Normal girls, abnormal rules
On 'cosmeticorexia' and pathologising girls and young women for doing what they're told
‘Anorexia nervosa’ is a famously rubbish term for whatever anorexia nervosa is. Some people who have received the diagnosis probably do ‘lose their appetite for nervous reasons’, but plenty of us don’t. Given the diversity of reasons why a person might starve themselves, and the misconceptions attached to the label ‘anorexic’, I’ve sometimes wondered how useful it is, even as a shorthand. Yet it’s one I still use since it captures a status, if not the experience itself.
In recent years the ‘-orexias’ have proliferated, in a way that’s felt quite lazy too me (if ‘anorexia’ isn’t quite accurate but will sort-of do, why not treat all these other conditions the same way?). There is now orthorexia, tanorexia, bigorexia, drunkorexia. What seems to connect them is that they are conditions that could be written off as vanity or a lack of self-control, or could be put in a meaningful context with regard to social expectations about bodies, except we’ll do neither. We’ll make them into illnesses, but do so in a cavalier way which shows we don’t if mind they sound totally ridiculous.
The latest addition appears to be ‘cosmeticorexia’ (or ‘dermorexia’), defined in a March 2026 study as “a culturally reinforced preoccupation or obsession with achieving ‘flawless’ skin that can lead to excessive, age-inappropriate, or compulsive use of cosmetic products and procedures”. As someone who has often wandered into Boots or Superdrug and thought “WTF?” when it comes to the proportion of skincare products aimed at women and girls compared to those aimed at men and boys, I wonder how “excessive, age-inappropriate, or compulsive” are being defined here. What’s the ‘reasonable’ amount of time and money one should be spending on attempting to fix something that isn’t broken? What’s a suitable age at which to start feeling inadequate? How many times should you be cleansing, toning, moisturising, exfoliating, slathering on serum etc. before it is deemed ‘compulsive’? I find myself reminded of an Onion ‘top 10 compulsive obsessions’ joke listicle from years ago, which included “always scrubbing hands before surgery”. Are multi-stage skincare rituals a sign of madness or aren’t they? And if it’s ‘sometimes, but only when you take them really, really far’, isn’t that treating something that shouldn’t be normal – female human beings being groomed to see their bodies as in need of correction, excessively female and insufficiently feminine – as perfectly acceptable?
According to a Guardian report, “when Italian authorities cracked down on big beauty brands for allegedly targeting younger and younger shoppers, they cited cosmeticorexia as a cause for concern […] [Researchers] suggest it requires further understanding, tracking, research and potentially treatment”. Does ‘treatment’ involve any engagement with the ideas found in, say, Sheila Jeffreys’ Beauty and Misogyny or Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth? Or is it more aimed at getting you down to a ‘reasonable’ number of lipstick re-applications per day, starting at a ‘reasonable’ age? That the beauty industry profits from and exacerbates the insecurities of women and girls, constantly seeking new ways in which to target them, is hardly front page news. Indeed, one of the arguments Wolf made was that the industry encourages women to see their supposed flaws as akin to an illness in need of treatment. ‘Cosmeticorexia’ seems to take this a step further.
The inadequacy you feel, and the drive to fix it, is also a type of illness, at least if you don’t have it under control. Even if the illness model reserves some censure for the beauty industry, criticising “the growth of ‘cosmeceutical’ markets” and “social media platforms that reward routine-based content and appearance-focused self-presentation”, what it doesn’t do is address the relationship between these performances and the fundamental mismatch between femaleness and femininity. How can you expect women to feel acceptable when the preferred definition of what they are is something they’re not? Isn’t what you’re focussing on here just one tiny part of a bigger picture?
In her memoir My Good Bright Wolf, Sarah Moss recounts a midlife relapse into anorexia which begins when she follows some ‘intermittent fasting’ podcasts. Clearly one can’t blame a few podcasts for someone almost starving themselves to death. As Moss also stresses in the book, there are many other messages – some of them rooted in a feminism which seeks to transcend the body – that fuel her illness. Nonetheless, the way in which her illness develops is by following every single rule and picking up every single hint offered to her by the fasting ‘experts’:
“she pushed their voices into her ears, pressed play on podcasts that lasted an hour, two hours, exhaustive, and as she ran they told her what she must do. She must fast two days in seven, and should that not be enough to achieve a more acceptable number, every other day. […] The men of reason did not experience hunger. Their concentration improved. They became even better scientists and experts. Their fasting was not a diet, to be followed for a certain purpose and discontinued when a goal was reached, but a permanent state of grace, a life sentence.”
Even when she is hospitalised, she worries about having any substance that could lead to a “blood sugar spike” during fasting hours:
“diet soda is forbidden during fasting hours because it still raises your blood sugar level even though it has no calories, and the same applies to chewing gum, we see through your ruses. No, you may not add milk to your coffee except during the eating window. No, it is the last mouthful of your dinner and not the first that must be swallowed when the eating window closes.”
These might sound like the crazy imaginings of someone in the depths of an eating disorder, but they’re not Moss’s inventions. They’re rules casually thrown out by fasting gurus on the basis that ‘the normal person’ knows to take them in the spirit in which they’re intended – which is what?
