How our toxic beauty culture drove me out of the industry
When I had imagined buying faces, I hadn’t imagined it like this. I’d pictured them made of silicon and wrapped in cellophane, lips contorted in a carton of pure expression. You’d unwrap your face and press it on to your skin like a mask until it fused, seamless and smiling. What we were discussing was more insidious than that. Sitting in the middle of the Spanish desert, in a conference room surrounded by dust, we planned the future of our technology.
The app we were building was pink and peach — white. We allowed independent beauty professionals to upload pictures of their services to their profile, sync their calendar and take bookings from the thousands of beauty fans using our platform to document their favourite looks. We had started out with , colourful braids and party make-up, but very quickly aestheticians joined the platform, and all of a sudden you could buy noses, lips, chins and a super-smooth forehead — all achieved by injectables.
