When I dreamed of getting a face, I didn’t imagine it like this. I imagined them made of silicone and wrapped in cellophane, their lips twisted like pure cardboard of expression. You would uncover your face and press it like a mask onto your skin until it boiled, uninterrupted and smiling. What we talked about was more insidious than that. Sitting in a dust-covered conference room in the middle of the Spanish desert, we planned the future of our technology.
The app we created consisted of pink and peach-white screens with gradient skin tones and a bold black logo at the top. There were images: endless images of women. You can choose, mix and buy from carousels and galleries sorted by trending parts (eyebrows, lips, cheeks) all in one place. Finally, we prophesied that you will be able to follow your friends and celebrities, find out where they got their features from, and then buy the same. Our business was beauty treatments. We’ve enabled independent beauty professionals to upload images of their services to their profiles, sync their calendars, and receive bookings from thousands of beauty fans who use our platform to document their favorite looks. We started with nail art, colorful braids and party makeup, but very quickly aestheticians joined the platform and suddenly you could buy noses, lips, chins and a super smooth forehead; all of this was achieved with injectable drugs.
I have worked in this company for more than a year since its establishment. 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 funds of £4 million. It felt like a Goop-noir parody of the Silicon Valley ideal of what we imagine venture capital-backed tech companies should be doing. We slept in inflatable pods, went on walks of self-discovery, and filled out fact sheets by the pool about our childhood trauma.
In this particular session, our head of people, a former VC scout, was leading a lesson on building better technology. In a way, this meant imagining the worst possible outcomes for our company and trying to plan to avoid them. So we sat on the plastic high school chairs and took turns trying to create a horror story about all the things we could do wrong. Data may leak. The software can be hacked. We could lose everyone’s banking information. When it was my turn, before we changed the code, I prophesied that the algorithm would eventually create insecurities in girls en masse and encourage thousands of others to sculpt their faces and bodies in a similar way, spending hundreds or even thousands in the process. once again it has become obsolete. After announcing my beautiful episode of Black Mirror to the room, I realized it had already started.
I predicted that the algorithm would eventually create distrust in girls en masse. Then I realized it was already starting to happen
We were doing technology differently; A female-centered beauty start-up taking on the San Francisco brotopia. We marketed ourselves as a company that contributes to women’s economic empowerment; We had signed up to the UN Sustainable Development Goals and our pitch focused on women and girls progressing towards gender equality.
But it’s not always that simple. We were part of the $500 billion global beauty industry, which is predicted to grow more than 50 percent by 2025, according to Forbes. My company was one of many startups that tried to capitalize on the growing obsession with selfies over the course of a decade. with ourselves. This was a newly energized beauty industrial complex where body parts were designed to be easily copied and sold to the masses. We talked about beauty treatments as if they existed in a vacuum, as if they were separate from the patriarchal ideal that benefits from the time, money, and energy it costs women all over the world. In pink and purple Instagram posts, we said women could celebrate themselves (and other women) by booking beauty treatments through our app.
I thought about the girls who volunteered for free beauty treatments and wondered how many of them were volunteers. I thought about making profit from women without making profit from women. I thought about my Stockholm syndrome and wondered whether it was myself or someone else who had captured me now. I thought about quitting my job, and then I thought about the free beauty treatments I would lose if I quit.
John Berger famously wrote: ‘You painted a naked woman because you liked looking at her, put a mirror in her hand and called the painting ‘Vanity’, thus morally condemning the woman whose nakedness you depicted for your own pleasure.’ But we added another layer: You taught a girl that the labor of beauty is a necessary investment in her worth, that knitting, trimming, and plucking are essential skills to her humanity. You have repeatedly explained that beauty labor is only valuable when it is free, and once you start making a profit from your beauty work, you reduce your efforts to meaninglessness. When the feminists saw the blood money in his hands, they pushed him out and declared him a traitor. I quit my job a few weeks after returning home.
This is an edited extract from Ellen Atlanta’s book ‘Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women’ (£20; Title)