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In a society so heavily dominated by a culture of lookism, it feels impossible to not revel in self-hatred. Reflecting this, there’s a new genre afoot — let’s call it beauty horror.
A subgenre of body horror, beauty horror typically manifests a quasi-satirical gendered narrative in which a character, usually a woman, finds a solution to the evergreen problem of lookism that works for a while but ultimately ends up disfiguring or wholly ruining her. It’s a tale as old as “The Portrait of Dorian Gray” and whose most recognizable recent iterations include Coralie Fargeat’s “The Substance” and Ryan Murphy’s “The Beauty.” But, its signature mix of anxious routine and dread has found its fullest form in the recent works of Asian American women.
Beauty is a discipline, one that requires persistence and consistency — qualities that mirror the stereotypical expectations of the Asian American model minority. This resonance positions Asian American girls and women as the ideal subjects for representing the extremes of self-governed beauty regimens. Not only do Asian American consumers outpace total U.S. customers in facial skin care segments, spending 18% more per year in the beauty market compared to the average buyer, but they also are ubiquitous as influencers, dermatologists and makeup artists hawking product recommendations on Instagram and BeautyTok.
Race is not incidental, but central to understanding beauty horror. Amy Wang’s 2026 film “Slanted” is “The Substance” but with ageism replaced by racism. The film follows Joan Huang (played by Shirley Chen), the teenage daughter of Chinese immigrants who undergoes racial reassignment surgery in hopes of becoming prom queen. In chasing social acceptance, Joan sacrifices her family’s pride, identity and eventually herself, transforming into a perky, cherubic blonde (McKenna Grace).
What “Slanted” gets right is how the pursuit of beauty for Asian Americans often is rooted in the pursuit of whiteness, and how the beauty industry promises perfection if we are willing to take matters into our own hands. However, the film’s proposed remedy — of loving oneself and one’s family — falls short by presenting an individual solution to society’s racism, and thus the film reproduces the same logic of self-improvement that Joan fell prey to in the first place, leading to her racial reassignment.
There’s another Asian American figure woven throughout “Slanted,” though lacking an Asian American face — Dr. Singer (R. Keith Harris), the surgeon who performs Joan’s racial reassignment, was once Indian American. Profiting off racial self-hatred, by the end of the film, his business, Ethnos, is booming with people of color lining up around the corner for his services. Singer’s profit provides an important counterpoint to Joan’s pain, depicting how Asian Americans who fall victim to the impossible pursuit of whiteness also can perpetuate it.
If we care to look, beauty horror can expose us to underlying histories of racial violence in an industry where the fiction doesn’t stray far from reality. Tretinoin, now among the most popular topical acne and anti-wrinkle treatments, was derived from a series of unethical medical experiments whereby its creator, University of Pennsylvania dermatologist Albert Kligman, tested excessively high concentrations of the cream on incarcerated individuals at Philadelphia’s Holmesburg prison, the majority of which were Black men, as documented by scholar Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu. These dosages left behind deep open wounds and chemical burns.
Alongside these trials, Kligman also infected incarcerees with pathogens and chemical agents, including dioxin, a toxic chemical component of Agent Orange, infamously and extensively used during the Vietnam War. Similarly, the origins of Asian blepharoplasty — the double eyelid surgery meant to install a crease and make eyes appear bigger — can be credited to D. Ralph Millard Jr., who served as chief plastic surgeon to the U.S. Marine Corps after the Korean War.
In his medical writings, Millard detailed how he viewed the injuries sustained by victims of the conflict as a “plastic surgeon’s paradise.” Millard also viewed these cosmetic operations as an act of American generosity and goodwill. Through facial reconstruction, whiteness permanently scarred the Asian faces of South Korea.
The future of beauty is no less fraught. Today, the industry’s most extreme iterations can be found in Silicon Valley startup culture and direct-to-consumer brands. Eshani Surya’s novel “Ravishing” features a young woman named Kashmira who augments her features with a nanotechnology-driven face cream called NuLook that she buys off the internet. Suffering violent side effects, Kashmira ends up in the hospital, only belatedly realizing her estranged brother Nikhil works at the skincare startup.
In Ling Ling Huang’s novel “Natural Beauty,” readers are presented a techno-optimist backstory for the Goop-like beauty company Holistik, where its Chinese American protagonist, Anna, works. Her boss, Holistik top brass Victor Carroll, is also the founder of Avidia Tech, a company whose name sounds suspiciously like Nvidia, the multinational tech firm run by Taiwanese American entrepreneur Jensen Huang that makes GPUs for data science and high-performance computing and that recently partnered with L’oréal on AI-driven cosmeceutical research.
While the character of Victor is not Asian American — that would be too on the nose — we’d be ill-advised to ignore the preponderance of Asian Americans in these burgeoning fields. “Natural Beauty” emphasizes that in the face of billions of dollars, self-love and authenticity can do only so much.
If we focus on the Joans without the Dr. Singers, the Annas without the Victors, the Kashmiras without the Nikhils, we get only half the story. Because as beauty horror tells us, what’s on the outside seeps in, contaminating our selves. The genre’s value isn’t limited to showing the experience of Asian American women; rather, it provides a lens through which to examine beauty’s complex entanglements with whiteness, money and power. We might not like what we see. But we still need to look.
Michelle Wang is a sophomore studying journalism and psychology at Northwestern University. Michelle N. Huang is Assistant Professor of English and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.
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Ideas expressed in the piece
The article argues that “beauty horror” is an emerging subgenre of body horror in which stories about beauty routines and cosmetic transformations reveal the violence of a culture obsessed with appearance, especially through quasi-satirical narratives where women’s efforts to “fix” themselves end in disfigurement or ruin.[1][2][7]
It contends that Asian American girls and women are particularly potent figures for this genre because stereotypical expectations of disciplined, “model minority” behavior resonate with the self-governed, highly regimented beauty routines that beauty horror pushes to disturbing extremes.
