The Beauty Stranglehold: how deeply repulsive is a woman to the world?

"I am 25, I have to take care of myself," says Urfi Javed, a rising influencer on her new reality show, while getting a lip filler and conversing with a doctor about her botox. She later admitted that she had spent more than 10 million USD on her beauty treatments. She is not the only one. Influencers and celebrities across the globe have exoticized parts of women from different races, and there is a market urgency to become it under the guise of 'taking care of oneself.' 

Big lips, glass skin, thick hair, thick brows, small nose, wide eyes, big breasts, a disappearing waistline, a curvy back, no wrinkles even at forty or fifty or sixty. The 'ideal' woman is found in parts across the globe, existing in different cultures and races, from slumbering mountain ranges to trenches of the sea; she is everything but real, yet she is the standard we must meet. And here lies the birth of one of our world's biggest businesses: the beauty industry. 

The problem in chasing these different aspects of beauty is women's unhappiness with themselves, fuelling the beauty industry. Not just this, but the promotion of 'superfoods' that are marketed as having anti-aging properties, often disrupting ecological systems and challenging sustainability, are other dangerous fixes offered to whatever the world classifies as ugly. From Botox, lip fillers, fat removals, medicines like Ozempic for rapid weight loss, and thousands of dollars worth of skincare products in our cupboards to ensure we never look like we age. The biggest sin any woman can commit is to age, to have sun-kissed skin to show that not only was she alive but she lived, to let her body be allowed to change.

The cosmetic surgery industry is predicted to balloon from $59.77 billion in 2024 to $81.66 billion by 2032. In a world ruled by algorithms, almost everyone is getting something done. A popular Instagram influencer, who would frequently receive comments telling her how beautiful she looked, shared her journey of her addiction to getting plastic surgery done. Not only did she spend $30,000 on herself, but she got her first surgery when she was 16. While she kept things transparent, it's important to remember we exist in a world where many things are not 'born this way.' 

I spoke to Pallavi, a YouTube vlogger, who herself considered getting plastic surgery done at a point in her life. For her, it's been nothing short of a Heroine's journey. Competing in a beauty pageant at a young age, she felt she didn't measure up against the women in the pageantry. She had always been told she had a big nose, an insecurity that only heightened during her competition when the pageant conducted a session with cosmeticians that informed participants about cosmetic procedures.  She debated getting a rhinoplasty. The hesitant protests from the people who loved them only further convinced her that she needed to 'fix' herself. 

As the Universe would have it, she went to an army doctor instead of a 'for-profit' one for her work. He challenged her opinion of this situation. He told her that this procedure should only be accessed by people who have a dysfunctional nose; there was no control over how it would actually turn out and the kind of impact such a procedure would have on her body. He also asked her to Google her failed rhinoplasty. 

"At that moment, I felt desperate and desolate. Beauty was finally within reach, but this guy wouldn't let me have it." But like a true heroine, she let the pain wash over her and transformed her life. She didn't get the surgery, and today, years later, she is grateful for it. 

Pallavi is currently on a one-year, 35000+ km, Great Indian road trip with her husband, living the life she made for herself with joy. 

Pallavi's story is all our stories. How frequently have we sat in front of the mirror, god, or the Universe and desperately wished for that one thing to change in our body? The mirage of beauty keeps pushing us to do more and more, with the end never in sight. You can be 6, 16, or 60; it doesn't matter. We will always want to find ourselves this 'beauty,' access to power that's often just a trend, or chemicals or plastics, at least in contemporary times. 

The problem with following these well-meaning content creators is that you are convinced that everything you do in your life is wrong or less. From the utensils you use to cook your food to your protein intake, the number of steps you take every day, the amount of water you drink, working out according to your cycle, or balancing your cortisol level by taking cold showers in winter, I don't even know where I draw the line and where it ends. When is it enough? What is self-care really?

When I asked Zuha, an in-house legal counsel, what she thinks of self-care, she added, "Self-care has become more commercialized. You are adding a hundred chemicals at different levels and calling it a 'routine.' From her perspective, the beauty industry is greedy capitalism at its core. As long as people buy what is marketed as 'good for you,' nobody cares what they are selling. Not too self-care, is it?

Self-care was a term coined by the revolutionary feminist Audre Lorde, who, after facing burnout, spoke about needing self-care. In her book, A Burst Of Light, the revolutionary feminist wrote about self-care as an act of self-preservation and political warfare. For women who are constantly at the intersections of myriad marginalized identities, their gender being one, taking care of oneself means you are fighting against a world that is harsh towards you. It means to surround yourself with a community that can support you, rest and reset, nurture yourself, and take care of yourself. Taking care of yourself didn't mean 'commercialized me time,' at least not for Lorde. And not for Zuha, either. As someone who has moved to the Himalayas to live a simple life after spending most of her life living in big cities, she keeps her requirements simple. Long walks, a healthy diet and drinking water are her top priorities. "Self-care is really about paying attention to what your body needs and also paying attention to the world around you," she adds. 

One of the experiences that has shaped her conversation with her friends who keep pushing for chemically induced skin care products is her observation of the tribal people she works with. "People in the village are exposed to the sun all the time and even, and despite being very old, they have a stiffness to their skin and I'd rather have that than what the city folks have." 

