immersed in a glossy, very artificial filtered version of beauty that we see exclusively online.”

Appropriately, she begins by analyzing the cult of Kylie Jenner, who grew up in the public eye and reshaped herself into a state of so-called feminine perfection, which influenced a generation of young women. Jenner, the younger sister of Kourney, Kim and Khloé Kardashian, is the avatar of improbable Instagram stars they aspire to resemble, and Atlanta quotes Jenner’s 2023 television interview where she admits regretting the decision to get breast implants at age 19.

The chapters include intimate conversations with more than 60 women and girls about body image and belonging. One of several chilling findings in Pixel Flesh is how social media has distorted modern womanhood to the point where we are witnessing the death of teenage girlhood. Beneath the glib remarks about so-called Sephora teens with elaborate skin care routines, Atlanta argues, is the grim reality that a childhood free of the constant pressure from digital perfection is a thing of the past.

“We are experiencing an epidemic of perfectionism amongst very young girls,” the author says. Beauty culture’s hyper-visual digital platforms have given rise to self-surveillance. The assumption that they’re always being watched has been internalized, so that girls constantly monitor their faces and bodies for deviations from the ideal. She recounts one eight-year-old saying she doesn’t play outside so as not to be seen without the mediation and perfection of angles and photo filters.

The experience isn’t limited to those coming of age in the digital era. Conforming to accepted standards of beauty adds social currency and contributes to economic success, so youthful beauty fuels a new aspect of the class divide for women, too. It has added to the disparity between those who can pay for fillers, Botox treatments and weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and those who cannot. “We’re gonna have, ultimately, a population that can afford to visibly not age and a population who can’t,” Atlanta says, “and that’s a very real concern.” 

Among boomers, she adds, the COVID-19 pandemic spurred an increase in the number of consultations for injectable and cosmetic procedures, “because, I think, for the first time, they were experiencing what the younger generations have grown up with: consistently looking at yourself through a digital lens, on Zoom, and constantly being faced with your own image in the digital space.”

Media literacy is important, Atlanta stresses, “but there is evidence to suggest that, for example, tagging a picture as edited or augmented in some way doesn’t actually prevent us from wanting to look like that image.” If anything, it reinforces an even more unattainable beauty standard, “because our brains still haven’t caught up to be able to use a critical lens.” With Web 2.0, we witnessed the rise of social media, she adds, which was about finding community and being your authentic self; with the advent of AI, we’re working toward Web 3.0, an anonymous metaverse full of the Internet of Things, non-fungible tokens, avatars and virtual playgrounds that exist as this un-human online thing. “Right now, we have this liminal space where we are kind of pretending we’re being ourselves online, but no one’s actually showing who they truly are.”

Similarly, former Allure beauty editor Sable Yong has mixed feelings about the beauty and fashion industry in her engaging new book, Die Hot with a Vengeance: Essays on Vanity, where the podcaster writes about growing up Asian, in between Michelle Kwan’s Olympic triumphs and Lucy Liu in the Charlie’s Angels reboot, and going to a mostly white school on Long Island.

Yong understands the first rule of consumerism is making women feel bad about their appearance (or body odour or cleanliness). “Beauty is embedded in the ways we are socialized to value people,” she declares in the introduction. “Beauty writing is often geared toward selling solutions to issues that aren’t problems, so much as they are new benchmarks of what’s in.”

To know the complicated history underpinning how women are expected and encouraged to present themselves helps to understand it. In her new book, All the Rage: Stories from the Frontline of Beauty, British social historian Virginia Nicholson pores over vintage periodicals, advice manuals and etiquette guides to chart punishing cultural practices over a century of female adornment between 1860 and 1960. In the Victorian era, as now, moral judgments were tied to one’s appearance, such as hemline length or quantity of cheek rouge. “As the progress towards equality and liberation has gathered momentum, the demands and pressures made on the female body have escalated in parallel,” Nicholson writes.

In her illuminating book Beyond Vanity (out Sept. 10), art historian Elizabeth L. Block, senior editor in the publications department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, zeroes in on American hairstyling for an expansive and inclusive view of the role it has played in the perception of women as well as “what they wanted to say about their identity.” Block, who wrote a 2021 book on the cultural importance of American fashion called Dressing Up, believes hair is just as worthy of deep study, given how much time and money women spend on it.

The history of hairstyles hasn’t merited close scrutiny in part because they are ephemeral. “We grow our hair, we cut it, we grow it, we cut it, we discard it, the hair itself does not have intrinsic value,” Block says in a phone interview from New York. The other reason is its origin in unseen female labour. Before hairdressing was a profession in the late 19th century, it was often the invisible work of lower-class white maids, enslaved Black women and women of colour who “dressed” and maintained the hair of middle- and upper-class women. 

I’m curious about how Eurocentric norms were not only imposed on women of colour, but conditioned them to the point where white beauty ideals were internalized. Hair restorers of the period, for instance, often touted a dual promise in ads claiming to straighten natural hair and lighten complexion.

Even now, BIPOC women feel the pressure to code-switch – shape their looks, comportment and voices to survive in the white world  – although Block notes the boom in celebrity hair-care brands led by Black women like Rihanna, Gabrielle Union, Taraji P. Henson and Beyoncé. She cites actor Tracee Ellis Ross, for example, who founded Pattern Beauty to sell products for women with curly, coily and tight-textured locks. She is also a vocal activist for the CROWN Coalition, a natural-hair movement that fights race-based hair discrimination in the workplace, where Black women who wear cultural hairstyles are more likely to experience microaggressions and the majority feel they have to straighten their hair to get ahead. 

Reclaiming the context of women’s hair as having important cultural meaning brings us to the 21st-century’s current moment. Block has been following coverage of Kamala Harris and the image discourse around her presidential campaign. The author mentions how, in an interview, Black actress Keke Palmer asked the U.S. Vice President about her silk press hair-straightening technique. Since then, TikTok videos by Black women, set to audio of Harris describing her routine, have proliferated online. “There’s always the risk,” Block notes, “that you are reducing someone of power to what their hair looks like.”

As Yong writes in Die Hot, “access to power and status almost always requires looking the part to demonstrate how much you deserve to be there (and that goes beyond hair, but hair is a common place to start).” But “good hair days” have a higher price tag, especially for Black women, “whose natural hair texture is routinely politicized.” Still, Yong says some feel the time, effort and money it takes to attain this “manicured standard” is the price they must pay to fit in and get ahead in a world where natural hair is seen as something that must be managed.

At its best, “beauty culture is a way of communing with others, caring for yourself, and connecting how you want to be perceived and who you wish to signal with your appearance,” she writes. The key is engaging with it on one’s own terms, eschewing the harmful cultural and social messages around it.

In Pixel Flesh, Atlanta leaves us with another incongruity: knowing the extent of the beauty industry’s arsenal  – of marketing campaigns, social expectations and constructions – makes us no less susceptible to its sway. The final pragmatic chapter offers useful advice on how to resist: immerse yourself in reality (and reject the artificial sphere by curating social feeds to follow accounts representative of healthy values) and relegate beauty to the background of your life. The issue is systemic and structural, so Atlanta says the answer lies in collective action, in our shared reckoning and response. In other words, sisterhood is self-care.