Title: How Toxic Beauty Standards Shape Modern Women (Mental Health Mondays)

Alison Stewart: You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. On today's Mental Health Monday, we look at toxic beauty culture, and the call is coming from inside the house. Ellen Atlanta worked at an app that sold beauty treatments, nail polish, injectables, hair color. One click and the products were yours, along with the promise of a better you. Looking back, Ellen writes, I can see that we were a paradigm of beauty standard denialism, a company extolling power and self-love while profiting from the ever higher expectations of women's bodies.

She set out to investigate how and why the Internet became part of the problem. She interviewed more than 100 women for her new book, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. She joins us now. Hi.

Ellen Atlanta: Hi. Thanks for having me.

Alison Stewart: Listeners. What have you given up on the beauty train? Did you stop coloring your hair? Did you ditch to scale? No more botox? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Let's say your beauty routine, you like it and you want to make a case for getting facials or seeing your trainer. 212-433-9692, what have you seen on social media that makes you think that beauty standards have gone too far? Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. You decided to work at this app that sold beauty products. What did you like about your job initially? When you got the job, you were excited. What did you like?

Ellen Atlanta: Yes, I love beauty. I'm coming to this from a position of always loving beauty culture. For me, I started my career in beauty salons. I've worked in almost every facet of this industry, magazines, working with product. As you said, working in technology and beauty, for me, is such a point of connection. It's such a point of self-expression and culture. We'd have women coming into the nail salon who maybe hadn't had someone hold their hand in months or knew they could come in to the salon as a safe space to maybe charge their phones or sit whilst they waited for a taxi in the evening.

The issue came for me when I started to feel like in the 2010s, the culture shifted slightly from something that felt more based in self-expression. We were doing cool nail art and braids to all of a sudden, lots of very young girls being encouraged to inject their faces. We kind of adopted this beauty culture of homogeneity far more than we seem to have done before, that relied on very extensive, painful procedures that were often very risky or had permanent effects. Yes, I come to this as a beauty lover who wants to kind of reclaim beauty and return it to a place of play, to a place of self-expression and connection and touch, as opposed to homogeneity and pain and prescription.

Alison Stewart: What were the questions that you wanted to ask about the beauty industry as you sat down to write this book and to interview these women?

Ellen Atlanta: Yes, so many questions. I think, especially coming from that position, it was something that I found myself wrestling with a lot, was kind of, how can I be a part of this industry and it be positive? How can I be the woman that I needed as a young girl? How can we create a more beautiful future for women and girls? That's a question that I returned to throughout the book. I asked over 100 women that question. some of them experts, some of them doctors, some of them influencers, celebrities, some of them worked for charities.

I asked all these different women, and between each chapter, there is a different answer to that question of, how can we create more beautiful future for women and girls, both as individuals and as a society? A lot of it was how to balance my feminism with my interest in beauty, how we can balance these things? I think a lot of women feel caught up in this paradox of knowing these things are harmful, but still wanting to pursue them, knowing the images they may see online aren't real, but still wanting to imitate them, still wanting to create them. It can often feel like there's a lot of emotional labor there that we still have to do around beauty that can also feel frustrating.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ellen Atlanta. She's written a book called Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. It's part of our Mental Health Mondays. What have you given up on the beauty train? Did you stop coloring your hair? Ditched the scale? No more botox? Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. What do you see on social media that makes you think, hey, these beauty standards have just gone too far? 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Ellen, you write that 76% of Snapchat users use a filter every day. 600 million people use filters on Instagram and Facebook. One of the goals of the filter is to conceal yourself. You don't want people to see the real you. What is the downside of feeling your true self online?

Ellen Atlanta: I think the biggest thing for me, and I think I'll always return to the young women and young girls that I work with. I think for this book, I spent time with girls as young as seven or eight, so elementary school. I was hearing multiple times young girls saying to me, I don't want to go outside after school anymore, because I don't want people to see my real face any more than they already have to, as if subjecting the world to a young girl's face, as it naturally is, is somehow a horrifying experience. I'm seeing how this filtering online, this intense self-curation online, is limiting especially young women and girls, because this is a gendered issue. It is more heavily used and utilized by them.

