You need to stop doubting yourself

Or: the rising cost of glow up culture

“In a world that profits from your self-doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act.” — Caroline Caldwell

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In 2017, Zadie Smith said something that broke the internet. Talking at the Edinburgh Fringe about her seven-year-old daughter who’d recently started learning how to contour, she said:

'I explained it to her in these terms: you are wasting time, your brother is not going to waste any time doing this. Every day of his life he will put a shirt on, he’s out the door and he doesn’t give a shit if you waste an hour and a half doing your makeup […] I decided to spontaneously decide on a principle: that if it takes longer than 15 minutes don’t do it.’

She continued:

‘It was better than giving her a big lecture on female beauty, she understood it as a practical term and she sees me and how I get dressed and how long it takes.'

I was at university, at this point. Studying On Beauty and learning, myself, how to contour (oh, those Kardashians were reigning supreme). So, I decided to make the same rule for myself. Since then, I have never spent longer than 15 minutes on my makeup. I can do it all, including highlighter – if I’m feeling sparkly – in less than 15 minutes. (If I’m being honest, this is also partly because I’m not exactly a make-up connoisseur, but I digress).

But this was all before TikTok. Before Brexit, and Trump, and the pandemic. Before I started applying retinol once a week and eye cream every night and joking about how great it feels to be ID-d, at the grand old age of 29. And, of course, it was all before the rise of ‘glow up culture’: 60 second videos telling you exactly how to change your life in order to be ‘pretty’ or ‘hot’ or ‘unrecognisable by summer’. Before LED masks peppered my Google Ads and the concept of the ‘daily shed’ was even invented.

photos from Pinterest

Now, women are going to bed wearing so many products, tied about them in such uncomfortable ways that it all seems like a kind of torture. (My friend said to me: this is like something from the Hunger Games).

@southernwestsunshineThe uglier you go to bed the ✨prettier✨ you wake up #dailyshed #skincare #heatlesscurls #silkbonnet

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@southernwestsunshineBUT LITERALLY ✋ #mindyourbusiness #notforyoureyes #dailyshed #weeklyshed

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@maytexmyersReplying to @Karen Mariana Kovar #morningshed #collagen #collagenmask #koreanskincare #overnightmask #mouthtape #morningroutine #dailyshed #fy #fyp #viralskincare

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One of my favourite podcast duos, The Polyester Podcast, actually tried the trend, comprised of applying a specific – and obscene – amount of products in order to sleep in them (mouth tape, face tape, face masks, under-eye masks, silk hair masks, chin strap, something to open your nose, heatless curls, a kind of tinted lip liner, and more). Their hot take? No one is actually sleeping in this. Because – to paraphrase – it’s practically impossible to sleep with that amount of crap clinging to your face.

In 2003, a sixty-two-year-old Nora Ephron wrote an essay called ‘On Maintenance’. It hasn’t aged particularly well, but the concept is fascinating. She estimated that she spent, at that stage in her life, approximately eight hours per week on beauty maintenance alone.

In 2023, a study published in Psychology Today said that women spend over 2 hours and 40 minutes more per week on beauty routines than men. And according to a 2023 LendingTree survey, millennial women spend an average of $2,670 on beauty regimens annually. Okay, yes. This makes sense. It’s a lot of money – but also, societal standards are impossibly high. The beauty tax is real. The pink tax is real. The patriarchy is all-encompassing. None of this is new.

What is new? Glow up routines, which seem to be growing more and more extreme as time beats on. Take vitamins for your hair, do scalp treatments, laminate your brows, drink lots of water but no alcohol or caffeine, also drink your greens, and consider lip filler, and find your celebrity lookalike, then replace your wardrobe with the things they wear. Steam your hair and skin, open your pores, walk 10,000 steps a day and do a hair mask twice a week and sleep more and eat less and and and… it may never end, but at least you’ll look ‘pretty’! (As one TikTokker put it ‘being pretty makes life so much easier’).

images from Pinterest

I decided to do my own calculations.

Firstly, how much does it cost me – and my peers – to maintain a beauty regime on a weekly, monthly, and yearly basis? And then, how much would it cost if we were to do what all these ‘glow up guides’ tell us to do?

How feasible actually is it, to glow up? These were my (non-scientific, very cursory) findings:

Low(ish) -Maintenance Routine Breakdown

(Very) High Maintenance:

Most of us spend around 5 hours per week on beauty. That’s 20 hours a month, and 11.3 days per year – with an average monthly cost of £185 or a yearly cost of £2,220.

