the business we call “self-love.”

the female body is nothing but a marketplace for the capitalist beauty industry.

“the way we look at foot-binding now is how people in the future will look at our BBL’s and lip injections. It takes different forms but it’s a destruction of the female body all the same.”

—Paris Mwenuwa on Tiktok.

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What is beauty?

I found myself asking this question when the bones of this essay were taking form in my head. And although it was something I constantly strived towards, I found it hard to define. I knew what was beautiful, and mostly stood in awe of the things I regarded as such: women (especially), paintings, pieces of clothing. A subjective feeling that appealed to the senses. And as young women navigating a patriarchal society, we’ve been told to be nothing but.

I’m not exempt from this. Plagued with acne during my adolescent years (the horror!), I spiraled into a web of self-loathing. There were also parts of my body that I’d been told by everyone were undesirable. I had to change. I needed to be fixed. I came to the conclusion that to love Oreva, and to be loved by others, I needed to change who I am.

So I spent my time consuming “Glow-up” content, learning how to do gua sha so I could get a sculpted face. I stocked up on skincare products that never helped. I tried dieting (that didn’t last very long) and even attempted working out (that also ended after two short days). My values did not matter, nor did all the love I had for people and the world. I just needed to have a pretty face, a snatched waistline, and a massive rack of ass. Not too much and not too little. Just the perfect equation so that the minute I stepped into a room, I left people breathless.

I usually enjoyed watching Botched on E! It baffled me when women would go into the offices of the doctors and request breast augmentations or butt implants. But was I any different? Maybe the only thing that differed was that they had the resources to be on the reality show of two very amazing (and expensive) doctors. Apart from that, we were both striving for the same thing: desirability within an audience that upheld a rather Eurocentric beauty standard. Trying our possible best to mold our faces and bodies to a yardstick that never stood in one place. And when it reverses, do we go back? Or do we keep on changing ourselves until our bodies are completely destroyed?

It’s not wrong to want to look beautiful. It’s not wrong to want to look absolutely mug in that photo. But why do we hate our faces and our bodies in the first place? What is it that makes you stare at your face and recoil? Is it normal human perception? Or built off a society that tells us that our acne scars are ugly, our natural noses are too big, or that having a sculpted jawline is the goal? Is it built off an industry that continues to look for faults in women, in you and I, so they can profit from it?

To put it simply, the beauty industry doesn’t care if you’re beautiful.

Because if every woman is beautiful, if they campaign toward making sure beauty and its standards are scattered all across the earth, how do they make their money? Where will the profit come from?

Rather than doing that, it is best to capitalize on dissatisfaction disguised as self-love. Think about it. Why is it that rather than telling us to love ourselves as we came into the world, we are told that if we reach a point where, after consuming all the skincare we can afford and the fitness classes and the “how to be more feminine in 10 ways!” content, we will come to love ourselves. But, to quote Jessica DeFino, “Self-love has become the most profitable form of self-hate.”

If I had kept on spending endless money on something that showed no sign of reversing itself on my face, would I have stopped feeling like wanting to rip it apart whenever I stared in the mirror? If I did those goddamn squats, would I obsess over my big butt? If I starved myself, would I smile at the firmness of my belly?

Now that I reflect on it, maybe. There would have been satisfaction, probably a sense of pride, but that only left the authentic parts of me that I wanted people to see to be flipped over with my new changed face and ass. Therefore, the entire point sort of misses its mark.

But it’s “self-care.” It’s “confidence.” It’s “girl-bossing.”

I always thought of never shaming women for doing what made them regard themselves as beautiful, but again, this “beauty” that we preach is never a constant thing. If we flip the script and the features we now regard as “ugly” are suddenly revered by society, won’t we see it as just? Would we question it? Underneath lies a hard pill to swallow: that even if you think you’re doing all this for yourself, engaging in unhealthy consumer practices and breaking your body so it can slip into the way society views women, you still view yourself in the mirror image society has defined as the ideal woman, even if that was never your intention.

In the end, our bodies are nothing but a marketplace. Where capitalists look for other insecurities to go “Bob the builder”, package it as just wanting women to feel confident in their bodies, spiraling them into self-hate all over again. Even if we try to make beauty personal and do it for our “self,” the idea of that has also been socially-conditioned and shaped by media, culture, Eurocentrism, patriarchy, and capitalism. It is still molded from something and has nothing to do with personhood.

“So should I just sit here and be ugly?” Well, no. But rather than obsessing over beauty, I want women and people to cherish the things society has thrown out the window. To dote the same affection on a leaf the same way you would on a rose, because despite whatever human perception might say, they’re all just plants in the end.