And anyway, what is exhaustion if not a set of symptoms for beauty brands to solve?
“Burnout can manifest physically,” Tilghman says from experience. The Great Exhaustion will likely exacerbate these stress-induced issues — hair loss, breakouts, dull skin, premature ageing — presenting plenty of opportunities to market surface-level ‘solutions’.
More than feeling burned out by these solutions, consumers will fear opting out of them.
The normalisation of injectables, surgery and extreme skincare routines over the past decade has shifted the baseline standard of beauty for all — aesthetic inflation, if you will — trapping women in a cycle of aesthetic labour they can’t easily escape without facing social, financial and political fallout. Fear of those consequences, which hit marginalised groups hardest, will keep consumers consuming.
“I am disabled and autistic and consider beauty labour part of masking,” says one anonymous respondent in a survey I conducted on beauty standards and quality of life. “If I were to show up in professional settings the way I exist at home — unkempt, bare faced, plainly ill and exhausted — my disability would be visible, and my job in danger.”
“It’s exhausting, especially as you get older, but I know I have to,” says another. “It does help with opportunities and how I’m perceived.”
Even the industry’s harshest critics are impervious to its pull: Mohamed’s routine feels overwhelming, but she still does it. Tilghman recently tagged her hairstylist in a post showing off fresh blonde highlights. The Aesthetica launch party offered free Dysport injections. The Substance director Coralie Fargeat said she would take The Substance if she could.
Aesthetic inflation is matched by actual inflation, of course, and individual hardships might shift where and how consumers spend on beauty in the near future. “The average price of premium products increased by nearly 9 per cent in the past year alone,”…
