by When I imagined buying faces, I didn’t imagine like this. I would picture them made of silicon and wrapped in cellophane, contorted lips in a carton of pure expression. You would unwrap your face and press it onto your skin like a mask until it was fused, seamless and smiling. What we were discussing was more insidious than that. Sitting in the middle of the Spanish desert, in a conference room surrounded by dust, we decided the future of our technology.
The app we were building was pink and peach – white screens with a flesh tone gradient and a bold, black logo at the top. There were images: endless images of women. Roundups and galleries arranged by trend – brows, lips, cheeks – you could pick and mix and buy them all in one place. Eventually, we prophesied, that you would be able to follow friends and celebrities, find out where they got their features from, and then buy the same. Our business was beauty treatments. We’ve allowed independent beauty professionals to upload pictures of their services to their profile, sync their calendar and take bookings from the thousands of beauty fans who use our platform to document their favorite looks. We started out with nail art, colorful braids and party makeup, but very quickly aestheticians entered the scene, and suddenly you could buy a super smooth nose, lips, chin and forehead – all achieved by injectables .
I have been working in this company for over a year, starting when it was founded. I was 23 and for a while I was successful for my age. A bright and rising star. The trip to Spain came shortly after we raised £4 million in funding. It felt like an enactment of what we imagined venture capital-backed tech companies should be, a Goop-noir parody of the Silicon Valley ideal. We slept in inflatable pods, went on self discovery walks and filled out clues about our traumatized childhood at the pool.
In this particular session, our head of people, a former VC scout, led a class on high-tech construction. In a way, this meant imagining the worst possible outcomes for our company and trying to plan to avoid them. We sat there, on high school plastic chairs, and took it in turns to make up a horror story about everything we could have done wrong. The data could leak. The software could be hacked. We could lose everyone’s bank details. When it was my turn, I prophesied that in the end, the algorithm would incite insecurities in girls en masse and encourage thousands to sculpt their faces and bodies in likeness, spending hundreds or even thousands in the process , before we changed the code and had their features. out of fashion again. I realized, after announcing my Black Mirror beauty episode to the room, that it had already started happening.
I prophesied that the algorithm would incite in the end uncertain in girls en masse. Then I realized that it had already started happening
We were doing technology differently – a women-based beauty startup taking on San Francisco’s brotopia. We marketed ourselves as a company that contributes to the economic empowerment of women; we registered with the UN Sustainable Development Goals and our pitch focused on the advancement of women and girls towards gender equality.
But it’s not always that simple. We were part of a $500 billion global beauty industry — one that, according to Forbes, is predicted to grow by more than 50 percent by 2025. My company was one of many enterprises looking to take advantage of ten a year of selfie taking and increased obsession. with ourselves. This was a neo-energetic beauty industrial complex, where body parts were designed to be easily replicated and sold to the masses. We talked about beauty treatments as if they were in a vacuum, as if they were separate from the patriarchal ideal that benefits from the time, money and energy they cost women around the world. Women, we said, in pink and purple Instagram posts, could celebrate themselves (and other women) by booking beauty treatments through our app.
I thought about the girls who volunteered for the free beauty treatments and wondered how many of them ever volunteered. I thought about making a profit with women without profiting from women. I thought about my Stockholm syndrome and wondered if I was now my own captor or someone else’s captor? I thought about quitting my job and then I thought about all the free beauty treatments I would miss out on if I quit.
John Berger famously wrote: ‘You painted a naked woman because you enjoyed looking at her, you put a mirror in her hand and called the picture “Vanity”, morally condemning the woman you depicted naked to of your own accord.’ But we added another layer: you taught your girl that beauty work was an essential investment in her worth, that braiding and trimming and plucking were essential skills for her humanity. You told her over and over again that beauty is only rewarded when it isn’t paid for, and when she started reaping the benefits of her beauty work you reduced her efforts to frivolity. As soon as the feminists saw the blood money on her hands, they pushed her out and called her a traitor. A few weeks after I returned home, I quit my job.
This is an edited extract from ‘Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women’, by Ellen Atlanta, available now (£20; Headline)