I recall from my own time being treated for anorexia the frustration of constantly seeing ‘diet’ or ‘healthy eating’ rules and being told these were for ‘the normal person’ to sort-of, half-heartedly follow, but not me. Obviously if you followed every single rule, the message seemed to be, you’d end up where I was, which is why ‘normal people’ understood not to. I’d think ‘but are these rules or aren’t they? Which is it? Why, from month to month, does every single food group have a spell as the food you’re not meant to eat? Am we meant to eat it or not?’
There’s a parallel, I think, with the rules for femininity overall. You are supposed to feel incredible pressure to meet the behavioural and presentational standards, but you’re not actually meant to meet them because that would be ridiculous and impossible. You’re meant to live your life with that constant feeling of not-quite-making-it, and if you’re the kind of person who says ‘no, actually, I refuse to fail at this’, you will be deemed ill, or morally and intellectually inferior, or both. In its relationship to social codes, anorexia has always been that weird combination of total obedience and a total fuck you. You’re defying the rule not to follow the rules down to the last letter, because that would show the rules up for what they are.
Girls with ‘cosmeticorexia’ are, in their own way, showing the rules up for what they are. It is easy to say ‘yes, but no one is actually meant to follow every single beauty rule laid out for women because women would never leave the house’. You’re meant to choose, even though everything is presented to you as ‘essential’. You’re meant to be ‘the normal person’ who never feels good enough, and can always blame herself for never feeling good enough, because there’s always more she could be doing. The ideal itself is never to blame, only ‘taking things too far’.
Whatever cosmeticorexia is, it does not seem to me particularly new. Its impact may be more severe, fuelled by greater access to advertising and products, but girls have always been encouraged to see themselves less as fully formed human beings, more as dolls. To treat an obsession with the rituals of ‘feminine grooming’ as a modern phenomenon is to minimise the extent to which it is rooted in the age-old construction of woman-as-feminine-object as opposed to woman-as-adult-human-female. It depoliticises self-objectification, and it does so at a time when both cosmetics companies and self-identified ‘progressives’ are more invested than ever in conflating femaleness with femininity.
An Unherd article claims that ‘cosmeticorexia is a symptom of social media replacing play’:
“Children cosplaying adult routines is nothing new: little girls — and boys — have always tottered around in their mother’s high heels, smeared lipstick on their mouths, or posed with candy cigarettes. Yet this pretend play has a new fixation: skincare. Tweenagers are no longer asking for Barbies and bikes but toners, serums, cleansers and moisturisers, practising their multi-step skincare routines for performative ‘get ready with me’ videos.”
A supposedly innocent age is contrasted with one in which little girls are becoming TikTok obsessives. Yet I would argue that even a Barbie doll is a very different thing to a bike. As a former child of the eighties, I’d suggest that even then, the boundaries between play and performing ‘health and beauty rituals’ – rituals that were supposed to make you thinner and more beautiful – could be very blurred for girls. A friend and I recalled how we both desperately wanted ‘Crayon Girl’ cosmetics – real make-up styled to look like crayons – and ‘Get in Shape, Girl!’ gym equipment. Our mothers wouldn’t buy them, partly due to the expense, but partly due to their view that such things were a bit tarty. There was a very fine line between being a girl who was appropriately obsessed with feminine things and a girl who was deemed to be too interested, too soon, and hence on the road to slagdom. One Christmas I got a ‘Girl’s World’ head-without-a-body toy, with a face to which you could apply make-up and hair you could style (since one couldn’t do such things with an app). I took the wig off and wore it round the house but got told off for wearing it outside because apparently it made me look ‘like a hussy’.
In the late eighties and nineties – around the time we were getting our ‘period talks’ at school – paperback ‘life guides’ for girls were becoming popular. These would blend sensible advice for girls about, say, contraception and choosing period products, with ‘grooming tips’ (placing having a cleanse-tone-moisturise routine on the same level as remembering to shower and use deodorant) and ‘advice’ on weight and diet. I had one called How To Be A Supergirl which bothered me greatly, since it went on about female strength while all the leotard-clad ‘supergirls’ had jutting hipbones and looked too thin even to menstruate. Then there was another by TV doctor Miriam Stoppard, which included a complex ‘ideal weight and build chart’ which indicated that if I had a ‘small’ build, the target weights set for me when I was in treatment for anorexia may have been too high (so obviously I was obsessed with this). The underlying message of so many of these books was, yes, don’t be obsessed with your looks – but if you do everything we tell you, you won’t need to be (except, not literally everything, for even that would be obsessive).
Making ‘cosmeticorexia’ about social media subtly implies that girls today have been made narcissists by their phones. Ill narcissists – narcissists to be pitied – but narcissists all the same. There’s a subtle moral shaming to it, as though historical, non-digital obsessing was more wholesome. It’s easier to blame the medium than the message when challenging the message is politically unacceptable. We live in a culture in which the very definition of ‘woman’ is being emptied of femaleness to be filled with glossy, pornified femininity, and we expect girls to both accept this and to consent to be substandard women – or not women at all. You can’t excel at femininity – at least not if you’re female – because that would make you insane. Just accept that whatever you do or are, it’s never good enough.
Subscriber only: More thoughts on the distinction between femaleness and femininity
