In July, Sable Yong, a former Allure beauty editor, released a collection of essays skewering the industry she once worked in. In Die Hot With a Vengeance, Yong holds a mirror to the many tricks beauty plays on us: It invents treatments for insecurities we didn’t know we had (hello, shoulder-slimming Botox), advertises creams and serums as the key to a more fulfilling life, and convinces us that buying products and procedures is “empowering.” Yong’s balance of humor and compassionate critique is potent. But Die Hot With a Vengeance is particularly moving because it’s written by someone who worked in service of the very machine she now encourages us to reconsider. 

Yong isn’t the only former beauty insider to point out the industry’s ills. Just one month after her literary debut hit shelves, Ellen Atlanta, the founding editor of Dazed Beauty, released Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. In it, Atlanta examines contemporary beauty standards and exposes the ways in which culture rewards — and penalizes — women and girls for their appearance.

And earlier this year, Emmeline Cline’s Dead Weight, recounts the author’s struggle with disordered eating and examines the wider systemic issues and cultural trends that prop up diet culture.

It’s not just the literary world that is reckoning with the constant and increasing pressure to conform to a narrow standard of beauty.

34 years after Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth — arguably the most famous non-fiction book critiquing beauty culture — hit shelves, a new wave of thinkers and artists are tackling the conundrum for a younger generation contending with contemporary cultural developments that have made beauty culture so much more acute: social media, digital marketing, and a never-ending stream of new beauty products and treatments.

The Substance, one of the year’s most talked-about films, is another piece of “anti-beauty” media to emerge in 2024. Directed by Coralie Fargeat, the movie follows an aging Hollywood star who gets hooked on a black-market drug that promises to restore a younger, “better” version of herself — with predictably disastrous consequences.

Elsewhere, Jessica DeFino, the author of popular Substack newsletter The Review of Beauty (described as “a critical review of the beauty industry that prioritizes people — not products”), landed a beauty advice column in the The Guardian called “Ask Ugly.” Instead of recommending the latest makeup and skincare releases, DeFino urges readers to question whether products are really the answer to their appearance-related insecurities.

To Yong, the recent preponderance of beauty-critical media is no surprise. Our own appearance, as well as the appearance of others, has become “inescapable,” thanks to social media and Zoom meetings spent staring at ourselves on a screen. It doesn’t help that influencer culture has turned looks into the means to a lucrative career —  a phenomenon Yong says is encouraging onlookers to “self-optimize” via cosmetic treatments and procedures “for better visibility.” When Wolf’s The Beauty Myth released in 1990, TikTok, Instagram, and digital influencers didn’t exist. Neither did FaceTune, nor the cornucopia of cosmetic products and procedures that are now at our disposal. (Botox and filler were around, but they weren’t nearly as accessible or popular as they are now.) 

Clearly, a lot has changed since Wolf’s heyday. In fact, it was Atlanta’s realization that no one had updated The Beauty Myth (which she still considers a landmark text) to account for the internet and digital media that pushed her to write Pixel Flesh. Her goal with the book, she says, was “to tell the truth about how it feels to exist as a woman in the digital age — our experiences as bodies.” 

To Atlanta, we’re living in an “augmented reality.” It’s harder than ever to discern when a photo has been manipulated. “Shooting, editing, and curating images is no longer exclusive to Hollywood,” Atlanta adds — the majority of us do the same on our social media profiles. At the touch of a button, we can filter photos of ourselves “to see what we might look like with a rhinoplasty or a shaved-down jaw, bigger lips, or flawless skin.” 

These conditions have created what Atlanta calls “the most heightened beauty expectations” we’ve ever experienced. It’s no wonder creators like she and Yong are pushing back. 

Yong doesn’t just hope that her work, and that of her peers, puts into words the frustrations and anxieties readers may already be feeling. She also urges readers to reassess their own behavior and belief systems. “I want them to take inventory of whatever beauty ideals they’ve absorbed and upheld subconsciously, and question which ones are helpful or not,” she says. “[I want them] to honor the way that beauty enriches their lives without feeling beholden to ideals that don’t align with the world they want to live in.”