How beauty trends predicted Trump's second win

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For today’s dispatch while I’m in Japan, I chatted with Ellen Atlanta, the author of one of my favorite books, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. Reading this was cathartic, if I had to pick just one word. It’s a book specifically intended for women, to speak to the modern experience of being a woman, but I think everyone could benefit from reading it.

Whenever I stumble onto a topic about beauty and the most complex angles of it, I think about Pixel Flesh. I cited it when I wrote about The Substance and its eerie parallels to our real-life beauty culture. I thought of Ellen’s work again when I saw people discussing the procedures that high-profile conservative women and politicians have apparently sought out to dramatically alter their faces. There have been a lot of questions about why you would do that and what the desired effect is. As it turns out, as with many aspects of beauty, there’s a material cost and a benefit.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Kat Tenbarge: With some of these women connected to the Trump administration and who are in pro-Trump conservative media, you’ll see before and after pictures that show a dramatic transformation. It looks like surgery, filler injections, and much heavier makeup. I’ve seen a lot of people ask why they’d do this, and I think there’s a bigger story behind this aesthetic shift than people realize. How would you explain that to someone?

Ellen Atlanta: We need to recognize Instagram specifically, but also all these kinds of hyper-visual social platforms, for what they are. They're these hyperrealities, right, as much as they are tied to or have anchors in a very human physical space, they are these kind of hyperrealities that have their own laws and logics and physics and rules and aesthetics. And I think what can be quite striking, if you're not in that realm, and you don't exist in that realm often, is realizing how much of an aesthetic language and an aesthetic reality has emerged. And I think what we're seeing a lot of, and what we still do see a lot of, is that when you're creating beauty aesthetics for a small square, when you're creating beauty aesthetics for kind of this hyper-legible space where everyone is fighting to be seen all of the time, you end up with everyone trying to compete, and then you end up with exaggeration. So you end up with kind of increasingly exaggerated and increasingly intense versions of existing beauty ideals that maybe exist in our very physical reality. In hyperreality they just get magnified and amplified. So we see the things like the lip filler. We see really high contrast, whether it's the bright blonde hair, or really high-contrast makeup, a contour, really bright blush highlighter. That's what started to emerge in the 2010s. There'll be a lot of trend experts who will say that died off, and I don't really think it has. I think in kind of a mainstream population, that language still has a lot of currency, and that visual still has a lot of currency, yes.

And you know, once that trend does die down, you end up with another version of it in another way, which becomes about glossy, shiny skin and capturing attention in a slightly different way. There's a part of Pixel Flesh where I'm speaking to a very well-known beauty influencer, and she's talking about how you can always identify beauty influences in the wild, because they don't look like everybody else. They have a different makeup style. The makeup might be thicker. It might be the high-contrast look that works well on camera. Their face might have been augmented with filler in a way that works really well on camera and captures really well. But in real life, as the face moves, it doesn't quite translate in the same way. And I think it's really interesting to think about how there is a population of people who have crafted an identity and an aesthetic to work in a digital space, but not necessarily in a physical space.

KT: I was reminded of a conversation I had a couple years ago with a young woman. She was telling me that people comment on her pictures and say “Your lips look fake.” And she said that was actually the look she was going for. That has stuck with me, because it kind of makes me think there’s a conformity in this style of non-conforming, with things like filler in particular.

EA: And as with all of these things, it becomes status, right? Like there was a point where only influential or wealthy people could afford to have lip filler and facials and injectables and all of these things, and now they're so much more easily accessible. You could edit your photos to look like you've had it done if you haven't. These aesthetics often are really rooted in this idea of self-investment, right? It's about showing that you have disposable income, that you're working on yourself. To have really obvious hair extensions or to have really obvious lip filler or obvious fake tan, to have beauty work that's really legible and visible is a sign of your labor. It’s a sign of making money and using it for working on yourself. We see it in really obvious veneers. Then, there's a point in kind of the beauty class dimension, where then that is looked down upon as like gauche or maybe tacky. You kind of get this judgment then that your labor, your beauty labor, once you reach a certain status, should then be invisible. It's not cool to be seen as overtly trying to work on yourself. It should be as if you naturally woke up virtuous and pure and with minimal effort.

We've seen that demonstrated in the Kardashian arc in a lot of ways. They kind of started off in low culture reality TV, heavily relying on social media. There are the links to sex work and things like that, where the exaggeration of the body and the more heavy makeup and the performance element of it is a lot more necessary. There's also obviously a lot of the controversy around how much of the aesthetic was pulled from marginalized groups. You can quite clearly see it play out in the beginning, and then as they achieve higher levels of fame and status. You know, Kim wants to get into law. There's talk about whether she wants to run for president, all of this stuff. They kind of drop a lot of that aesthetic. We see them losing weight. We see BBLs getting smaller, the “country club BBL” or a “skinny BBL,” the language around which is also quite racially coded in a lot of ways—who gets to go in those spaces, who is slim and not particularly curvy and not overly sexualized. We start to see them pare down their makeup. Kylie says she's gotten rid of her lip filler. They're toning it down on the injectables, not wearing wigs and going back to more of a natural hairstyle. There's this idea of conformity, non-conformity, but I also think there's this idea of depending on the ecosystem that you're in, the value that is attached to different types of beauty work and how that then translates into the social code that you exist within.