The pressure is slightly greater for them right now. It's incredibly limiting in how they live their lives offline, in how free they feel, but also how we then live online, right, because once we create this standard, we all then feel we must live up to it. To be the only person posting without a filter, to see your face unfiltered in a sea of many filtered faces is to start to think there might be something wrong with you, or to start to feel that as you exist naturally is to be defective or to be ugly, or to be not worthy of visibility. It does, in many ways, kind of limit the way we can live our lives and how we embrace ourselves as we naturally are.

Alison Stewart: You spoke to a beauty influencer who took a break from her many followers, and she came back with her hair completely cut off.

Ellen Atlanta: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Tell me what her experience was like.

Ellen Atlanta: This was a particular influencer who had built her platform on a specific brand of wellness. It was lots of juices and expensive activewear. A lot of her page became about self-care and self-love and wellness and eating healthily and being mindful. In reality, the behind the scenes, a lot of this content and this intense curation and having everything color coded and having to post at specific times was actually fueling a very unhealthy lifestyle behind the scenes, which became kind of obsessed with self-documentation.

She'd say, "Instead of being present in conversations with my friends, I was just thinking about when they could take a picture of me next or where I could pose, where the lighting would be nice. I wasn't really listening to what they were saying. I was just thinking about myself all the time." It was fueling an eating disorder. Then she got to the point where, all of this became too much, and she took a break, hundreds of thousands of followers. A very high income she was making online. Took a break from all of it. Shaved her head in what I imagine was a very liberating moment of rejecting this hyper-feminine, hyper-curated image that she'd made online.

Went into therapy for her eating disorder and said she'd never been happier. Now works to support women and influencers who want to come offline, who want to transition those skills that they may have gained from posting online and building a following into something that is more rooted in maybe a nine to five. It's quite funny how we've seen almost a full circle now of people embracing a nine to five as quite a liberating work life because there is a start and end to the day, as opposed to social media work, which kind of never ends.

Alison Stewart: Yes. We got a text that says, "Got off social media totally. No more dieting, more dates." Another text said, "I feel like the red light face masks are dystopian. I'm not sure I'm above it, and I know people enjoy them, but I think if you step back and see that 20-somethings are sitting there with these masks every day, let me enjoy my wrinkles." Another text says, I think the trend to remove buccal fat from the cheeks is not attractive. Everyone who gets this done to enhance their cheekbones will regret it in the future." Let's take a call from Linda, who is calling from Connecticut. Hi, Linda. Thanks for calling in.

Linda: It's my pleasure, because I've been preoccupied with a little joyous observation. Many, many years ago, I had a husband who wasn't as interested as he should have been or could have been, and something drove me to become a blonde. Not only was he different, but the whole world was different, which was shocking and uplifting and fun. Now, we had Covid, and I started not only cutting my hair, but letting all color grow out, and I am thoroughly enjoying saving the time for the beauty parlor and the money and being worried that the gray is showing. The gray, whatever I call it now, it grew in, and it's beautiful. I just had to share with the world. There are other ways to go about it, but each was an experience.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for sharing your experience, Linda. If you have an experience like Linda or you want to tell us, maybe you stopped coloring your hair, you ditched the scale, gave up the botox. Give us a call. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. Maybe you've seen something on social media that thinks, hey, beauty standards have maybe gone a bit too far. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC. We're talking about really toxic beauty standards in the age of the Internet with Ellen Atlanta, the author of Pixel Flesh. Now, you actually took this off the Internet into real life. You and a friend set up an experiment to see where your "beauty" gets you in this world by trying to get past a certain bouncer at an event in London. What were you hoping to find out?

Ellen Atlanta: I think this, for me, this was in a chapter in my book called The Power of Pretty, which talks about beauty and class differences. It talks about the very real perks and penalties that you can obtain when you adhere or do not adhere to the beauty standard. In this chapter, I intertwine the story of a charity that I work with in the UK that provides free beauty services for marginalized women and girls for after school, in a space where they can also access social support.

