“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
— Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Barely a generation ago, the most beautiful woman you knew was probably the one in your city. She was the girl who turned heads on campus, or the one who caught the eye of your favorite band. In other words, for the 2010s Tumblr girlies, she was Y/N. 

Now in our current world, before you’ve even gotten out of bed, you’ve already scrolled past dozens of the most beautiful women in the world – hand-picked, filtered, and edited to perfection. And on top of all that, very likely cosmetically or surgically enhanced. We’ll talk more about that in a bit. 

And yes, I know, you’ve heard all this before. But I’m not going to give you the usual “don’t compare, love yourself, beauty is on the inside” spiel. That’s not where this is going. What’s unfolding is stranger, more systemic, and more sinister than that.

beauty influx (noun)
The overwhelming surge of exposure to highly curated beauty, delivered constantly through digital media, saturating daily life and reshaping our sense of what is ordinary.

First, an important distinction: this modern beauty influx is not the same as the fashion magazines or Hollywood stars of past decades. Back then, those figures were aspirational, admired from a distance, and so removed from ordinary life that they felt almost fictional. Today, that distance is gone. Beauty has crept from the magazine stand to the TV screen and now into your pocket, 24/7. Every girl on TikTok looks like she could be the cover model. It’s been this way for a while now, so much so that it risks sounding trite to even mention, but this kind of accessibility was never normal. 

We weren’t built to take in this much beauty, this constantly. What was once exceptional has become ordinary, leaving us both overstimulated and desensitized. For most of human history, beauty was a rarity in daily life. To encounter someone very beautiful up close was unusual and the kind of moment people didn’t forget. The kind of woman men might spend 14 sonnets immortalizing, or paint across the nose of a warplane. 

Now, it’s routine. The result is a strange paradox: beauty has never been more visible, yet it has never felt less special. It’s like Syndrome’s line in Pixar’s The Incredibles: “When everyone’s super, no one will be.” Inundated with beauty, we start feeling restless and unsatisfied. 

beauty inflation (noun)
The cultural trend in which cosmetic interventions have become so prevalent that they raise the standard of beauty to the point where it becomes unattainable without artificial enhancement.

The recent unprecedented rise in cosmetic procedures completely rewired the game. I’m not here to debate whether surgery is good or bad, whether it’s empowering or oppressive. But, what does it reveal about our culture at large when beauty is now something that can be bought?

Because beauty is no longer something you either had or didn’t – it’s now a product with a price tag. Botox, filler, cosmetic procedures, and plastic surgeries are everywhere. Our bodies have become skin you can modify and upgrade, like avatars in a video game.

Melanie Martinez captures this well in her lyrics from “Mrs. Potato Head”: 

“If you weren’t born with it

You can buy a couple ornaments

Just be sure to read the warning kids

‘Cause pretty soon you’ll be bored of it”

Of course, the commodification of the female body is nothing new. Women’s bodies have always been objectified and treated as commodities, from the tiny corseted waists of the Victorian Era to the coveted “thigh gap” of Tumblr circa 2010. 

But today’s culture has commodified individual features so much that it’s sliced beauty into parts that can be “upgraded” or “sold” like they’re from a menu: lips from here, nose from there, cheekbones from somewhere else. These interventions don’t just change individual faces; they slowly shift the baseline of what “counts” as beautiful. Even Y/N would need a little lip filler now. That bombshell on the plane? People would call her “mid” now. 

And I want to acknowledge something. Whenever the struggles of attractive-yet-insecure women come up, it’s easy to roll our eyes. “Oh please, the pretty girl has problems? Shall we pull out the world’s tiniest violin?” But she is significant because she reveals something about society. The “already pretty” woman is symbolic: she had always been the cultural barometer…until now. When the most beautiful among us can no longer “qualify” without unnatural intervention, what hope does the average woman have?

Like the already-thin girl who develops an eating disorder, when the already-pretty girl erases herself in pursuit of perfection, she illustrates a cultural sickness. Body dysmorphia is the new normal. To anyone looking closely, whether they’re chronically online or not, the artifice should be blatantly obvious. But like a fish is blind to water it swims in, people have grown so accustomed to it that they register it as “normal.” 

Beauty today disguises itself in lip fillers, nose jobs, and buccal fat removal, all so subtle they pass as natural. It hides in fox-eye lifts, lip lifts, and breast lifts; everything is lifting up and up like an unattainable escalator, always moving faster than anyone can climb. It is restless, never satisfied, always demanding more.

Even Aphrodite herself would not be enough. We can’t win the game, but we don’t have to play it blind. The more clearly we can see the spectacle of modern beauty culture, the less it can quietly shape us without our consent.