The Truth In Our Digital Reflections

I remember the first time I learned I was hot. It was the early aughts. I had signed up to one of those Myspace-adjacent social media websites; it was very hot pink and Hot Topic-coded and had Lipstick-something in the name. According to the older kids I knew, it was the spot for cool people to post pics of themselves looking cool (which in 2003 meant grainy, high-contrast, moody selfies taken with MacBook Photobooth or digital camera, flash on). It was a lot of side-swept bangs, razored haircuts, tons of eyeliner, and sulky pouts — the combination of which inspired all manner of effusive comments indicating that I was hot, Hot, HOT.

I cannot stress enough how imperative being popular on the internet is to a teenage girl’s agenda. It was true for me then and is even truer now. It was a revelation of self to me: a 16-year-old with overactive body odor, a parental embargo on makeup and shaving, and a 10 p.m. curfew. I was an IRL 4 moonlighting as an online 8. There’s no dopamine better served to an insecure adolescent like strangers on the Internet telling you how impressive and pretty you look. Their judgments redefined my reality and confirmed I was indeed just in the wrong place at the wrong time. Were they peers or pedophiles masquerading as peers? Who knows! Who cares! Not me (at the time)! This was substantial evidence from unbiased sources who had nothing to lose or gain from telling me I was desirable, which made it feel all the more legitimate.

This was just as good as hitting puberty and gaining mutant powers, inheriting a small European principality that I was secretly the princess of this whole time, or aging into my legacy of ancestral witchcraft. Now that it was decided I was hot, everything was going to turn out perfect for me. At least, that is what everything around me indicated. The key to a good life was being beautiful. And the internet offered an entirely new frontier for beauty.

No one could’ve known it at the time, but the World Wide Web has effectively become the leading global market for hot people looking hot at you while also showing you how to look hot (explicitly or implicitly). The internet amplified beauty’s magnetism, revealing the ironic dynamic that the closer you get to beauty, the uglier it can make you feel. Comparison is the most thrilling way to hurt your own feelings. Like a bad actor, it will never deter you from making an uncharitable judgment; it’ll just tell you you’re right.

The more internet we had access to, the more faces and bodies there were to redefine beauty on a global scale. I often think that if I’d had access to this international menu of hotness I may have been less insecure in my younger years, seeing more people who looked like me. But everything we’ve learned about how people — young girls especially — view themselves after being presented the entire world catalog of global hotties suggests that a surplus of consuming beauty leads to mental illness, anxiety, and depression. Hmm. But if they, like me, were also being told how pretty and gorgeous they are anytime they post a selfie, what was the problem? If more hot, why not more happy?

We give too much reverence to the kind of fame produced by an Internet presence. That it could ostensibly be achieved by nearly anyone is the most vexing and appealing part of it; it’s disposable idolatry, able to be dismissed at the slightest misstep. The individual benefits to being hot online may appear impressive, conditional though they are, but it bears cultural consequences for the way beauty is transacted at scale.

The digital age introduced a phrase thrown around a lot by people who often looked like they’re about to offer you a life-changing opportunity to be your own boss: “democratization of beauty.” Anyone can be hot as long as they’re committed (or rich) enough. Given an abundance of variety in appearances, the prospects for expanding our perspective on beauty should have given us all the resources for creating new expressions. And it certainly did.

Beauty has always been a reliable avenue for social mobility. It’s why makeover scenes are pivotal plot devices in most movies that involve them (Pretty Woman, The Princess Diaries, Clueless, She’s All That…). It’s why certain body shapes go in and out of style depending on which famous figures have them (The American Association Of Plastic Surgeons called 2015 “the year of the rear,” the year after Kim Kardashian’s Paper Magazine cover featuring her enhanced butt “broke the internet”). And it’s why Black women with 4c hair types spend four times more than white women on haircare (despite the 2019 CROWN Act making discrimination against natural hair illegal).

Beauty’s mass digital industrialization created its own social economy of self-capitalism. There is no limit to self-optimization; the ceiling is always at the level of someone hotter and more seemingly successful because of it. It sounds bleak, but beauty content has a keen ability of making it look fun and inviting. And a lot of the time it can be, especially when the results speak for themselves.