I'm constantly talking to young girls and women I work with, girls from the age of eight to women into adulthood and beyond. When you're talking to teenage girls, I think it's so easy to dismiss their feelings around beauty, culture, and aesthetics and what they want to look like and who they're aspiring to look like as trivial and, you know, frivolous and silly. And I think that's often the reaction we have when we see women who are kind of overtly made up in a way that we don't understand. And I think what's really important for me with this book, and important when I'm talking to young people specifically, is that the pursuit of beauty is entirely rational. It's not a lesser pursuit. It creates currency that we are told all of the time has value.

KT: I find it so fascinating that you have conservative women performing femininity in this way, which looks so different from previous generations. But ultimately I feel like it shouldn’t be surprising, not only because everyone is subject to the influence of these beauty standards, but also because of what conservative women are demonstrating through this labor. They’re demonstrating the role of women in a lot of conservative ideology, which includes focusing on your appearance and putting work and upkeep into it.

EA: Exactly. And it’s also interesting to me in the U.S., because I often think the dominant ideologies, especially in things like beauty, seem to come from the coastal cities. We get kind of this authoritarian idea of what’s trending and what’s not, when actually, I wrote a piece for BeautyMatter about this a few months ago, about America’s beauty belt through central America, and how dominating those trends actually are in mainstream culture. There’s the balayage or the Utah curls, as they’re called. If we looked more closely at the trends developing across America, I think we would have had a clear indication of Trump’s second win. Whether it has been the “clean girl” or “quiet luxury” or minimalism, we’ve generally been moving toward a more conservative approach. “Old money blonde” trending, “blonde” as a hashtag started to get more popular. I think it’s actually really interesting that the beauty industry kind of neglects middle America, both in purchasing power and cultural influence. Because I do think that kind of serves as a cultural barometer in a lot of ways.

KT: What inspired you to write Pixel Flesh?

EA: There was almost a perfect storm of things happening at the same time. You know, I’d worked in beauty for nearly a decade. I started off in nail salons and doing very expressive, community-driven beauty work. I found myself ultimately working at a beauty tech company. We were doing beauty booking via images. So instead of just walking into a nail salon saying “I want these nails,” you would book via an image you’d seen, like on Instagram, for example. You could see exactly who did it, how much it cost, and what their availability was the next few weeks. It was really cool. We started off doing stuff like that, and within a few months, we kind of went through that phase in the 2010s where lip filler was all of a sudden everywhere. Kylie Jenner revealed her secret, and the girls started demanding injectables.

It almost felt like overnight the industry shifted from a place that for me felt more expressive and fun into an incredibly prescriptive idea of beauty. It was not only prescriptive in the way maybe makeup had been, but it involved spending hundreds of pounds or thousands of dollars on invasive procedures. Very young girls were then after those procedures. It felt like overnight on our app, we went from pictures of nail art and braids and hair tinsel to noses and lips and chins and cheeks. And I had this revelation that you could buy a face. And not only can you buy a face based on individual perfected features, but you can build an algorithm into this. And we were building an algorithm into this. That meant we could tell you that all your friends have booked that nose, so you need to book that nose. And we could say all your friends have booked this pair of lips. And we could do that for every community and vary it by region. As then as soon as everyone’s adjusted and had their tweaks and injections, we could change it. We just go, “Oh, actually, now everyone’s buying this nose.” And I had that realization about a year and a half into my job, and then I realized that was already kind of happening, that was what Instagram and all these platforms were doing. They were creating this laundry list of things that women needed to change about their faces and their appearances, and they were creating an ever-longer list of treatments and requirements that were getting ever more expensive and ever more invasive and needed to be done to achieve this ideal. And I quit my job two weeks after that, with no job to go to. And then the pandemic hit.

We had a system in the U.K. when we were in lockdown, we had things called “support bubbles,” so you could partner with one other household if you were on your own. I was, so during lockdown I partnered with one of my girlfriend’s houses. It was really hot in London that summer, and we would spend time in the garden, just working and sunbathing. Because it was locked down, no one was really bothering to wear makeup, no one was really shaving. Everyone had gained a bit of weight. And I remember looking around at these women in this garden, and in my head, it’s literally like a Renaissance painting. It kind of glows. But the line in the book, which is where the title comes from, is that I hadn’t seen bodies in a while, only pixel flesh. I was then looking at my friends, and there were belly rolls folded over a laptop keyboard. There was cellulite and body hair and razor burn and everyone was a bit sweaty and sticky and red. It’s just so beautiful to me. And I realized in that moment how desensitized I’ve become from what women look like, what women’s bodies have always looked like, how we exist. Being on my phone as much as I had been had almost completely isolated me from that image.

