The Horror of Aging

Beauty culture 🤝 Body horror

Jan 10, 2025

Hi close friends,

I hope you are staying safe if you are being affected by the LA wildfires. 🤍

It’s been a long week, but it feels good to be back in New York and seeing familiar faces again. I had my first job interview in a long time and while I felt rusty, it gave me some much needed momentum. I also started an Intro to Ballet 6-week course at the Mark Morris Dance Center and it is healing my inner child. I highly recommend their adult beginner classes if you are in the market.

I un-ironically became the meme of the British lads drinking when I hung out with friends this week and felt happiness. 🥲

Welcome back to English class…

I’ve noticed this rise in the past few years in horror fiction — both in books and movies — of stories critiquing our culture’s obsession with women retaining their youth and beauty. With Ozempic becoming a household name, Gen Alpha buying Drunk Elephant products at Sephora, and a millionaire using his son’s blood to stay young, it’s not the most surprising this shift is being reflected in our art too. In this newsletter, I’m going to dive deeper into this trend by taking a look at three works in this genre. This one’s a bit longer and nerdier of a read, so if you’re into it, grab a snack and let’s get started with our syllabus:

Rouge (2023) by Mona Awad

For as long as she can remember, Belle has been insidiously obsessed with her skin and skincare videos. When her estranged mother Noelle mysteriously dies, Belle finds herself back in Southern California, dealing with her mother’s considerable debts and grappling with lingering questions about her death. The stakes escalate when a strange woman in red appears at the funeral, offering a tantalizing clue about her mother’s demise, followed by a cryptic video about a transformative spa experience. With the help of a pair of red shoes, Belle is lured into the barbed embrace of La Maison de Méduse, the same lavish, culty spa to which her mother was devoted. There, Belle discovers the frightening secret behind her (and her mother’s) obsession with the mirror—and the great shimmering depths (and demons) that lurk on the other side of the glass.

youthjuice (2024) by E. K. Sathue

From Sophia Bannion’s first day on the Storytelling team at HEBE (hee-bee), a luxury skincare/wellness company based in New York’s trendy SoHo neighborhood and named after the Greek goddess of youth, it’s clear something is deeply amiss. But Sophia, pushing thirty, has plenty of skeletons in her closet next to the designer knockoffs and doesn’t care. Though she leads an outwardly charmed life, she aches for a deeper meaning to her flat existence—and a cure for her brutal nail-biting habit. She finds it all and more at HEBE, and with Tree Whitestone, HEBE’s charismatic founder and CEO.
Soon, Sophia is addicted to her HEBE lifestyle—especially youthjuice, the fatty, soothing moisturizer Tree has asked Sophia to test. But when cracks in HEBE’s infrastructure start to worsen—and Sophia learns the gruesome secret ingredient at the heart of youthjuice—she has to decide how far she’s willing to go to stay beautiful forever.

THE SUBSTANCE is now streaming exclusively on MUBI.

The Substance (2024) dir. Coralie Fargeat

Elisabeth Sparkle, renowned for an aerobics show, faces a devastating blow on her 50th birthday as her boss fires her. Amid her distress, a laboratory offers her a substance which promises to transform her into an enhanced version of herself.

A candid note from your professor: I’m going to be completely honest and say out of the three of these, The Substance is probably the only one I would truly recommend for the casual consumer. Unfortunately, Rouge and youthjuice were not my favorites as far as pure entertainment goes. However for the purposes of this topic, they were very fun to analyze! Also, you won’t need to have read/watched any of these to keep reading. :)

What’s hiding beneath the surface?

Margaret Qualley in The Substance (2024)

One of the first things I thought was interesting about all three of these stories is that they focus on skin. At the beginning of Rouge, Belle meticulously walks us through her multi-step skincare routine, name-dropping product after product layered on her face. Over the course of the book, she seeks facial treatments from the same spa her mother used to frequent. As the clinic delves past her pores into traumatic childhood memories, Belle transforms into a glowing, ghost-like version of herself.

In youthjuice, Sophia becomes fixated on a cream that heals the scars from self-harm on her hands. The story is also intercepted with short chapters that bring us back to 2008 and memories with her toxic ex-best friend.

And in The Substance, Elizabeth injects herself and literally sheds her outer layer of skin to re-birth into a younger, prettier version of herself.

When I think of critiquing beauty culture, the first thought that comes to mind is makeup. However, there’s something more insidious and visceral about the symbol of skincare. We’re getting right to the source of the “problem” of being a fallible woman, whether that means chemically altering your body’s exterior or going under the surface to dissect the insecurities that developed because of societal expectations. For each of these treatments our protagonists undergo, there’s a deadly price they have to pay. Body horror is the perfect avenue to explore these sacrifices, both literal and metaphorical.

Who is your beauty nemesis?

This was the question I kept pondering while reading/watching these stories.

For Belle, we see her immediately pitted against her mother as a young girl. As her sole caretaker, her mother shines bright in Belle’s eyes, the epitome of French class and grace, while Belle reckons with her own mixed blood and traits passed on from her Egyptian father. While Belle envies her mother’s fair-skin and grown up beauty, her mother envies Belle’s youth and tanned skin.

Meanwhile, Sophia struggles both in childhood memories and present adulthood with comparing herself with her close girl friends, who are often more naturally popular it-girls than her, whether with boys or work. For Sophia’s boss and CEO of the company she works at, it’s the women who are younger than her that she plays comparison with.

And for Elizabeth, she’s competing against herself — the idealized version that she now has to switch off bodies with every week.

