Ageing and death are the great equalisers. The more unequal society becomes, the less the indifferent forces of time are tolerated. When the contours of inequality grow especially brutal, anti-ageing-focused wellness movements flourish. Twice in global history, the Western world has been seized by a fixation on longevity: the desire to resist ageing, forgo physical and mental decline, and perhaps even escape death. The first was during the inception of “the West” as a region with a coherent identity, after the height of European colonial expansion and before the 1940s Holocaust. The second is unfolding now, as the West declines in the aftermath of the Global War on Terror, and during the holocaust of Palestine. In both cases, an obsession with anti-ageing emerges alongside the pursuit of conquest, steeply growing inequality, and the mainstreaming of bigotry through new media.

Before the 19th century, old age was linked to the wisdom of perspective. In The Art of Living Long, published in 1558, Venetian nobleman and architect Luigi Cornaro wrote, “I had never known that the world was beautiful until I reached old age. Indeed, old age is the time to be most coveted, as it is then that prudence is best exercised, and the fruits of all the other virtues are enjoyed with the least opposition; because by that time, the passions are subdued, and man gives himself up wholly to reason.” Cornaro’s view was popularly embraced, republished in over 50 editions by the 19th century. This belief – that while the ageing body may weaken, the ageing mind should be respected – endured for as long as there was little change in the world between generations. Anti-ageing panic also subsided during times of prosperity, which offered strong welfare programmes, such as the post-Second World War period in the US – a period when ageing could again be associated with leisure and security. It’s safe to assume no subsequent generation will ever drink and smoke as much as boomers did. But at the end of the 19th century, the world did not feel secure: it was in intense flux.

This was the era that saw the rise of gerontology alongside a struggle to grapple with the rapid transformation of society. Victorian culture, beyond the rigidity of its social mores, is better understood as the first era of mass culture and industrialised consumption, to which a responding social rigidity emerged. Literacy exploded across classes for men and women alike, creating some of the first pop culture trends. Industrial labour required physical strength, but the greatest wealth accumulation occurred for the class of people who did not perform physical labour, creating a self-consciousness resolved by a cosmetic and health-oriented focus on the physical body. Before the modern “pilates princess” or “gym bro”, the turn-of-the-century Europeans enthusiastically established organised sports and exercise programmes. Male fears for their own vitality were quickly foisted onto women, who became personally responsible for maintaining youth. Medical doctors promoted anti-ageing therapies including testicle grafts, ovary transplants and semen injections, because vitality was linked to ideas of sexual performance. These procedures were rarely effective and often fatal, but exceedingly popular. The focus on productivity was twinned with purity, just as the era saw the world yoked to the whims of a new geopolitical centre of gravity: the Western powers.

By 1900, 45 US states had been created through a 95% elimination of the indigenous population. Bison, once numbering an estimated 60 million, were also slaughtered to almost extinction. The US may have reluctantly given up slavery, but still refused to include Black people in the nation’s definition of full and equal citizens. Lynchings, abuse and segregation were enthusiastically enforced (and, arguably, continue today through the police force). In Canada, too, these years were pivotal: 1900 to 1913 marked the greatest economic boom in Canada’s history, and while the Canadians remained British subjects, the path was paved for another white nation on the North American continent. Meanwhile, across the Pacific in 1901, the penal colonies of Australia federated. The Aborigines of what is now Australia were estimated to have numbered 1-1.5 million; by 1900, it was 100,000. When the Herero and Nama people (of present-day Namibia) rose up in 1904 against the brutal German occupation, the Germans opted for exterminating them through the establishment of concentration camps. The campaigns from 1904-1908 against the Nama and the Herero are now considered the first genocide of the 20th century, but as we know, it was hardly alone and not the last. This is how Europe and its unruly settler colonies – the US, Canada and Australia – reached forms that together preserved their common threads of white supremacist genocidal capitalism, joining Western Europe in a geo-political formation we now collectively call “the West.”

Doctors promising these Europeans and Americans a reversal in their ageing process hailed the efficacy of gland grafts, and – like today’s medical influencers – presented themselves as test results. Dr Frank Lydston claimed his transplant restored his hair colour. Leo Stanley, a physician at San Quentin prison, declared that he had successfully operated on 643 inmates, with results that fixed everything from “acne to asthma.” They advertised the same suite of restorative benefits many supplements promote today, from skin health to organ function to mood. In France, Dr Serge Voronoff sourced testicles from chimpanzees and baboons for his patients. Monkey glands were such a popular anti-ageing therapy that it caused international concern over supply, leading the French government to ban hunting monkeys in its colonies. In the US, the enterprising Dr John R. Brinkley was a prototypical content-creating medical influencer who established a radio station in 1923 to advertise his work. It featured music, Christian sermons, intense critiques of the medical establishment, and advertisements for goat glands ($750) and human glands ($2,000). By the time the Kansas Medical Board revoked his license (which he’d received after three months of medical school), he had become a millionaire. Meanwhile, in Vienna, Eugen Steinach pioneered a procedure called vasoligation, the fundamental component of a procedure known today as a vasectomy. Promoted as a way to “restore” vitality by allowing semen to circulate in the body, it was embraced by both Sigmund Freud and William Butler Yeats. Yeats even credits his best work to his “strange second puberty.”

