In a society so closely dominated by a culture of lookism, it feels unattainable to not experience self-hatred. Reflecting this, there’s a brand new style afoot — let’s name it beauty horror.
A subgenre of body horror, magnificence horror sometimes manifests a quasi-satirical gendered narrative by which a personality, normally a girl, finds an answer to the evergreen drawback of lookism that works for some time however finally finally ends up disfiguring or wholly ruining her. It’s a story as previous as “The Portrait of Dorian Grey” and whose most recognizable current iterations embody Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” and Ryan Murphy’s “The Magnificence.” However, its signature mix of anxious routine and dread has discovered its fullest form within the recent works of Asian American women.
Magnificence is a self-discipline, one which requires persistence and consistency — qualities that mirror the stereotypical expectations of the Asian American mannequin minority. This resonance positions Asian American women and girls as the perfect topics for representing the extremes of self-governed magnificence regimens. Not solely do Asian American consumers outpace total U.S. customers in facial skin care segments, spending 18% more per year in the beauty market compared to the average buyer, however in addition they are ubiquitous as influencers, dermatologists and make-up artists hawking product suggestions on Instagram and BeautyTok.
Race isn’t incidental, however central to understanding magnificence horror. Amy Wang’s 2026 movie “Slanted” is “The Substance” however with ageism changed by racism. The movie follows Joan Huang (performed by Shirley Chen), the teenage daughter of Chinese language immigrants who undergoes racial reassignment surgical procedure in hopes of changing into promenade queen. In chasing social acceptance, Joan sacrifices her household’s pleasure, identification and ultimately herself, reworking right into a perky, cherubic blonde (McKenna Grace).
What “Slanted” will get proper is how the pursuit of magnificence for Asian People usually is rooted within the pursuit of whiteness, and the way the sweetness trade promises perfection if we are willing to take matters into our own hands. Nevertheless, the movie’s proposed treatment — of loving oneself and one’s household — falls brief by presenting a person answer to society’s racism, and thus the movie reproduces the identical logic of self-improvement that Joan fell prey to within the first place, resulting in her racial reassignment.
There’s one other Asian American determine woven all through “Slanted,” although missing an Asian American face — Dr. Singer (R. Keith Harris), the surgeon who performs Joan’s racial reassignment, was as soon as Indian American. Profiting off racial self-hatred, by the tip of the movie, his enterprise, Ethnos, is booming with individuals of colour lining up across the nook for his providers. Singer’s revenue offers an essential counterpoint to Joan’s ache, depicting how Asian People who fall sufferer to the unattainable pursuit of whiteness can also perpetuate it.
If we care to look, magnificence horror can expose us to underlying histories of racial violence in an trade the place the fiction doesn’t stray removed from actuality. Tretinoin, now among the many hottest topical zits and anti-wrinkle therapies, was derived from a collection of unethical medical experiments whereby its creator, College of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Kligman, examined excessively excessive concentrations of the cream on incarcerated people at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg jail, nearly all of which had been Black males, as documented by scholar Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. These dosages left behind deep open wounds and chemical burns.
Alongside these trials, Kligman additionally contaminated incarcerees with pathogens and chemical brokers, together with dioxin, a poisonous chemical part of Agent Orange, infamously and extensively used through the Vietnam Battle. Equally, the origins of Asian blepharoplasty — the double eyelid surgical procedure meant to put in a crease and make eyes seem larger — can be credited to D. Ralph Millard Jr., who served as chief plastic surgeon to the U.S. Marine Corps after the Korean Battle.
In his medical writings, Millard detailed how he considered the accidents sustained by victims of the battle as a “plastic surgeon’s paradise.” Millard additionally considered these beauty operations as an act of American generosity and goodwill. By way of facial reconstruction, whiteness completely scarred the Asian faces of South Korea.
The way forward for magnificence isn’t any much less fraught. At the moment, the trade’s most excessive iterations will be present in Silicon Valley startup culture and direct-to-consumer brands. Eshani Surya’s novel “Ravishing” incorporates a younger lady named Kashmira who augments her options with a nanotechnology-driven face cream referred to as NuLook that she buys off the web. Struggling violent unintended effects, Kashmira leads to the hospital, solely belatedly realizing her estranged brother Nikhil works on the skincare startup.
In Ling Ling Huang’s novel “Pure Magnificence,” readers are offered a techno-optimist backstory for the Goop-like magnificence firm Holistik, the place its Chinese language American protagonist, Anna, works. Her boss, Holistik prime brass Victor Carroll, can also be the founding father of Avidia Tech, an organization whose title sounds suspiciously like Nvidia, the multinational tech agency run by Taiwanese American entrepreneur Jensen Huang that makes GPUs for information science and high-performance computing and that recently partnered with L’oréal on AI-driven cosmeceutical analysis.
Whereas the character of Victor isn’t Asian American — that might be too on the nostril — we’d be ill-advised to disregard the preponderance of Asian People in these burgeoning fields. “Pure Magnificence” emphasizes that within the face of billions of {dollars}, self-love and authenticity can do solely a lot.
If we give attention to the Joans with out the Dr. Singers, the Annas with out the Victors, the Kashmiras with out the Nikhils, we get solely half the story. As a result of as magnificence horror tells us, what’s on the skin seeps in, contaminating our selves. The style’s worth isn’t restricted to displaying the expertise of Asian American girls; somewhat, it offers a lens by means of which to look at magnificence’s complicated entanglements with whiteness, cash and energy. We’d not like what we see. However we nonetheless have to look.
Michelle Wang is a sophomore learning journalism and psychology at Northwestern College. Michelle N. Huang is Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Research at Northwestern College.