The piece emphasizes that race is not incidental but central to beauty horror, arguing that for Asian Americans, the pursuit of beauty often doubles as a pursuit of whiteness, and that films such as “Slanted” dramatize how racial reassignment or whitening is marketed as a path to social acceptance that ultimately erases family, culture, and self.
It criticizes narratives that propose self-love and family acceptance as sufficient cures for racist beauty norms, arguing that such “solutions” individualize what is fundamentally a structural problem, reproducing the same logic of self-improvement that drives characters toward extreme cosmetic interventions.
The article stresses that Asian Americans can be both harmed by and complicit in the pursuit of whiteness, highlighting characters like Dr. Singer, a former Indian American surgeon who profits from racial self-hatred, as emblematic of how those who suffer under white beauty standards may also enforce and monetize them.
It argues that beauty horror exposes how contemporary beauty culture is built on histories of racialized violence, pointing to examples such as unethical dermatological experiments on predominantly Black prisoners in mid‑20th‑century prisons and the development of cosmetic procedures like Asian blepharoplasty in postwar military medicine, which linked “improvement” of Asian faces to Western norms.[8][10]
The piece links these histories to the present by noting how Silicon Valley startups and wellness-branded beauty companies fold advanced technologies such as nanotech and AI into cosmetics, suggesting that the same entanglements of whiteness, money, and power now operate through data-driven “innovation” and luxury wellness branding.[7][10]
It cites novels like “Ravishing” and “Natural Beauty” as key works of beauty horror, portraying characters whose involvement with cutting-edge creams or tech-backed beauty brands leads to bodily harm and psychological unraveling, underscoring that self-love and authenticity offer limited protection in a landscape dominated by billion-dollar corporations and techno-optimist rhetoric.[7]
The article insists that focusing only on individual victims—Joan without Dr. Singer, Anna without Victor, Kashmira without Nikhil—gives only half the story, and argues that beauty horror’s real value lies in illuminating systemic networks of whiteness, capital, and technological power that shape both who suffers and who profits.
Ultimately, it maintains that beauty horror is not just a niche for Asian American women’s stories, but a critical lens on how aesthetics, race, and profit are intertwined; the genre invites audiences to confront how deeply beauty norms seep into the self, even when the truths they reveal are uncomfortable.
Different views on the topic
Other commentators on beauty horror and body horror frame the subgenre primarily as a feminist response to antifeminist backlash and patriarchal beauty standards, centering gender and domesticity rather than race; these essays describe “beauty horror” as a women-led, satirical mode that targets misogynistic pressure on women’s bodies without foregrounding racial dynamics.[1][2][7]
Critics of beauty‑centered horror sometimes emphasize its satirical attack on the enforcement of a narrow, often male-driven beauty ideal, attributing the harm mainly to patriarchy and misogyny; in this view, the genre’s central conflict is less about whiteness and more about the policing of femininity and the psychological toll of being a woman in a hostile, appearance-obsessed culture.[1][2]
Coverage of recent “Goopcore” and wellness-oriented horror fiction such as “Natural Beauty” and “Aesthetica” often frames these works as critiques of influencer culture, wellness branding, and Instagram aesthetics, but treats technological and corporate innovation in beauty as ambivalent or open to reform, rather than as inherently bound up with white supremacy and colonial histories.[7]
Beauty industry leaders and founders, including many Asian American entrepreneurs, express a belief that the industry can be transformed from within through more inclusive representation, public stances against anti-Asian hate, and culturally aware marketing; these voices call for better diversity, authentic storytelling, and corporate accountability rather than portraying beauty capitalism itself as irredeemably entangled with whiteness.[4][6][8]
Some of these founders describe beauty rituals and products as potential sources of confidence, creativity, and cultural pride when representation improves, arguing that expanding who is seen and celebrated in beauty campaigns can counteract internalized racism and narrow ideals, rather than assuming that participation in the beauty market always reinforces white norms.[4][6]
AAPI-focused advocacy and public health projects criticize colorist and skin-lightening products for their toxic ingredients and links to cancer and skin damage, but often emphasize tighter regulation, safer formulation, and consumer education as solutions; their campaigns encourage informed, health-centered beauty choices rather than rejecting beauty practices wholesale.[10][8]
Journalistic investigations into racism in the beauty industry highlight exploitation of Asian labor, cultural appropriation, and the lack of Asian American representation, yet frequently frame remedies in terms of workplace protections, anti-hate measures, and inclusive hiring and casting—suggesting structural reform and protection within the industry rather than a fundamental break with it.[6][8]
Scholarship on Asian diasporic beauty cultures notes that some Asian American women pursue procedures such as double-eyelid surgery as a way to navigate complex identities, online communities, and competing standards of attractiveness, complicating a simple equation of cosmetic modification with capitulation to whiteness and highlighting how new “ideal Asian” aesthetics can also emerge and be policed.[9][11]
Critics of horror more broadly sometimes argue that the genre’s power lies in its exploration of universal human vulnerability, empathy, and aesthetic experience, focusing on how horror makes audiences feel and reflect on the human condition; these analyses pay little attention to race or beauty, treating those elements as just one set of tools among many rather than the central framework for understanding horror.[3][5]
Some writers on “art horror” and the aesthetics of fear stress that horror’s blend of beauty and terror can challenge norms in multiple directions—philosophical, emotional, or formal—so they resist prioritizing any single interpretive lens; from this vantage point, reading beauty horror primarily through Asian American racial politics is one possible, but not definitive, approach.[3][5]
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