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It is no coincidence that the modern vampire, a creature that is neither dead nor alive but somehow still walking among humans, dominated pop culture during the same period. As their empires extracted resources and labour from colonised people, European audiences consumed stories of beings who lived forever, and who fed on others to do so. John William Polidori’s The Vampyre established the creature as we now know it in 1819, but it was the many works inspired by it at the end of the 1800s that made vampires synonymous with Victorian fiction. Polidori’s Lord Ruthven was proud, ruthless, selfish: a creature of voracious appetite and refined taste who was cold to the suffering of others, even relishing it. The countless duplicates that came after mythologised the parasitic elite, who drained the vitality from others to maintain their own. Forty-five years before Bram Stoker’s more feeble and decaying vampire capped the terminus of the imperial age, Queen Victoria had already seen Dion Boucicault’s The Vampire performed at the Princess’s Theatre London, twice.

In Late Victorian Holocausts (2000), Mike Davis explores the grim balance of feasts and famines in the 19th century. Davis writes, “Although rice and wheat production in the rest of India (which now included the bonanzas of coarse rice from the recently conquered Irrawaddy Delta) had been above average for the past three years, much of the surplus had been exported to England.” The millions that died from the famines of the 19th century did so in a new era of policy that could produce inequality on a dizzying scale. Literary theory has analysed vampire fiction for decades, and there’s an easily drawn range of metaphors for invasion or sexual expression that white critics tend to project onto the vampire. But vampires can be understood as simply a reflection of their audience, exaggerated. A reflection that wasn’t otherwise available because the way Europeans were living at the time was historically unique. While English towns bulged with the profits of the Empire, their residents feasting on stolen grain and sipping tea sweetened by slave labour, they could insist in between bites and sips that they weren’t monsters; monsters had fangs. For others, it was perhaps a more titillating escalation of the necrocannibalism they already practised; mummified remains from Egypt were considered a restorative supplement by the English.

In 1888, Pears printed an ad captioned, “I am 50 today, but thanks to Pears Soap my complexion is only 17.”  The same brand illustrated the soap turning Black children white, linking whiteness with hygiene and purity despite the great disparity between hygiene standards and frequency of washing that was normalised among nonwhite people versus white. Similar campaigns became an important terrain for rehabilitating white identity as other forms of social reproduction seemingly lost their stability, and health and wellness offered a way to recoup the psychological distinction of white identity. The European imperial project relied on the violent construction of whiteness and masculinity as superior. The weakening white body contradicted that ideal, and ageing thus became a threat to the imagined purity and strength of the national body. This created the conditions for wellness movements rooted in eugenic logic: to cleanse, purify and dominate the self as a proxy for the world. And when culture fixates on productivity and purity, ageing is feared as causing weakness and decay.

After industrialisation, widespread poverty produced greater incidence of infectious disease and worsening living conditions for the growing working class. The decline in living standards was a result of aggressive capitalist development that devalued labour, suppressing wages while maximising profits for wealthier and wealthier elite. The ruling class faced a choice: either accept a reduction of power in exchange for greater equality in their countries, something many working class organisations were pushing for at the time, or urge people into personal wellness reforms instead. While the popularity of gland grafts at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries indicates how widespread the desire for anti-ageing therapies was, the true extent to which personal wellness became a dominant ideology through which inequality was psychologically metabolised is the Lebensreform, or “life reform” movement.

Across Germany, Switzerland and Austria, the middle classes turned to an emphasis on “healthy” living and “natural” medicine. From 1890 to 1930 exhibitions, regional clubs, curriculums and personal regimens hailed a renewed interest in returning to nature and avoiding the glut of processed foods and lethargy of inactive modern living. All the contemporary interest in detoxing and health foods can be considered the Lebensreform legacy as much as Lebensreform innovations like almond milk and muesli. In fact, many of the wellness fads of the last decade are Lebensreform-coded; raw milk, no seed oils, more probiotics, parasite cleanses, cold plunges, hot saunas, “clean” as a metaphor for nontoxic, “detox” as an activity. In The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany, A Social History (2003), Michael Hau details how much reactionary conservatism was reinstituted in the changing world under the banner of health and wellness. It would lay the ideological groundwork for the Nazi concept of territorial expansion and racial cleansing, but first, it offered immediate succour to the public. As Hau writes, “the experience of personal failure – or perhaps more important, simply the fear of it – underpinned the [turn-of-the-century] obsession with health. With its promise to increase people’s Leistungsfähigkeit (in the dual sense of ability to perform and achieve), life reform gave its supporters a sense of agency in their own future.” Importantly, it was a way to cope with status anxiety during heightened inequality: “Lower-middle-class life reformers … were unable to build their social identity around material success or educational attainment. In their quest for social distinction, they therefore made a virtue out of necessity and turned to bodily discipline.” All the “wellness” was in service of longer, more youthful, lives.

