Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women

'I am surrounded by women who are emblems of modern feminism and #Girlboss culture. These same women admit to me in private that the hardest part of the day is getting dressed, that they Facetune their photos, obsess over diets, break down over their appearance and spend thousands on invasive treatments.' We now live in a new age of beauty. With advancements in cosmetic surgery, accessible tweakments, augmented reality face filters, photo editing apps, and exposure to more images than we were ever meant to see, we have the ability to craft ourselves in whichever way we please. We pinch, pull, squeeze, tweeze, smooth and slice ourselves beyond recognition. But is modern beauty culture truly empowering? Are we really in control? In every era there is a beauty ideal. Yet, today, the pressure to attain and retain the perfect body is compounded by a need to present this perfect image across multiple media channels, to exist in constant comparison to curated feeds and the version of your life that you show online. In an age of influencers, mass circulation of images and the increasing commodification of the self, modern beauty culture is all-consuming and unavoidable, touching the lives of every young woman in the country. From Love Island to lip filler, blackfishing to the beauty tax, Ellen Atlanta reconfigures our understanding of women's relationship with beauty culture to account for the digital age. Providing a fascinating account of the realities young women face under a dominant industry, Pixel Flesh unmasks the absurdities of the dystopia we find ourselves living in, acting as a rallying cry and a refusal to suffer in silence, forming a collective memoir of what it feels like to exist as a woman today.