a true face: how tech and the cosmetics industry created an ideal of human beauty, and what it means for the rest of us.

I don’t find myself easily phased by retailers asking for my personal information anymore. But when the Ulta employee asked for my government ID when I was purchasing 2 sticks of eyeliner, I felt more than slightly alarmed.

Rewind 30 seconds — I’m buying products at a makeup store for the first time in 3–4 years. When I give the cashier the products, she asks for my phone number.

“Do I have to give you my number to continue checking out?” I ask meekly to not be a jerk to the cashier, who is doing this at the behest of someone back at corporate.

She said, “We use it for points, returns and stuff”. I forfeited, thinking that it would be the end of it.

And then she asked for my ID, which I handed over.

I was trying to leave with the least amount of friction possible, and didn’t realize until I got an email welcoming me to my Ulta account with coupons after I left what happened — the employee signed me up with a rewards account without my consent.

Retailers over the years have increasingly felt comfortable demanding access to you — collecting “rewards” points, creating accounts to be able to get you the best deals, and always asking for email or phone number. Your personal info is no longer personal, it’s just marketing material now.

The scale of the amount of people who know how to reach you, across all of the shopping you do, is immense.

Ulta is not the only one doing this, but it brings a question to light: what’s the bigger context of the marketing pipelines that we’re forced into, and who benefits from us being forced into them?

My mom cared about her looks, before I really knew what that meant. One of the most precious memories I have of us is me finding an anti-aging beauty product on the stairs, and going to her and saying — “You don’t need this”.

I couldn’t comprehend my mom feeling like she needed to be fixed. I didn’t realize it, but that was the last time I had a healthy relationship with cosmetic products in my childhood.

When I was in the 3rd grade, I started getting hormonal acne. I freaked the absolute fuck out.

I had appointments with dermatologists all of the time. I burned my skin with salicylic acid and gave myself chemical burns with essential oils to remove scars.

When my parents divorced, I moved from a small mountain town in the mountains of Southern California where people wore pajamas as daily outerwear, to Palm Desert — a decidedly more looks focused place where Lululemon and Hollister were the uniforms of the upper class.

By the time I was in 7th grade, transplanted to the desert, I had an eating disorder account on Instagram, a brand new social media most hadn’t heard of yet.

I would take photos of my self harm scars and post it. I would take photos of the skinny girls in the Justice and Hollister catalogs and share it to groups of people who agreed with me.

This was 2013. There was no real understanding yet of the effect Instagram would have on mental health and body image. But I saw what it was doing to me. It allowed me to not only pit myself against the girls at school, but any girl I could find on the platform. And there was no shortage of them.

I remember being in the mall around this time when my mom got pulled into a natural skincare store with me. I had a stranger grab me, and do an entire skincare routine on my face without my consent.

That was the first example that I remember where just existing with acne, was turned into a marketing opportunity. It generated a flaw to sell me something to fix it, an early harbinger of what would become a massively profitable industry.

When I wanted to hide my acne, I went to Claire’s and bought mascara. The cosmetics industry thrives off this urge.

Bring social media into the mix, where Instagram and TikTok show you everything you could be (and what you’re not).

By the time you realize what’s “missing”, you already have seen ads to fill that gap, oftentimes right next to the content that makes you feel as though you need the products in the first place.

Back then, I looked at photos of myself and compared my face and body to women in their 30’s. People who had plastic surgery, and access to photoshop tools I had never heard of. I didn’t know how stacked the odds were against me, but I compared myself nonetheless.

Now, I look at those photos and my heart breaks. I realize how much of my childhood was spent hurting, and working to fill a void created by others to make money off me.

To Instagram, I wasn’t a child growing up — I was another user who was very easily fooled into being shown beautiful people and who would chase rabbit holes of eating disorder and makeup content to look like them.

Ironically enough, when I was 16 and at the peak of my mental health advocacy, I was invited to Instagram’s Kindness Prom in Santa Monica.

It was me and a small group of activists mixed with the biggest influencers at the time — Instagram seeked to create a place where kindness was celebrated, not realizing the influencers they brought to the event were the foundation of a culture that made everyone else feel like shit about themselves.