Today, there are two resurrected pillars of the anti-ageing panic. The tech industry-led longevity scene is philosophically comparable to the biomedical interventions favoured by turn-of-the-century wealthy, while the beauty industry rebranding of anti-ageing as “health ageing” combines Victorian ideas of “natural” beauty with life reformers’ zeal towards personal optimisation. Both treat physical aesthetics as an important biomarker of health, through which more cosmetic concerns are euphemised as central to wellness. And both reinscribe sexual dimorphism, or the physical distinction between men and women, in an era that had only just begun agitating for progress on the subjects of race, gender and class.

Like the turn-of-the-century anti-ageing panic, the contemporary one is also downstream of colonial violence (the Global War on Terror), rising wealth gaps, and fascist reterritorialising of social norms seen as being ceded to progress, described colloquially as “woke” (or le wokisme in France). Strict diets, supplements, biometric tracking, evangelising one’s routine, and self-service medical care rejecting institutional guidance, such as vaccines, in favour of niche practitioners are all practices that began to rise significantly during the 2000s. The antivax movement has had the worst impact. In the year 2000, vaccinations had eradicated measles in the US. By 2012, the antivax movement had restored outbreaks. The year 2025 marked more measles cases in the US than in any previous point in the last 30 years, with the majority stemming from an outbreak in Texas. England in 2024 logged the highest number of cases since 2012. Like the Lebensreform movement, contemporary wellness is replete with ironies and contradictions about the body’s natural abilities and what constitutes healthy living. In our modern era, the deciding factor is a belief that public health is immaterial to individual health. Amidst a desire by some to prove the body’s strengths through exposure is a desire by others to secure the body’s strengths through constant monitoring. As vaccine denial grew, the rise of wearable tech devices normalised data-driven personal health monitoring.

The earliest was the Fitbit in 2009, and in 2015, the Finnish Oura ring transformed the field with its sleek gunmetal casing capable of monitoring sleep quality. Now in its fourth edition, Oura has sold more than 2.5 million rings, inspiring new entrants into the field of ring-style personal health monitoring devices like the Evie ring, designed for women, and Samsung’s new Galaxy ring. All offer “wellness tracking” which covers step counts, heart rate and heart rate variability, activity levels, body temperature and how soundly you sleep. It’s funny to consult a third-party resource for one’s own “activity level”, and you don’t need to be wearing a thermometer 24/7 to be healthy. The vagueness and imprecision of how these devices ascribe numbers to “sleep quality” haven’t deterred anyone, from the tech millionaires who sport the rings at longevity conferences to the suburban parents who wear them on commutes. The devices function like a child’s security blanket that, through its consistent presence, soothes and affirms your own. Gently working in the background, even and especially while you rest, the rings are a captcha code your body performs while you’re not online – tethering you to the side of the digital divide where you already spend so much time that offline time may risk its sense of reality. The sleep data you can look at first thing in the morning offers proof – you exist. Your life need not have much meaning or fulfilment to produce reams of metrics. Being able to run diagnostics like an operating system is akin to the attempts at resolving bodily inadequacy post-industrial Europeans felt during the rise of efficient machines before they too sprang into doing jumping jacks on hillsides. The amount of data these devices collect and display is a talisman of body sovereignty, but it isn’t yet the escape from ageing currently being pursued.

Over the last decade, scores of tech millionaires have hoovered up gerontologists, doctors and scientists to pursue longevity research they hope will speedrun a biomedical solution to ageing. There were fewer than 100 such clinics in 2013; today, there are more than 3,000. They hope to distil ageing to a handful of elements that can be bottled and sold. Elysium, for example, was founded in 2014 and focuses on a cellular compound called sirtuins whose absence has been linked to ageing. Sirtuins require nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD, which is why you may have seen influencers recommending NAD supplements that many celebrities are now already taking. But neither the benefits of NAD nor the role of sirtuins have been conclusively demonstrated, just linked to a series of processes connected to cell repair. Longevity clinics are privately funded business ventures. They often rush to launch products without much depth of research or even scientific consensus, making their methodologies only slightly more sophisticated than stapling on an animal’s glands and hoping for the best. With the Trump administration defunding food and drug research and deregulating its marketing, Americans are likely to discover the effects of longevity clinic products not in clinical research but through customer experience. 

