Medical Trends in the Beauty Community – A False Sense of Wellness
“A move away from diet culture and toward holistic nutrition and wellness” is what Forbes Magazine wrote in January of this year.
While I wish I could sit and write an inspiring piece on the state of the world and a rise of better mental health in Western society, I love you too much to lie to you.
It would be a massive disrespect to the doubling number of eating disorders being treated in the United States, rising from 3.4% to over 7.8% between 2000-2018, a sadness and “hopelessness epidemic” among teenage girls rising from 36% to a staggering 57% from 2011 to 2021 as reported by the CDC, and a radical, but telling, decrease in age of the first time a young girl has felt dissatisfied in her own body, dropping from 13 years old in the 1990s to only 9 years old in 2023.
So why the positive framing from Forbes? How could one look at this information and deem it “wellness,” or even just anything other than destructive and upsetting?
Well, for one, your cosmetic doctors, buy-now-pay-later financing companies, and I, would argue, men are pretty happy. From a rise of 5% in 2022 to 7% just one year later in 2023 doctors are performing invasive surgical operations daily, as reported by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
And from 2019 to 2023 minimally invasive procedures have seen a 58% rise overall. Access to the procedures has become dangerously easy with financing companies such as CareCredit and Cherry making these expensive treatments seem falsely accessible to everyone.
Women are more insecure than ever, and being sold not only many unnecessary products, but also the fake illusion that this is the epitome of health, and if they feel bad, they are the outliers. So why do I say men?
““The more insecure you are, the more compliant you become.” ”
Insecurity creates the perfect candidate to manage. Many of your insecurities are manufactured, in fact, I would go so far as to say they all are.
There are three themes that bring in the most revenue for products designed to be sold to women, they are as follows: endless self-improvement, competition with other women, and/or a fear of judgment or rejection. Through the research I did for this article, I came to a key realization: this insecurity isn’t a subtle side effect of brilliant marketing — it’s the very engine driving profit in the beauty and “healthcare” industries.
An interesting early example of this is not fashion or beauty related at all, it is actually in the realm of dentistry. In the 1920s we experienced the birth of the modern beauty ad. Companies used pseudo-medical language to frame cosmetics as hygiene. The epicenter of this theme was insecurities women faced regarding men. Listerine created the term “halitosis” to sell you mouthwash, telling women that bad breath was a shameful social disease, and targeted their greatest fears; will he kiss me if I have bad breath? Is my husband still looking at me?
Eating disorders are not new in modern society. It is also important to note that they occur in men also, however, for the sake of this article I am writing solely about women and statistics I use will reflect only that.
In 2024, eating disorder treatment centers faced a sharp increase of new patients that were actively on GLP-1s. The more accessible GLP-1s have become to the general public, the more new-onset restrictive disorders and relapses we have seen.
Patterns in diagnoses have taken an interesting shift. Binge eating disorder has always been the most diagnosed in the United States, followed by bulimia, and the rarest being anorexia- nervosa. A new diagnosis being widely clinically acknowledged, however, not officially recognized in the DSM-5, is orthorexia, first coined in 1997 by Dr. Steven Bratman. This disorder is characterized by an unhealthy obsession with clean eating, to the point that it becomes physically and psychologically harmful. This is the fastest growing eating disorder in the United States and goes hand-in-hand with “wellness” culture.
Now that you have suffered through all of this information, it is time for the takeaway. I have given you the upper hand. There is only one demographic immune to faulty marketing, manufactured insecurity, and suffering with a disorder you do not even know the name of: those who are educated. You are now educated. You, your body, your clothes, your skin, and certainly your breath are not the problem.
The big businesses, men in power, and social media may sell you the idea that you have something you need to fix. I am telling you that you do not. You are perfect just as you are today, and you must learn to believe that in order to escape what so few people will even ever know that they are trapped within.