“You have so much Glow,” I tell her. I think this compliment will soften her, but it makes her smile sharp.
“My Glow is Shadows,” she says, “compared with yours, Daughter. A cold rock in the outer orbit of your Impossible Brightness. The literal embodiment of Dull.” She’s spoken the truth, she knows it. Tears fill her eyes because it stings. “I envy,” she whispers. “So much.” She looks at me through stinging tears. And I see the dark love there in her eyes. Veritable soul poison. How it loves and looks in spite of itself.
“Thank you,” I hear myself say. “I envy too.” But mine’s a lie. I don’t envy. I know I’m the Impossible Brightness. I know she is the cold rock. She sees the lie in my eyes and she runs away, crying. Everyone around us keeps dancing like nothing.
Envy, it happens all the time…I should follow after her. Tell her, I’m very sorry my Glow hurts your eyes. I wish we could all Glow like I do. These would be more lies, of course. I’m not sorry. I don’t wish that. (Rouge, 262)

There’s an inherent hierarchy in beauty. While all the protagonists had other women as the objects of their envy, each one revealed a slightly different shade of what beauty can offer them — love, status, a career — and the true horror of losing access to these things.

The Metropolitan Fantasy

All three stories take place in “the city.” In Rouge, the setting of sunny LA skies, palm trees, and Belle’s mother’s glamorous home stand in contrast to Belle’s grief and isolation. We see Sophia go to work in New York, trendy items like Togo chairs and tote bags signaling the status of startup culture and her office environment. And Elizabeth lives in a high rise, staring at a billboard plastered with her own face outside her apartment window. Her forays outside to retrieve “the substance” are set against the beating drum of the stark sidewalks and narrow alleyways.

A missing poster appears on a telephone pole near the office. It’s not Emily, but someone I’ve never seen. Or, I don’t think I’ve seen her. Ashley Allison. She has a low ponytail and a clean-girl coat of lip gloss that shines through the grain of the poorly photocopied image…
There are too many Ashleys, a veritable army of them. Oozing out of the woodwork in perfect lockstep through the revolving doors of offices in Midtown, SoHo, FiDi, Flatiron, on their way to upwardly mobile jobs in publishing, at Condé and Hearst magazines, design firms, galleries, public relations. Not to change the world directly, but to apply gentle pressure to it, warm hands working dough into a new shape.
You may never meet Ashley, but she is conducting your life from the sidelines. Telling you what to want, how to feel, who to be. (youthjuice, 210)

The fantasy of the city is the same as that of beauty — access to a better and more beautiful life. It also creates this sameness in beauty culture. Just like the “Instagram Face,” we’re not only constantly aspiring for more, we’re also morphing into one ideal of beauty and one sterilized lifestyle. And when you’re surrounded by it, it’s hard to avoid what you don’t have.

*** FYI, spoilers ahead if you’re planning on reading/watching any of these! ***

Hiding the body in the bathroom

This is where thing get a little freaky.

Sophia learns that the fresh-faced interns at HEBE are being “used” to create this miracle beauty cream. Her roommate and best friend — who works as a blogger and influencer in the industry — soon becomes a part of the operation as well. However, instead of disposing of her friend’s body, she can’t seem to let it go. Sophia talks out loud to her like she did when her friend was alive. She puts makeup on her, taking selfies and posting on her Instagram account on her behalf. And she keeps her stored in her bathtub like a physical manifestation of her guilty conscience.

Elizabeth chops down her apartment wall to build a secret enclosing in her bathroom, where she drags her original body into every time the switch happens. As she tests the limits of how long she can stay in her younger clone self, her older body lays decaying and hidden in the dark, a reminder of what is being sacrificed for her beauty.

Belle sneaks into her mother’s bathroom to speak to a mysterious man in the mirror, who promises to love her in exchange for hurting her mother.

“Beauty,” Tom says through the smoke, “is a mystery, Belle. A spell. Some people have it for real like the sun…And you can have it for a while. You can bloom and bloom. But Beauty also disappears. Just like that. Here one day, then poof. Gone. Smoke and mirrors…When Beauty goes, it fucks with people, Belle…They’ll do anything to get it back. Even stealing Beauty that doesn’t belong to them.”
“Really?” I whisper. “They do that?” I think of Mother’s mean face.
“But you know what you have to do, of course,” he says. “When they steal it.”
“Take it back,” we say at the same time. (Rouge, 160-161)

These stories showcase beauty culture operating through two principles:

Scarcity — Not everyone can be beautiful. There’s a limited amount available.
Entitlement — That being said, you deserve to be one of the chosen ones, and you can be with investment into said product or treatment.

So. Much. Blood.

You can’t have body horror without some guts and gore!

The final scenes of The Substance include a bloody showdown between old and new Elizabeth in her apartment. And a campy mutated Elizabeth, who performs her final number on stage, spraying the audience with blood and wreaking havoc.

Towards the end of Rouge, Belle finds out the jellyfish in the tanks at the spa are grown using the visitors’ own memories and thus connected to their owners. As the most elite of the clients fight over a long dinner table to feast on these jellyfish, Belle hears the screams of the souls of those who underwent treatments at the spa.

And in youthjuice, the secret ingredient to the miracle cream is blood. At an exclusive HEBE launch party, clients are invited to step into bathtubs filled to the brim with blood to see the results for themself.

In these stories, if skin is the entry point into beauty, blood is the life force fueling it. Aging is the natural process of life and with each character’s attempt at avoiding it, their subsequent downward spirals serve as a warning to our society’s unquenchable desire to stay young, pretty, and powerful.

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