Rachna is a Functional Medicine Certified Health Coach and an EFT (Tapping) Practitioner in the UK. She was an accountant before this. Why did her approach to cosmetic change? In her life, she experienced a few miscarriages that devastated her. "The day before that 20-week scan was booked, I gave birth to a baby boy – we named him Vinay - We never got to take him home."

The following weeks were a blur and all the test results came back inconclusive – I was told that there was no reason that this had happened – I'm a scientist, I have a logical brain – there had to be a reason."

Her loss became a reason for her to find out what had actually happened. "I started to think about toxins and chemicals that we are exposed to on a daily basis through our makeup, beauty products, toiletries, cleaning products, laundry products, food, medication. These things are hormone disruptors and can affect development – and I am convinced that this is a massive contributor to the high rates of baby loss in the UK as well as so many illnesses." Her experience made her shift careers, where she now spends time helping people understand the ill impact of chemicals in our day-to-day products and helps people heal by bringing in significant changes in their wellness plans. 

Why do we continue to use these products? Is it beauty we are seeking or something else entirely? 

A 26-year-old data scientist from Helsinki, Elena wondered if beautiful people flocked together and if she was on the sidelines because she wasn't beautiful. In her adulthood, she became 'conventionally' pretty by losing weight. People seemed more friendly towards her, but was that enough? Elena continued to struggle with image issues even after her weight loss. There was an enormous heartache attached to the younger her, who wasn't socially accepted as she should have been, so Elena decided to get a laser treatment, and she still holds the door open of microneedling for her acne scars. 

She does add that ageing is always a complicated process. "I know I don't have wrinkles, but I believe I do. I think it is hard for women to deal with ageing in this industry, especially when we have done so much to not age. Lines on your face just show that you have lived a life. But it is still something I am inculcating."

Elena is not accessing beauty but rather power. She wants to be conventionally beautiful because she witnessed beautiful friends being together in her childhood. It wasn't that this was it, but it was that there existed power in having beauty. One of the most popular feminist writers, Naomi Wolf, writes in her book The Beauty Myth about how beauty is inaccessible because of how much power it supposedly has. "The beauty myth is not about women at all. It is about men's institutions and institutional power." She further expands on how, since ageing is a sign that women are growing more powerful, some may feel it is necessary to take that away. And what better way than making aging an evil and awful thing? The older women must be afraid of the younger ones, and the younger ones fear the old, and "the beauty myth truncates for the entire female life span. Most urgently, women's identity must be premised upon our 'beauty' so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air." 

Yet, when I asked Elena what makes her feel really beautiful, she said, "What makes me feel really beautiful is sports. I love it. It makes me feel so powerful, so sexy. I really like doing things with my body that I wouldn't have thought possible." 

For Elena, the power truly resides in her, as she says that what makes her feel the most beautiful also makes her feel the most powerful, in her freedom to move her body the way she wants to. 

If beauty becomes a tool for power, then what women are really seeking is a recalibration of the power balance. But that power balance cannot be reclaimed by a Mirage. In a world created against women, with data bias, policy bias, architecture and design bias, 'merit' myth, wage gap, and so many other institutional biases, it is no wonder we constantly feel powerless. We are made to feel it. To resist, we must begin by questioning. 

I remember when I thought my sister looked her most beautiful self. She was on the beach, sand everywhere on her, her hair was falling like a waterfall, and she was staring at the sea, marvelling that life had brought her here. And I looked at her and thought, "This is the little girl I skipped school for when she was born, this is the girl who loves to bake and loves to love people and colours everyone's life pink. And she looks so beautiful doing it."

The world would tell her otherwise. The beauty world would find ways to fix her. She sometimes spends hours looking for the right product for different parts of her face. Where did we fail as human beings when we allowed businesses to exploit our loved ones? We let our aunts be convinced that they needed a Botox, or our sisters that they needed different serums on the face before they were twenty, or that my mother's freckles, after four children, either needed to be marketed as a 'beauty spot' or is an ugly mark on her face that she needs to get rid of.

Lucinda Price, Australian Comedian and author of the upcoming book, "All I Ever Wanted Was to Be Hot"  in her blog Floomesworld, breaks down how deeply impacted she was working in a job that constantly focused on churning out 'wellness content' but the type of content, from my perspective, that is created to generate more views than rooted in actual health. It played a role in paving the way for an eating disorder and body dysmorphia. To return to herself, she had to start living with abandon. What could living with abandon mean? We need to root our power within ourselves and not the worldly perception of how we are. Beauty is a power structure created to forever remain just out of reach for women, but abandoning the structure and finding the power within ourselves in pursuit of our ambition and our joy could be the thing that might free us. 

If beauty is to be cultivated, surely it would come from eating locally sourced and healthy food, from dreamy beach days and mountain air, from sunlight that releases joy in our system, from slowing down, from wearing ethical brands, from using skincare tips our grandmothers and fathers passed to us, from laughing too much, from friendship and community care, from loving and being loved. Surely, it wouldn't come from comparing ourselves to the rest of the world almost constantly, believing something is wrong with us, or something that needs to be fixed with expensive products or procedures, or worse, being created anew. 

Let's resist the stranglehold of beauty and break free. Nothing is more stunning than a happy, relaxed and free woman.