The customer model of health is not unique to the US. Preventative care franchises are part of the contemporary investment boom in longevity. These facilities are answering a growing demand for personalised preventative care that hinges on full body diagnostics, comprehensive testing and care plans that are difficult to come by from traditional health care providers. Clinique La Prairie, a Swiss longevity clinic founded during the original Lebensreform, recently launched their own line of supplements. Blue Longevity Clinic raised €2million to launch “health centres” across Southeast Europe, promising “diagnostics, lifestyle medicine, and regenerative therapies.” Texas-based Humanaut Health has been so successful that they just opened a branch in Florida offering “biomarker testing, medical therapies and lifestyle support under one roof”, and they’re looking to expand further. They currently offer “Shiftwave (a vibration device designed to regulate the nervous system), PEMF (pulsed electromagnetic field therapy for treating chronic pain and inflammation), hormone, IV and ozone therapies including EBO2 (extracorporeal blood oxygenation and ozonation – where blood is removed via a vein, passed it through a machine that adds a ozone and then returned to the body).”

If anyone outside of these businesses has heard the terms “biomarker” before, it’s likely because of Bryan Johnson.  Of all tech millionaires investing in longevity research, he is the one simultaneously pursuing celebrity and influence. Through a wellness protocol he calls Project Blueprint, with himself as its founding subject, he claims he has “reversed” his age by five and a half years already. In 2023, Johnson even took a litre of plasma from his 17-year-old son’s blood to imbue himself with youth. He quotes 50 “perfect” biomarkers and 100 biomarkers that are below his “chronological age” that he updates and broadcasts regularly across his many social media channels. In the documentary Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants to Live Forever (2025), Johnson claims, “For every twelve months, I age eight months.” While he no longer supports blood transfusions (they yielded no difference), he still believes in the mission of what he calls the “Don’t Die” movement. His supporters have joined him in a competition called the “Rejuvenation Olympics”, where their biomarkers compete against each other on a leaderboard.

Much of what we know about the human body, and even our models for public health, was inherited from the Nazis and fascist Japanese scientists who took a similar interest in the body, and researched on prisoners unhindered by ethical concerns. The late 19th-century gland grafts became the foundation for modern endocrinology. All the contemporary research and experimentation will doubtlessly lead to useful innovations in the field of health management. But so far, there has been no major breakthrough that holds promise for the future of medicine and public health, just numbers obsessively observed going up or down or staying the same. Western anti-ageing anxiety, or longevity fixation, is as reactionary as the Victorians.

This is the personal routine model of health, and it marks the abdication of a public commons for which a concept of public health can be demanded. It is all the public health that can fit in a blended drink, bathroom cabinet, or wellness session at a private longevity clinic. It is public health without a public. Genocidal cultures cannot produce an investment in public health because they never reached a consensus on who belongs.

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As soon as the War on Terror allowed a re-expression of the tropes of barely dormant antisemitism that had been so central to the European character for centuries (this time, against Muslims), white nationalism reorganised with all the cell memory of an organ repairing itself. Last year’s elections offered a view of the results. In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the second strongest party, and the first white nationalist party to win a plurality of seats since the Nazi party. In Sweden, where the Socialist Democrats had been the leading political party since the 1930s, the second largest spot was taken last year by the white nationalist Sweden Democrats. Austria’s far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) secured the highest percentage of the election results for the first time in history. FPÖ was formed by a former SS officer and is so racist that when it first made an appearance in national elections, Belgium issued sanctions on Austria – since then, Belgium has elected its most right-wing government too and, like other white nationalist parties across the continent, is on track to keep them in office. In the UK, leading Conservatives and voters are rushing to the newly established white nationalist Reform party; the UK’s immigration policy, invented by the Conservatives and inherited enthusiastically by Starmer’s Labour, is known as the “hostile environment”.

The commitment to policing potentially insurgent populations, once in colonies, now in a globally integrated world, has kept nations in tension with the idea of a commons. During Covid-19, the University of Georgia conducted a study that discovered white people stopped caring about the pandemic once news media emphasised it was disproportionately impacting people of colour. Rather than registering that people in service industries were getting sick and dying from higher repeated exposure, white people internalised the information as proof of their own invulnerability, and began going out more frequently and with less precaution.  A withheld social obligation of wellness, trained on racism and eventually deployed against everyone, is why the trauma of gun violence or the value of masking isn’t given the same public and commercial attention as nutritional supplements and “biohacking.”

Regardless of the race enforcing it, racial hierarchy is central to European and settler-colonial self-conceptualisation, but there’s never been a concerted effort to remove it from white culture because white people do not admit to being a demographic with distinct values or interests that are politically expressed. Every time those values climax violently, white people are incredulous. How could a people that once held zoos of captured colonial subjects fail to stop Nazi Germany? How could countries that spent the last 20 years debating the incompatibility of Muslims with civilisation allow the holocaust in Palestine? How could countries that devote their media and governance to minimising the impact of the left fall under right-wing extremism?

