Excerpt: Unhappy beauties by Matt Haig

Never in human history have so many products and services been available to make ourselves achieve the goal of looking more young and attractive.

Day creams, night creams, neck creams, hand creams, exfoliators, spray tans, mascaras, anti-age serums, cellulite creams, face masks, concealers, shaving creams, beard trimmers, foundations, lipsticks, home waxing kits, recovery oils, pore correctors, eyeliners, Botox, manicures, pedicures, microdermabrasion (a strange cross between modern exfoliation and medieval torture, by the sound of it), mud baths, seaweed wraps and full-blown plastic surgery. There are facial-hair trimmers and nose-hair trimmers and pubic-hair trimmers (or ‘body groomers’). You can even bleach your anus if the mood so takes you. (‘Intimate bleaching’ is a thriving sub-market.)

In this age of the beauty blog and make-up vlogger and online workout instructor, there has never been such a plethora of advice on looking good. We are bombarded with diet books, and gym memberships, and ‘dream abs’ workouts and ‘action hero’ workouts and ‘face yoga’ videos we can access via YouTube. And there are ever more digital apps and filters to enhance what the products can’t. If we so desire we can make ourselves into our own unrealistic aspirations and create an ever wider gap between what we can see in a mirror and what we can digitally enhance. Women – and increasingly men – are doing more than ever to improve their appearance.

Yet, despite all our new methods and tricks to look better, a lot of us remain unhappy with our looks. The largest global study of its kind, conducted by research group GfK and published in Time magazine back in 2015, suggested that millions of people were not satisfied with how they look. In Japan, for instance, 38 per cent of people were found to be seriously unhappy about their appearance. The interesting thing about the survey was that it showed that how you feel about your looks is surprisingly far more determined by the nation in which you live than by, say, your gender. In fact, all over the world, levels of anxiety about how you look are moving towards being as high in men as they are in women.

If you are Mexican or Turkish, you are likely to be fine about what you see in the mirror, as over 70 per cent of people there are ‘completely satisfied’ or ‘fairly satisfied’ with their looks. People in Japan, Britain, Russia and South Korea were much more likely to be miserable.

So why are so many people – with the exception of Mexicans and Turkish people – unhappy with their looks? A few reasons, it seems:

1. While we have an increased ability to look better than ever before, we also have much higher standards of what we want to look like.

2. We are bombarded with more images of conventionally beautiful people than ever before. Not just via TV and cinema screens and billboards, but via social media, where everyone presents their best, most filtered selves to show the world.

3. As people become more neurotic generally, worries about appearance increase. According to the authors of another survey (for the American National Center for Biotechnology Information in 2017), people who were unhappy with their looks had ‘higher neuroticism, more preoccupied and fearful attachment styles and spent more hours watching television’.

4. Our looks are presented as one of the problems that can be fixed by spending money (on cosmetics, fitness magazines, the right food, gym membership, whatever). But this is not true. And besides, looking conventionally attractive does not make you stop worrying about your looks. There are as many good-looking people in Japan and Russia as Mexico and Turkey. And, of course, many very good-looking people – models, for instance – are more worried about their looks than people who don’t walk down catwalks for a living.

5. We still aren’t immortal. All these products aiming to make us look younger and glowing and less death-like are not addressing the root problem. They can’t actually make us younger. Clarins and Clinique have produced a ton of anti-ageing creams and yet the people who use them are still going to age. They are just – thanks in part to the billion-dollar marketing campaigns aimed at making us ashamed of wrinkles and lines and ageing – a bit more worried about it. The pursuit of looking young accentuates the fear of growing old. So maybe if we embraced growing old, embraced our wrinkles and other people’s wrinkles, maybe marketers would have less fear to work with and magnify.

Copyright © Matt Haig,
Canongate Books.