It felt like a cruel joke, and just like actually being on Instagram. Being surrounded by other hot people, and feeling as if you didn’t deserve to be there. Feeling as though by showing up the way you naturally were, that you were failing in some way.

After it was done, I got back to my hotel and cried for a very long time.

Although the marketing has changed to focus on “empowerment”, there is still a standard of beauty being perpetuated by content. We have come to know what the most beautiful of beautiful people looks like, and what the most “fuckable” people look like.

Social media provides a way to quantify content — and when our faces and bodies become content, we unconsciously know at all times where we end up on the totem pole.

I was in New York for an event recently, and sent a photo to a friend of the weirdest thing I saw there — a mannequin of a lizard eating ice cream outside of a creamery. There were so many calls to my attention, and it was the only thing that actively made me stop and take a photo.

As I was talking to someone from the event, I showed them the photo and said “there’s so much in New York, that you have to be the extreme of the extreme to be noticed, because the extreme is so often normalized that it becomes the baseline”.

When everyone is beautiful, no one is. And when no one is beautiful — well, you have a giant market to sell to.

As we erode the boundaries of access to personal data, we create this cycle of being sold an image by social media, being sold products by retailers to achieve that image, and having it all be powered by the tech industry.

It’s the perfect ecosystem for driving customers to purchase products, and the pressure on data collection to close the loop on reaching customers is a byproduct of it.

We know this has been hurting our kids. Instagram itself knows the impact it has, saying itself it causes body image issues in 1 in 3 teenage girls.

The warning signs are starting to show with TikTok, which has already been attributed to a concerning trend of fast trend cycles, leading to more and more consumption and demand from fast fashion brands.

As we move into our tech-bound future, and recalling what Instagram did to me, I see a dark future ahead with TikTok — and how it has already created the “extreme of the extreme” effect in curating algorithmic beauty standards that no average person will be able to recreate without surgical intervention.

It’s not an unfounded concern — we’re maximizing the human body to be a vessel for content. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, unprecedented demand for plastic surgery has occurred during the pandemic.

Our human bodies are turning into something akin to a company where the least attractive parts are cut and skinned, where the most beautiful parts are emphasized, and where everyone else gets to be a shareholder on what makes us lovable and attractive.

A 2019 study on the effects of social media usage and desire for plastic surgery found that, “Social media use was a stronger predictor of a participants’ desire for cosmetic surgery than body dissatisfaction.”

Regardless of the discussion going around whether or not getting plastic surgery makes you a bad person, or whether you should ethically disclose it, there’s a greater discussion yet to be had:

What happens when our standard of beauty being formed through social media can only be achieved through purchasing products, treatments, or surgery?

And what happens when we feed that directly to the screens of kids who have a skewed idea of what the average person looks like?

These beauty standards have diverged from their evolutionary purpose to define “healthy” traits to pass along to our kids, into a funnel to create profits. Social media sets us up to consume a standard of beauty that cannot be achieved organically by the average person.

Beauty and aesthetics are what we optimize for in this content economy, but they don’t actually fill the hole these companies are creating within us.

Even once you realize that, and turn to find mental health options — your advertising will reflect that. Where my Instagram was filled with fashion, makeup, and boots as a kid — it’s now turned into all mental health and antidepressant ads. Very funny, Mark.

The flaws that are being created within us by social media will never be filled by products — and that’s the point. And when those products don’t work, they are more than willing to serve you ads for other things that you think will.

The needle must always be moved. You will never fit the standards they sell to you, or have everything you need. Once you do, they can’t sell you anything else.

The depth of how embroiled retailers are in chasing the trends of social media and collecting data in such brute force ways to advertise it is a forewarning of the future battle for our information, and how far companies will go to get it.

It also shows a chilling vision of the future for younger people coming of age, where the boundaries around personal data and consumption are being blurred.

I can’t imagine how much worse my eating disorder would have been if photos of influencers were sponsored by Noom, or had ads for plastic surgeons in my town the next story over.

Before the emotion hits, you will have a solution for it in the next ad space over. And if you don’t find it there, it will wait in your email inbox, rewards points section, or a cleverly placed storefront display.

There is no opting out. Take this ideal standard — buy stuff to achieve it, or live in torment with the dissonance it causes within you, haunted by the products you think could cure you in your physical and digital world.