Do you think it was Churchill or Hitler who said we must “flush out the vermin”, referring to largely Muslim urban youth? Neither – it was the campaign-winning promise of the 2007 French president Nicolas Sarkozy. But it could have been Emmanuel Macron; it could’ve been any US politician about the 2020 anti-racism protests, or any German politician about the 2024 anti-genocide protests.

The same consolidations of power that Western nations rely on to produce their borders and protect their “security interests” now funnel their people into being either the agents or victims of fascism. The total human toll of the Global War on Terror – between the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and the drone war across Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan – is estimated to be almost 5 million, with 38 million displaced. That number doesn’t include the millions who later fled the Syrian civil war. The response to the resulting migration away from the Middle East has been to identify immigration as the crisis.  The view that Muslims constituted a monolith large and homogenous enough to challenge “Western norms” was laundered by publications and news outlets that framed suspicion and contempt as the logical result of neutral intellectual inquiry. By insisting that scepticism was the normative view, and that being non-Muslim was thereby the more trustworthy perspective on the subject, the socio-political dispossession of Muslims was enforced before any of the supposedly neutral questions were answered. It’s a rhetorical model that has since been repeated beat for beat against trans people, often by the same figures and outlets. In 2011, Anders Breivik killed 77 people in a bombing and a shooting rampage he claimed was to “stop the Muslim takeover.” In 2017, an average of two mosques a week were burned down in the United States. In 2019 in New Zealand, 51 Muslims were massacred in a mass shooting inside their mosques. Last summer, armed white British people attempted to instigate pogroms in South Asian neighbourhoods. Today, the rights and visibility of trans people, queer people, women and children are all being debated in ways that tacitly sanction violence against them, too.

The worst-case scenario, where negative stereotyping from political leaders and media figures results in the violent mobilisation of civilians against minorities, has already occurred. Violence against young women is growing, from stabbings at ballet classes to the school yard. While hormone therapy is normalised for wealthy cis people “biohacking” ageing, it’s being stigmatised, or entirely blocked, for trans people. Trans students have been beaten or stabbed to death by their peers in the US and UK. 2018 saw the highest recorded rates of trans people murdered; every subsequent year has seen an increase. European far right parties are winning for the same reason that Trump did: offering solutions by naming enemies.

A robust public health programme would require valuing the public, which Western culture repeatedly demonstrates it cannot do as long as the public contains populations cast as enemies, even if that results in adversity for everyone else too. Eventually, to suffer in such societies is to mark yourself outside their social contract, because if you were among those who belonged you wouldn’t be struggling. That is the real reason why aesthetic-driven physical fitness and anti-ageing beauty routines are the personal manifestation of Western border securitisation and not just say, social media-driven self-consciousness. About extensive fitness programmes, people jokingly ask, “What’s everyone training for?” The workouts are not preparatory; they are the main event. Beauty labour and wellness routines disguise suffering. Whether you’re working out after a break-up or during the breakdown of the imperial core, it demonstrates that you’re free to focus on yourself; you’re not someone with suspicious solidarities or needs. The very act can mimic security, temporarily, at least. This is why the response to rising fascism has been to consent in advance, through the entry-level (body) fascism of beauty labour. 

The annual growth rate of the cosmetic surgery and procedure market in the UK is 16.3%, with medical spas projected to earn 3.2 trillion USD by 2030, up from 1.1 trillion USD in 2023. The most cited global wellness spending number is $6.3 trillion, which is what the Global Wellness Institute claims the “wellness industry” is worth. That is more than what all of NATO spent on military expenditures in 2023. But the market is projected to continue growing. The reason why “wellness spending” numbers are rising so aggressively is that a new category of consumer spending is being treated as a health expense – physical appearance.

The disease model of ageing has led to a Protestant work ethic model of beauty: as the avenues through which to pursue beauty are increasing, so is the mandate that the results appear to be a God-given blessing or, in other words, genetic. Far from exploiting insecurities, the beauty industry is racing to keep up with the current ones. Pharmaceutical-grade ingredients are marketed as part of “healthy skin” routines. Today’s skincare doesn’t just moisturise the cells you have, it may coerce their behaviour (retinols), alter their function (pigmentation blockers like tranexamic acid), or provide parts for cell growth (peptides and exosomes). These regimens are no longer limited to topical products, either. They are now likely to include microcurrent devices that lift skin and muscles, red light devices that prompt mitochondrial activation, or micro-needling devices that coax skin to repair through inducing injury.