But to glow up? Well, that would take around 15.7 hours per week, which is 62.7 hours per month, or 34 days per year. Per month, it would cost approximately £1.621; per year, that’s £19,452.

For a high-maintenance glow up, it would take over a full month of non-stop effort, per year. It’s also effectively a part-time job, which you would be paying to do.

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After the election,

Jessica DeFino

wrote a brilliant piece entitled ‘Post-Election, Beware of ‘Self-Care’’. Here, she charts the rise in our obsession with ‘conventional beauty’ against its political backdrop: ‘It’s a cultural reaction to far right politics, and one that conveniently furthers the movement’s goals.’

She goes on:

Think of it as the aesthetic arm of trad-wifery— a promise that women can find peace, ease, and fulfilment by retreating not into the traditional roles of wife and mother, but into the traditional role of object.

The point isn’t the adoption of a particular cosmetic trend; the point is the labour involved in the adoption of any particular cosmetic trend.

In a rousing final paragraph, her words resound with warning:

This time around, armed with data and experience, it’s crucial to acknowledge that cosmetically manipulating our bodies in service to a consumerist standard of beauty has only one thing in common with [Audre] Lorde’s vision of self-care: It’s an act of political warfare. But it’s an act against ourselves, our autonomy, our future, our freedom.

I couldn’t agree more. But I also wonder if there’s an element of distraction happening here. In January, Daniel Immerwahr wrote for The New Yorker entitled: ‘What if the Attention Crisis is all a distraction?’ in which he posits: “Our attention is being redirected in surprising and often worrying ways […] But the problem isn’t our ability to focus—it’s what we’re focussing on.”

A few things that have happened recently: The police have warned that domestic abusers are driving more victims to suicide; a mental health crisis means that youth is ‘no longer one of the happiest times of life’; MAGA has everywhere; Tate is poisoning the minds of young boys; people are falling in love with AI; women’s rights are being stripped; people are being enchained and detained; human beings are treating other human beings with such immeasurable cruelty, and we can watch it all, from our sofas.

I’m not trying to say that there’s some big conspiracy at play. What I am saying, is that in a world in which basic human rights are being overwritten—in which toxic masculinity reigns supreme—it’s important that we think, very carefully, about how we choose to spend our attention.

There is something so therapeutic, so calming, so genuinely lovely about applying a sheet mask and having an everything shower and lighting a candle. About exfoliation followed by a buttery moisturiser. About feeling clean, and nourished, and smelling of lavender, or pomegranate, or vanilla.

Over the last year, I’ve started getting my nails done regularly; I’ve learned how to self-tan; I’ve started going to Pilates; I drink a lot of water and apply a lip mask before bed. I have found a new favourite serum for my hair. And I absolutely love it. These things help me feel grounded, whilst also bringing me joy. What I’m trying to say, is that it’s not the act of doing these things themselves that’s the problem: it’s the mindset in which you do them.

Is this escapist, or is it nurturing? Is a pursuit of some impossible ideal, a consumerist answer to a problem you didn’t know you had? Are you doing it because you genuinely want to, or because you think you need to become ‘unrecognisable by the summer’ because you watched a video telling you so? Are you whiling away minutes that could be spent reading, or walking by the sea, or simply lying on a picnic blanket looking up at the clouds? Are we all simply doing far too much labour? All that sucking in and plucking and painting and perfecting? Have we forgotten what it is to be human? To be hairy and imperfect? To walk barefoot and climb trees and get sand in our knickers and in our beds and let ourselves be bloated, in public, our bellies protruding, unashamed?

It’s so hard, I think, to remind ourselves that this life is not about a pursuit of perfection; that what we are is not what we look like, but what we do.

That beauty is not a goal to be reached, but a mode in which we live. Something that emanates from something far deeper than our skin, rising like the thick stem of a sunflower from some unknowable depth. In the twinkle of an eye; the slant of a sunbeam; the movement of a woman as she lowers herself into the bath after a long day; the current that stitches strangers together, forever, the first time they meet. In the donations we make and the conversations we have on street corners and the marches that demand action and the simple act of picking out a card for someone you love.

So: maybe you don’t need a glow up. Maybe you just need to read a really good book, and have a long conversation with your best friend, and perhaps an iced strawberry matcha latte followed by a glass of wine, only to find yourself in love with this beautiful spinning world – and neutral about your imperfect body – and maybe, just maybe, that could be enough.

This is Emiko, a Japanese grandmother in her 90s who became an internet sensation through her joyful modelling of her granddaughter's colourful fashion creations. Image: @nothingtowearpod on Instagram.