The machine of digital media has a simple agenda: to accrue social metrics, engagement, and encourage content production. We receive little dollops of dopamine with each post, and in exchange we share personal data so it can be sold to advertisers. Beauty is one of the most nutritionally dense sources for that. It’s an image, a process, a shopping list, and a lifestyle — a market that allows anyone willing to perform themselves online a chance at a life that may actually reflect the kinds of aspirational content they post. We may all fake it in some ways, but some are better at making it than others.

The thing about systems is that they operate how they operate, not how they’re intended to. We tell and they show. Having access to so many global interpretations of beauty didn’t change the original system settings for beauty, it just added more variables and filtered accordingly, expanding an unchanged spectrum. The well-established systems in place that determined what kind of beauty was most valuable and worthy of attention and respect (we know what they classically are: blonde, blue-eyed, pale-skinned, thin-bodied, young) created a hierarchy of aesthetics that proliferated its own replication.

There’s already enough ink spilled about the homogeny of Instagram face and the wholesale yassification of online faces that the evidence is clear. The digital grasp on this type of beauty creates a funnel towards sameness that having reached peak saturation, quickly shifts to avoid boredom. Cultural fatigue is a predictable cleansing current, if not unpredictable in what will wash up in its tide.

Our interconnected lives online have constructed a house of mirrors we refer to as community, even as it self-governs like a cult (you know it when you see it). And often, the only thing that’s asked of you to participate is to look the part. But digital beauty’s relentlessly evolving nature keeps us upgrading, hoping to fill in the gaps left behind by our insecurities and uncertain identities. These shiny solutions often present themselves with no need for problems to address as we are already meeting them halfway there.

The algorithms we entrust with our self-esteem are easy enough to game as long as we keep opting in. In the same way that 80% of success is just showing up, 80% of winning at social media is just posting often and consistently (according to Instagram best practices, last I heard). The overwhelming amount of beauty content or just content featuring beautiful people should come with a trigger warning or at least a dramatization label, the way it so easily fools us into accepting a reality where someone else’s beauty has the emotional effect of negating one’s own.

However! We don’t have to succumb to the beauty machine when its instability offers so much opportunity for the natural chaos of the internet to prevail. There are subreddits where strangers ask to have their appearances assessed (constructively, I hope) and there is always a laudatory response, often admiring features the poster may have otherwise dismissed: a distinguished Roman nose, a mischievous smirk, eyes with a crinkle of kindness, and otherwise all other things a medical professional might suggest blurring away with neurotoxin but is crucial to defining a person’s unique allure. (And yes, sometimes there are some very blunt suggestions for aesthetic enhancement, but to be fair they did ask.)

This is where beauty thrives. So-called flaws are the defining authority of what we call beauty; we think an absence of flaws is ideal when history has taught us that the very concept of flaws is ephemeral, just like beauty. And not only that, we crave variety and novelty in what we truly see as beauty. Overplucked, thin eyebrows are eventually traded for thick, fluffed brows. Thin frames are traded for voluptuously curvy silhouettes. Foreheads become fiveheads. Beauty’s subjectivity is a continuous gift or a source of anxiety, depending on your sense of self.

Our identities and self-perception are always informed by our environments and communities, and this can feel bad if either are too small — or too impossibly vast. Of course, being accepted as a Hot Person by the greater World Wide Web is thrilling and encouraging, but its lived experience doesn't necessarily feel as great. Because the hotter you are on the internet, the more you rely on its validation. Without a solid sense of self in the organic world, it’s difficult not to be affected by the kind of careless insult doled out by anonymous haters. And if it’s not the trolls, it’s the algorithm switching on a dime to cut off your supply.

It may have started with a handful of strangers telling me I’m hot, but if the internet has made beauty into an enterprise of self-performance, too much beauty will invite complications, the same way more money, more problems. Beauty in its natural course is an unraveling of self over a lifetime that you alone weave and unweave. It’s a life’s work to cultivate a sense of beauty that engages senses beyond just what your eyes can see — something that’s hard to find online.