The hypercompetitive skincare market is now serving a much more educated consumer, who expects higher-performing goods that offer clinical results. The next generation of skincare is well past Korean serum-drenched sheet masks – it’s looking to stem cells and growth factors. The changes of ageing skin are described in more clinical terms, as the consequence of “collagen reduction” – a process which adverts often remind us occurs rapidly. And to “ensure laxity”, a host of high-powered creams and supplements now “support healthy ageing”. The medicalisation of beauty standards has been concurrent with the euphemisation of the goal being pursued: it’s gauche to call a wrinkle cream “anti-ageing” (Allure magazine, for example, banned the phrase), but the result is still desired, so the confluence of “self-care” terminology collapses any  difference between beauty and health care.  Beauty stores now carry vitamins and collagen supplements next to hair spray and lipstick.

Social signalling drives beauty standards and modern cost of living crisis has ascribed a new currency to the appearance of health. Consumer fluency in skin-supporting ingredients is just one dimension of this broader cultural shift that treats health as a status symbol – one of the few differences between today and the turn of the century (and one of the many similarities between Weimar Germany and modern America). It’s not just that beauty signals status through signalling health, but that routine itself is now a mark of status, over marriage or homeownership. Time and resources dedicated to personal wellness, in pursuit of a more desirable appearance, are now the hallmark of successful adulthood. This is where the rise of Goop and Gwyneth Paltrow’s image of luxury wellness fit in. But luxury is still niche, and lifestyle brands don’t resonate widely enough to satisfy a now much broader and more pronounced cultural demand.

For more affordable and better quality beauty and skincare products, Westerners are turning to East Asia. Japan and Korea offer much more advanced products because they already cater to higher beauty labour societies. In the more racially homogenous post-empirical societies of East Asia, standards could narrow more quickly, and the more the beauty ideal narrows, the more beauty labour it requires. In Korea, including professional headshots with your job resume has long been standard; some companies even require height and weight. As the West hearkens back to the stability of racial hierarchy and a rejection of diversity, beauty standards are another front through which to reassert the “order” and access personal “discipline.” Every border implies the violence of its maintenance.
What follows the rejection of racial diversity is an emphasis on the gender binary. As the reactionary backlash fuels a greater social disciplining of women, whose attainment of college education has in the last decade outpaced men in more than 139 countries, the natural look is not actually an embrace of naturally occurring women – it’s a demand for conforming to an ideal. This month, SKIMS, Kim Kardashian’s undergarment and loungewear company, launched a version of the face contouring bandages common in East Asia. It uses the same logic as a corset, an attempt to push your face into a smaller frame, a low-tech version of the electronic facial contouring and skin rejuvenating devices from Korea and Japan that Western consumers have started buying through companies like Medicube and Ya-Man.

Normalising this level of dedicated beauty labour lowers the threshold for acceptance of appearances that don’t adhere to narrowing standards. American makeup trends until the last few years favoured bold looks with obvious cosmetics: like dyed hair and piercings, bold makeup communicates a personal sovereignty over one’s body. It’s likely the reason the more right-wing a man is, the greater his distaste for signs a woman exercises a high degree of personal agency, like tattoos or unconventional haircuts. The right-wing backlash that rejects these types of beauty styles has met the rising influence of East Asian beauty care. Makeup increasingly insists on an “undetectable” application to create more natural looks that imply conformity and genetic privilege. Foundation is eschewed in favour of “lightweight skin tints” that “let your skin show”. Makeup meant to look like a lack of makeup is makeup that’s meant either to be worn at all times, or not required at all, because the face itself has achieved the desired result. The aesthetic promoted by Rhode Skin, fronted by Hailey Bieber, whose red carpet looks are not far from her “no-makeup makeup”, is just one example of what that looks like from American brands. The beauty ideal of “perfected” faces that don’t use many cosmetics doesn’t limit beauty spending; it raises it by raising the social expectations for perfect faces. This is something Korean and Japanese women know well, which is why their cities have such a high density of cosmetic clinics and why their skincare products perform so much better than Western brands. They’re made for longer wear and post-procedure skin.

Like the acolytes of Lebensreform before them, today’s Lebensreformers are obsessed with ideals of sexual dimorphism. The young people participating in looksmaxxing are focusing on traits that produce hypermasculine and hyperfeminine features. Looksmaxxing is often pursued without expensive clinical interventions, but aspires to surgical results: “mewing” trains your tongue posture to reduce the appearance of underchin fat, jaw exercise tools promise to develop square jaws for men, while for women, targeted exercises aim to increase the waist to hip ratio. Disordered eating towards weight loss is encouraged for both. At the extreme end, leg lengthening surgery increases height for men. Many now save up not to see the wonders of the world, but for beauty tourism. There’s Turkey for hair restoration, Mexico for veneers or a deep plane facelift, and Korea for skin rejuvenating lasers and injectable beauty treatments, all at a fraction of Western prices. If travel is out of budget, don’t worry, there’s a Library of Alexandria’s worth of videos demonstrating how to massage, train and tone your facial muscles into a more aesthetically desirable arrangement.

