Toxic Beauty

Beneath the curated glow of modern empowerment lies a growing confusion. Somewhere between “glow-up” culture, body positivity, and the self-love industrial complex, we’ve lost the plot. What began as a rejection of toxic positivity—the cultural denial of negative emotion—has now metastasised into a broader crisis: Toxic Beauty. It is not just about filters and fillers. It’s the dangerous normalisation of extremes. Beauty is no longer about feeling good—it’s about never being questioned, never being disciplined, never being denied. And that, ironically, may be costing us our health, our sanity, and our common sense.

To draw on Psychology Today, toxic positivity is “the act of avoiding, suppressing, or rejecting negative emotions or experiences” (Psychology Today). In its mutated form, Toxic Beauty doesn’t just suppress pain—it celebrates detachment from consequence. We’ve created a world where any boundary is seen as shame. Where every desire is endorsed as self-love. Where to question someone’s “glow-up” or weight gain or diet choices or 10-step skincare addiction is to “judge.” And in this judgment-phobic culture, we’ve somehow made everything sacred—except restraint.

In her 2024 article for Verywell Mind, Kendra Cherry explores how toxic positivity invalidates emotional depth and replaces it with guilt for being anything but upbeat (Verywell Mind). The beauty parallel is even more severe. Emotional gaslighting has turned inward: If you’re exhausted by the pressure to look radiant, it’s because you’re not manifesting hard enough. If your nervous system is burnt out, it’s not the 4 a.m. workouts or the Botox touch-ups—it’s your mindset. We’ve rebranded discipline as shame, and shame as trauma. And in the name of “healing,” we’re bingeing, overindulging, and numbing—then calling it self-care.

The International Journal of Indian Psychology warns that suppression leads to emotional dissonance, rumination, anxiety, and disconnection (IJIP). But it’s important to clarify: peeling away from self-compassion is only one pathway of harm. Equally concerning is the distortion of self-compassion into a weapon—used to justify a lack of self-discipline, the glorification of obesity, compulsive consumption, and anti-boundary rhetoric. Toxic Beauty isn’t just about physical image—it’s the collapse of moderation across all fronts. It’s the culture of extremes: inject everything, reject everything, eat everything, deny nothing. And when everything is allowed, when there are no standards left, we’re not liberated—we’re lost.

This is not about shaming beauty, bodies, or emotions. It’s about rejecting the all-or-nothing narratives that dominate our feeds and fracture our foundations. It’s about asking hard questions in a world that’s made nuance taboo. If a heart doctor says your diet is killing you, is that judgment—or care? If your self-love ritual includes numbing out with screens, sugar, and spendthrift indulgence, is it really love—or is it a culturally endorsed escape from responsibility? At its core, Toxic Beauty refers to anything that compromises our integrity. Anything that violates our common sense. And right now, we are culturally addicted to justifying our worst habits in the name of self-acceptance.

We’ve become a society allergic to realism, to self-denial, to measured grace. There’s no moderation left. No stillness. No pause between want and have. Everything is instant, everything is glorified, and everything is marketed as medicine. But we are not well. And if beauty is now defined by the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want, no matter the consequences—then maybe it’s time to ask whether freedom has simply become another form of compulsion.

Toxic Beauty isn’t about skincare or surgery. It’s the cultural permission slip to avoid self-awareness, self-discipline, and even self-preservation. And under the banner of empowerment, it’s making us sick, lonely, disconnected, and lost. It’s time to restore balance. It’s time to bring beauty back down to Earth.