I had this moment of ‘Oh, I’m not defective.’ There’s not something wrong with me. My body is fine. My body is how it’s supposed to be. Everyone’s bodies look like this. And it was kind of those two things happening in tandem, along with the ways that the industry felt like it was very quickly shifting. A few of those girls, as we came out of lockdown, immediately went to get their injectables done. One of them even started getting them done when it was still kind of illegal, because the industry is so unregulated in the U.K. It was a very confronting moment as we came out of the bubble into the real world again. Everyone started re-engaging and in so many ways, on an even more intense scale than they had before. I just felt like this book needed to be written.

KT: It’s easier for me to see now, given the political situation in the U.S. playing out now versus when I first read Pixel Flesh. It’s how we’re not really reckoning with the effects of the pandemic. It’s almost eerie how parallel it is. Just like beauty, you see an aesthetic of authoritarianism emerge. You see women in particular turn this desire for control inward, this violent standard. It tracks so perfectly with the misogyny and the desire to force women to be obedient and submissive and shrink themselves.

EA: It’s also a really smart kind of power play to tell everyone through these cute Instagram posts that they're so empowered and “their body, their choice” when it comes to filler and injectables. And you know, “You do you, boo,” when it comes to your face, and “As long as you're happy, everyone's happy” when it comes to filler and cosmetic surgery and body modification, whilst in the background, they're kind of pulling away at bodily autonomy, trans rights, reproductive rights. This idea of empowerment language shifting into the beauty space is also ironic, because the beauty space has very narrow ideas of what is and isn't beautiful and what does and doesn't hold currency, especially on the internet. But there is this really insidious language play around it, which, you know, frames these things as empowering, frames these choices as empowering, frames them as choices so therefore they are inherently feminist, they are progressive, and that they’re an investment. It’s all this language that is kind of taken from self-help and bastardizes self-care. I don’t think Audre Lorde would be very happy with us. Your real power is being taken away, your actual rights to your body are being taken away.

So many women and girls, whilst I was researching for Pixel Flesh, were telling me how empowered they were. When you dig deeper into that, you realize they can't quite tell you why or how. The actual feeling underlying that isn't one that really feels good, it kind of feels a bit uneasy. There's kind of an undercurrent of anxiety, but they've learned this script to say that kind of excuses and justifies and glosses over invasive procedures and expensive things and quite violent mechanics. And it stops the conversation from going any further. I spoke to so many women, and I still do, who say—and it comes across in the reviews for Pixel Flesh as well—like, “I was on autopilot. I hadn't really stopped to think, and seeing it all written down in one place triggered that reckoning.” And actually, “This is a bit odd, like, why am I doing this?” Like waking up from a dream, “I spent this much money and spent this much time and actually it hurts. It's not nice, and I don't actually feel better about myself.” And “What am I actually gaining here? I don't feel power at all.” I think our actual powers have very much stood backwards over the past few years.

KT: Another word that I feel similarly about is authenticity. In social media influencer culture, the idea of empowerment and the idea of authenticity are both part of this cultural script that has developed to explain what's happening, but they're both like doublespeak to me, because they're such misnomers when you actually distill what is happening. Have you noticed any evolution around this since you’ve published Pixel Flesh?

EA: My main thoughts since Pixel Flesh have been largely personal, in a way. It's this idea that you write the book, and you read all the theory, and you do all the interviews, and you come up with all these conclusions. Very shortly after filing, it was like, right, okay, I came to all these realizations about my image and how I like to be viewed and don't like to be viewed and how I actually don't think it's particularly healthy for me to be super immersed in a social media space and to be taking pictures of myself all the time. I would like as much as possible to step away from that. But, you know, you write the book, you file it in, and a few weeks later it's like, okay, so we need your headshots. Where's your TikTok presence? When are you gonna start making videos? And I found that incredibly difficult, and I'm still really struggling with how to be visible in a way that feels safe and comfortable, and to use that great word, authentic, to how I feel and how I'd like to present myself and my work, whilst also making sure that my book is read by as many people as possible and reaches the people I wanted to reach.

One of the women in the book, she was a young Black girl in the U.K. She described beauty to me as a negotiation of power, about using the tools that you have and the resources you have available to you to kind of negotiate opportunity and visibility and success and safety. And I think about that all the time. And I think about my responsibility as a middle-class white woman who has had this opportunity to write this book. I think about how helpful my image being visible is. I think about how to do that in the most responsible way, without necessarily conforming to or feeling like I should need to conform to a specific beauty ideal or a specific trend or way of presenting myself, whilst also then managing that with my own personal feelings. I'm really open in the book with my own struggles with beauty culture, and I really don't want to go down a slippery slope where I become fixated on parts of my appearance. It's actually what my next book will touch on, is kind of where that balance is.