Traits like textured skin, or a fat body, are all being reproblematised not solely so people can successfully address them, but so that socially we are allowed to view lapses in physical appearance as negligence, lack of intelligence, and lack of finances – in other words, as constituting an undesirable person. Weren’t we warned about societies that fostered hostility towards people deemed undesirable? A waning tolerance for personal divergence from a beauty ideal carries into society a waning tolerance for human diversity more broadly. This is not a sign of a healthy society; it is a sign of a profoundly anxious one. Consider spending hours upon hours, thousands of dollars, upon achieving blemish-free, glowing skin and a toned lean physique, only to walk out and see others happily lapping at ice cream cones without so much as a colloid sticker over their acne. Judging such choices, even noticing them at all, curdles into hostility quite easily. It’s why people are so much more activated by the idea of a lazy benefits collector than they are by the idea that perhaps no one should have to work as hard as they might be to earn a safe, stable and dignified life.

As the dream of a secure retirement in Western nations fades in the distance, competing factions each urge their own single social issue safety raft to ferry people across the chaos of the contemporary moment. Recent changes to the status quo are framed as crises. The decline of teen pregnancy and growth of lifestyle options for adult women beyond motherhood is now the “fertility crisis”. Straight men’s desire for marriage and children as a social subsidy imposed through adverse conditions for women, as opposed to romantic partnership with willing equals, is framed as “the male loneliness epidemic”. The inability of neoliberalism to sustain improvements in Western quality of life is blamed on immigration; the decline in the social reproduction of white supremacist patriarchal values generationally within white families is also being blamed on immigration. The latter, at least, is being solved in America with a novel jobs programme that simultaneously deals with the American surplus of men whose education and skill level cannot compete with better-educated and more highly skilled women and immigrants: ICE has already institutionalised an ad hoc and amateur version of the previously more bureaucratic forced separation of nonwhite families by Child Protective Services. Being an ICE agent offers a competitive salary without requiring a college degree. Rather than participating in a refusal of such fascist impositions on the social order, Westerners are focused on their face and body.

The zeal of personal wellness is just productive enough to occupy oneself with a manageable urgency and just satisfying enough to anesthetise oneself against looming global polycrisis. We are currently living through a mass extinction event, with 40-60% of the world’s species at risk of extinction at current rates of climate change. The attitude towards climate refugees will likely be no different from the current attitudes towards refugees, a doubling down on border violence that sanctions violence inside the borders too.

All of this is compounded by genuine medical concerns. Metabolic diseases abound. Colon cancer is becoming the leading cause of death for young people who were, in previous eras, considered ineligible even for screenings. The gut health imbalances people are collectively diagnosing and ameliorating through social web content may be attributed to trauma (if your algorithm leans left) or not enough red meat and butter (if your algorithm leans right), but they’re not hallucinogenic. For generations, mainstream Americans believed their system wasn’t worth examining because the apparent abundance around them implied a calculus in their favour. Today, they’re beginning to realise that the illusion of choice via grocery lanes replete with colourful packages was set dressing atop a reality that a handful of companies own every brand, and all of them have agreed to douse the land with glyphosate.

To create a vacuum that fascism will fill, all you must do is cause overwhelm and confusion – which the scale of our problems and volume of information about them has easily accomplished – and then offer a solution that requires hypervigilance and inflexibility, like a routine model of health and beauty, forcing people to grow unadaptable and therefore easily threatened. You can convince people to do anything, even look away, when you convince them that any action otherwise will be a threat to their meticulously maintained zone of comfort.

The right wing benefited from a more consumerist society, and it benefits even more so when consumerism becomes too complex and high stakes to navigate without becoming an amateur researcher. Sourcing the nontoxic version of common household items, even food, requires exhausting attention to ingredients and supply chains. The displacement of public health into a private responsibility makes earning money more urgent, even for those who can afford food and shelter, further inhibiting political action that draws attention or takes risks.  But no microcurrent device can shield you from the next mass shooting. No protein shake can mitigate what happens when people around you refuse vaccinations and masking. You cannot buy your way out of cancer. And there are no gated communities that can keep out climate collapse. Everyone knows this, hence the unease, which is why the array of market solutions and purchases as prayerful bets won’t pause anytime soon.

There is no political incentive for our governing elite to insist on regulatory mechanisms that would make food and product safety, efficacy and value widely available to all as a matter of standard. Instead, Americans who are growing more chronically ill are falling down radicalising rabbit holes that social web platforms are incentivised to organise by extremes of affect and content. Women have been vulnerable to it for ages, as their health concerns are not adequately addressed by the medical establishment, forcing them into communities with affirming content but dubious research and politics. Biohacking the body is Westerners trying to access a vision of the future for themselves, a vision their nations no longer provide.

