This article is part of the Future of Appearance, a collection of articles that investigates what we will look like in 20 years.
Beauty today is an exercise in exhaustion.
The reigning regimen is “high maintenance to be low maintenance”, which celebrates the effort it takes to appear effortless: semi-permanent eyebrow and lip colour tattoos, eyelash tints and lifts, red light therapy sessions, microcurrent facial massages. The ‘morning shed’ — or the performative removal of overnight skincare treatments, including face tape, mouth tape, sheet masks, eye masks, peel-off lip tints and heatless curlers — has turned getting ready into garbage collecting.
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Tweens have anti-ageing routines. Grandmothers are getting ‘glamma makeovers’. Somewhere in the middle, a 38-year-old is spending $140,000 on a preventative face lift. Non-surgical procedures — Botox, filler — increased nearly 58 per cent between 2019 and 2023, per the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery, a figure that continues to climb; upkeep requires multiple appointments per year, whether patients prefer the cartoonish excess of ‘Mar-a-Lago face’ or the invisibilised labour of the ‘undetectable’ look. Veneers are trending. Weight loss drugs are trending. ‘Chestnut teddy bronde’ highlights are trending. Everyone on TikTok is chugging collagen supplements, or hair growth supplements, or sleep supplements, or gut supplements. Some of them are using tooth gloss — that’s “lip gloss for your teeth”. Doritos makes nail polish now. President Trump sells perfume. It seems there is no surface left to smooth (Dr Paul Jarrod Frank recently promoted a treatment for back wrinkles) and no innovation that doesn’t already exist (see: hole serum).
“Beauty has become such a time-consuming and immersive part of people’s lives over the past decade,” says Zeynab Mohamed, industry reporter and author of the Face Value newsletter. “It’s almost incomparable.”
Lately, Mohamed is seeing signs of overwhelm in both herself and her wider beauty community. “The smallest steps in my routine can often feel like a huge task,” she admits. Some influencers — tired of performing beauty, then performing that performance for an online audience — are starting to leave the profession entirely. “I would say 100 per cent of my time, energy and brain space, as well as 30 or 40 per cent of my income, was dedicated to the pursuit of wellness and beauty,” says Lee Tilghman, former influencer and author of forthcoming memoir If You Don’t Like This, I Will Die.
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Recent works of fiction reflect this feeling of frustration. Aesthetica, a 2022 novel by Allie Rowbottom, imagines a cosmetic procedure to reverse all previous work. The Substance, the 2024 film starring Demi Moore, treats the industry’s most enduring promises — better, younger, perfect — as fodder for body horror.
Could it all portend the end? Are we headed for a beauty burnout?
Industry executives are wondering the same, particularly since trend forecaster WGSN has predicted the Great Exhaustion, a fog of fatigue that will condense and descend upon us all in 2026. (Has it not already?) This collective feeling, it says, will be fuelled by countless and concurrent global crises: climate change and income inequality; life online and the widening political divide; chronic health issues and skyrocketing healthcare costs; artificial intelligence anxiety and job insecurity; the unending deaths of ongoing war; and the rollback of basic human rights for women, the LGBTQ+ community and people of colour. The firm has circulated a report to help brands navigate potential pain points, but in my opinion, Big Beauty will be just fine.
I have a theory that the average beauty routine expands in direct proportion to political upheaval. Call it the Aesthetic Index.
The Great Recession of 2007 and the 2008 financial crisis coincided with the arrival of Keeping Up With The Kardashians, as the ‘five-minute face’ of the early noughties gradually gave way to the more elaborate Kardashian base — foundation, concealer, powder, highlighter, contour, bronzer, blush.
Following the 2016 election of President Donald Trump, and into the pandemic, skincare was rebranded as selfcare — an act of “political warfare”, in the selectively repurposed words of late activist Audre Lorde — and quickly became the industry’s fastest-growing sector, driving 45 per cent of its growth the next year. Searches for 10-step skincare (cleanser, toner, essence, exfoliant, oil, serum, spot treatment, SPF, moisturiser, mask) surged in the middle of Trump’s first term, and ‘meta face’ emerged near the end of it. The uncanny aesthetic was modelled after Instagram filters, as well as the platform’s photo-editing technology, and brought to life with $17,000 of non-surgical interventions per person per year, according to one 2019 estimation.
In 2020, the year of Covid, people “hyper-fixated” on beauty, says Brooke Devard, host of ‘The Naked Beauty’ podcast. “My listenership exploded during the pandemic,” she says. Hours on Zoom triggered the Botox boom, and plastic surgery saw similar growth, as procedure rates climbed 19 per cent over the following two years.
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, and this formal subjugation of American women was met with casual objectification — glazed donut skin was the trend of the year. In 2023, as over a dozen states enacted near-total abortion bans, consumers reclaimed body autonomy where they could, as they aspired to look like Barbie and injected off-label Ozempic. Multi-state attacks on transgender rights juxtaposed the girlhood craze, a sort of retail therapy in the form of pink lip gloss and bow-shaped barrettes.
When Trump was elected again in 2024, one woman told The Telegraph she spent big at the Sephora sale simply “to cope”. The extensive routines that define 2025 (see above) don’t exist in spite of the political chaos, but because of it.
In this way, each factor of the Great Exhaustion will also fuel the beauty industry. Climate change accelerates the push for SPF, anti-pollution skincare and sweat-proof setting sprays. Income inequality drives cosmetic class performance — ‘expensive’ skin, the boom boom aesthetic, the funnelling of wealth (or the appearance of it, secured via buy-now, pay-later programmes) into one’s face. Living through digital avatars makes eerie perfection feel like an obligation. A broken healthcare system turns beauty and wellness into forms of self-medication. Job insecurity reframes beauty as survival (studies show that attractive people are more likely to get hired).
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 and gender non-conforming people 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,” notes Mohamed. “I don’t think beauty enthusiasts will necessarily abandon their routines, but I think we’ll see more people becoming even more strategic about their spending.”
Devard predicts a focus on “extreme beauty treatments” (lasers, face lifts) and appointment services (nails, lashes). “Being high maintenance to stay low maintenance is going to continue,” she says, “people will stick with the things that make them feel good” — a low bar for brands to clear when everything else feels so bad.
Beauty is pain, the saying goes, but a more accurate analysis might be that pain powers beauty. When the world feels unstable, unsurvivable, out of control, people try to control what they can: their faces.
*Note on our images:
We created all lead images in this series using OpenAI GPT-4o’s image generation tool. To do that, we leveraged the ongoing partnership between Condé Nast and OpenAI and generated images that best reflect the expert insights and predictions about appearance found in this collection of articles.
We are aware of the debate surrounding the ethics of artificial intelligence in image-making, and we share concerns regarding creative ownership as well as that of our own image. In this series, we are talking about a world that doesn’t yet exist, and as AI is in so many ways the tool of the future, we felt it was appropriate to experiment with it in this way.
We guided the visuals entirely through written prompts. No external images or copyrighted materials were uploaded or referenced — every image was created from scratch based on our team’s original concepts.
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