With that came talking to experts who run the charity who were saying, often these very marginalized women are paying for beauty products and treatments over other "essential" purchases, because to be seen as beautiful, especially in this kind of hyper-visual age, is to be seen and treated as a human being, is to be seen as worthy of respect and visibility, and how necessary that can feel, especially when we think about women's safety. It's that story alongside the story that you mentioned about, there are specific venues-- This one was a nightclub-- around the world. This isn't just in London. There's places like this in New York as well, where you can only get into the venue if you look a specific way or if you have a certain number of followers.

It was essentially an experiment to-- It was a way for me to meet some of these women who are the beauty-haves, who have obtained all of the perks and privileges from being-- For meeting the beauty standard and for investing in beauty labor. We went to this nightclub where you either pay £20, you pay £10, or you get in for free, depending on how beautiful you are. If you are not deemed attractive enough, you are not allowed in. That was an experience. A lot of it, I found, was meeting a lot of these women who-- I'm working for these charities, I'm working with very young girls, and these young girls are talking about the women they follow on social media, who have all these followers and go to all these venues that are prestigious and lux and these women have it all.

I went to these venues and I spoke to these women that seemingly have it all and found that they're all suffering in various ways to maintain this beauty and then struggling with the pressure on top of that. Really, the conclusion was none of us are winning. We're sat here, put in positions where we're comparing one another, where we're taught to be kind of enemies. Actually, a lot of us are suffering in shared ways that we don't even realize, and the game isn't working for any of us right now. Yes, it was a very confronting experience.

Alison Stewart: It was. It was all about also the labor of beauty. Let's talk to Lucy in Orient, New York calling in. Hi, Lucy. Yes, go ahead.

Lucy: I'm 45 years old, and, wellness has always been, always exercised, everything since I was, like, 16. I think even before that, facial care, for some reason, was always on my mind. Literally, the conversation. Three friends visit me out here this summer, and each of them, we were up until, like, one or two in the morning discussing our facial routines. None of us have gotten to the point of Botox or anything like this. Our main focus of conversation is, what is your skincare routine? Funny, because I've had this with three separate people, hours in the night discussing what we think is the best. It's not only us talking about it [chuckles].

Alison Stewart: Well, I'm glad we're having the conversation, so you can listen to this. Let's talk about this. This text came and said, "Can Ellen comment on how these problems have gotten better or worse in the past 35 years since the beauty myth?" You quote the beauty myth quite a bit in your book. What do you think has gotten better? What do you think has gotten worse?

Ellen Atlanta: Well, the beauty myth, the subheading was how images of beauty are used against women. If we think about the main difference now is that when that was written in the '90s, when it was published in the '90s, you might see an unrealistic image of beauty a couple times a day. You might see them a few times in a magazine, you might see on a billboard when you're driving home or buy the magazine covers when you're checking out at the supermarket. The main difference for me, with the advent of the Internet and social media and smartphones and selfie cameras, is that now I can consume hundreds, if not thousands, of unattainable images of beauty every single day.

In a few minutes, I can see 100 on my phone. Not only that, is the fact that these feeds, these algorithms on social media, have flattened the landscape. Instead of seeing an actress on a billboard with an edited image where you are able to separate that image from yourself, you're seeing maybe your friend, your sister, a celebrity, an influencer, all on the same social feed within your phone. It's not as easy to distance yourself. Also, now we all have access to all of these tools, right? We can all access the filters. We can all access editing apps. We can all tweak and augment our photos beyond recognition.

It's not something that's now just reserved for the glitz and glam of Hollywood. It's something we all have in our pockets. I can post a picture with a completely different nose or make my waist tinier or my bum bigger, for example, within a few seconds, and no one may know about it. That, for me, is the main, the huge difference, is we're now living in this hyper-visual culture where these images are everywhere and very hard to avoid. Then also, the augmentation is very difficult to detect.

Alison Stewart: Let's try to get one more call in. Birdie from New Rochelle, you're on.

Birdie: Hi, I'm 71 years old. Five years ago, I stopped coloring my hair after 35 years. It was very trying. I had 50 shades of hair color on my hair for about a year, and now I am great. It is the most liberating thing I've ever done for myself, besides Pilates. Now, my handsome husband of 76, we're both silver foxes together.

Alison Stewart: [laughs] I love that as a call to end. My guest has been Ellen Atlanta. The book is called Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women. Thank you so much for sharing your book with us.

Ellen Atlanta: Thank you so much for having me.

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