Right now, East Asia has a clear position on the horizon of the future; the West, not so much. For Western consumers, these time-stopping beauty protocols preserve them quite literally, retaining their place as the world moves on. They even afford the sense that they have time to keep scrolling and shopping.

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At a time when the world desperately needs to grow more disciplined, more attentive to consumption habits and exacting in its focus on the future, we are faced with resounding proof that we do have a critical mass capable of meticulous and radical lifestyle intervention. However, it is not directed towards a collective resilience against climate change or genocide, but to a more singular end – an extension of life, not all life, just their own, and for no other end than itself. More days in front of red light panels, more hours logged to morning and nighttime routines, increasingly sequestered as the world burns, shocked when the heat reaches their doors. These lifestyles make no compromise. The only “destructive” behaviours being overhauled are the ones that begin and end with replacing sodas with probiotic fizzy drinks, chips with protein snacks, and polyester with organic cotton leggings, regardless of whether the Earth will be able to continue growing cotton much longer. The last time people were as fixated on their protein intake as they are now was during the Bush era, through the mass adoption of the Atkins diet. Livestock production is responsible for almost 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s a stunning rejection of the basic reality of global interdependence. You cannot continue Amazon-ing your personal wellness supplies if the actual, original Amazon, which has made so much pharmaceutical development possible, is allowed to be destroyed. You cannot have any kind of diet, clean or otherwise, on a planet that can no longer support agriculture. People know this, but they’ve decided they would rather live at their current rate of consumption for however long they can. This is wellness as lifestyle, fully integrated into the foundational death cult logic of Western states, where the rest of the world can only ever be a resource or an inconvenience to be eliminated.The rest of the world, for its part, has followed suit. You don’t need whiteness for myopic selfishness, just any logic of dominion. Indians want to purge Muslim Indians. Pakistanis want to purge Afghan and Baloch refugees. South Korean men want to purge South Korean women. El Salvador wants to be a penal colony. Everyone wants to be Dubai. And Dubai is a theme park gated community made possible by a form of indentured servitude that should be outlawed. We can definitively claim that the notion of a “Muslim world” was just an Orientalist myth, as Saudi Arabia supplies Israel with weapons used to exterminate Palestinians. Rather than resist the logic of conquest and domination, people are betting they’ll be among those dominating.

It is the core of fascism that what force accomplishes is what the force-bearer is entitled to. This logic not only justifies the exploitation of the vulnerable, and the vulnerabilisation of the previously sovereign; it also requires the maintenance of a population that believes itself invulnerable. As the status quo embeds itself further and further into our lifestyles, the neurotic compulsion towards wellness grows. When health and wellness are a private pursuit and personal responsibility, it is sufficiently delineated from being considered as a collective and mutually dependent objective, which is strictly discouraged in societies dependent on racial hierarchies. A world that refuses to meet the needs of all its people likewise needs hierarchies to continue functioning undisturbed.

The current famines in Gaza and Sudan are, like the “late Victorian holocausts”, entirely preventable. No one is preventing them. The axis of global power is shifting East, and Western powers are spending the final years of their hegemony to punish condemnation of the current genocide of Palestinians. Challenges to fascism are seen as a greater threat than fascism itself, because challenges emerge from beyond its authority and prompt a corrective impulse that registers as decorum even to liberals. This is why protestors are being arrested instead of war criminals. As white leftists discuss the potential of incremental change through consumer media, their attachment to their own authority keeps them from learning from the work of revolutionaries that, while not becoming podcasting celebrities, did manage to overcome slavery and colonial rule. The only official effort against the expansion of the Florida concentration camp known as Alligator Alcatraz resulted from the Miccosukee Tribe challenging its location in court, alleging it constituted a threat to the lands and water.

The longevity movements outlining the history of the West share eerily similar expressions. They are consumer-driven and biomedical, rooted in the commercial promise of extending youth. At the core is an obsession with sexual viability, making health synonymous with the beauty and libido of youth. This, in turn, relies on significant investment in the gender binary, and distinct social roles for men and women. Each movement has been propelled by influencer medicine – the commercial promotion of health products, lifestyle marketing, anti-ageing consumable goods and medical procedures. Crucially, these movements emerged in the context of growing wealth gaps in societies that justified racialised violence to preserve the security of the status quo and gave rise to a public that turned away as some starved to death, while others were hauled to concentration camps.

In such moments, the national body becomes symbolic: beauty standards are medicalised, physically embodying the purity the nation wants to believe it still possesses. Through anti-ageing pursuits, the sins of empire and war are displaced onto the body, which becomes a terrain to dominate into submission. It is then that ageing and any resulting enfeeblement or dependency are treated as a crisis to cure. It’s a productive distraction, and it ensures the real crisis arrives unimpeded. .