The Life Of Bryony - To Botox or Not to Botox – How to Navigate a World of Impossible Standards with Social Historian and Former Beauty Consultant, Ellen Atlanta

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

This week, I’m joined by author and beauty culture commentator Ellen Atlanta to explore how tweakments, filters and social media are reshaping not just our faces – but the way we see ourselves. From the rise of fillers in the UK to the constant pressures of online “perfection,” Ellen shares powerful insights from her book and from conversations with young women growing up in the middle of it all. Together, we talk about what it means to navigate beauty in the digital age, how social media has shifted our ideas of confidence and self-image, and why these treatments and filters have become such a big part of the conversation. If you’ve ever questioned your reflection, wondered how the online world is shaping your self-esteem, or simply wanted to better understand today’s beauty culture, this episode will give you fresh perspectives on acceptance, confidence, and defining beauty on your own terms. BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS EPISODE Ellen’s book, Pixel Flesh, explores the impact of digital beauty culture on women’s self-worth and mental health, and is available now in all good bookstores.   WE WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU Got something to share? Text or send a voice note on 07796657512—just start your message with LOB. Use the WhatsApp shortcut: https://wa.me/447796657512?text=LOB Prefer email? Drop me a line at [e-mail]  If this episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might need it – it really helps! Bryony xx   Credits:  Host: Bryony Gordon   Guest: Ellen Atlanta   Producer: Laura Elwood-Craig   Assistant Producer: Ceyda Uzun   Studio Manager: Sam Chisholm   Editor: Luke Shelley   Exec Producer: Mike Wooller    A Daily Mail production. Seriously Popular. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Seriously popular. Now, it's the dilemma that almost every woman I know experiences, but that none of us are really allowed to talk about. Do we age naturally or with the help of tweaksments such as Botox and filler that are quietly becoming so normalised? How do we exist in a world that criticises women if they adhere to ridiculous beauty standards and yet continues to uphold those ridiculous beauty standards all at the same time? Some people see Botox as nothing more than freshening themselves up, while others are sick of having to hear about it.

Many more say we shouldn't be focusing on the women having these tweaksments, but the culture that makes us feel we need them. I definitely agree with the latter statement, so I invited in Ellen Atlanta, a former beauty journalist, social historian, and the award-winning author of Pixel Flesh, the distortion of the female body and a world obsessed by image and how we can change it. we're going to talk about how to navigate a world where we're constantly told we should feel okay just as we are with all our imperfections but are still somehow expected to look fresh-faced and wrinkle-free. Talk to me about the celebrity you once worked with whose face just doesn't work. She looked odd when she talked and when she smiled like her face just didn't quite operate in a way that translates physically in real life. And there's so, much deception around the beauty work that she's had done. I was so angry at her. And I really

wanted to just grab her phone and just like live stream the whole experience and like set the record straight. Buckle up. We're going in. Makeup free. Of course. To Botox or not to Botox? That, Ellen is the question. Very much so. I don't want to be glib, but I think it is the dilemma that almost every woman I know experiences, but none of us are kind of allowed to talk about out loud,

which is do we choose to age naturally or with the help of tweakments such as Botox and filler that are quietly becoming so normalised? In 2023, apparently 10% of the UK population had tweakments, It's the, according to your book, Pixel Flesh, the United Kingdom is the fastest growing market for facial filler in the world. Yeah. That's mad.

Yeah. In South Korea, there's some stat in your book that's something like 20% of the population have cosmetic treatments every year. Yes. And they use kind of murky language to kind of disguise what that even means as kind of surgeries that aren't even class to surgeries because they're so normalized in culture that they just kind of feel like, That's not even cosmetic surgery.

Okay. I also reading your book, which has, which is just blown my mind. Over half of women aged 16 to 29 in the UK were considering some form of cosmetic treatment. But you also, there is, there was a refinery 29 did some research which found that how many women are racking up debt. Yeah. Getting these treatments. So I wanted to get, I wanted to kind of do this episode because it's been on my mind. I feel like we're crossing a Rubicon and a point of no return really in terms of treatments.

And if I don't do an episode on it, it's not, I don't, I don't for a moment think that this is going to change the world and stop everyone and suddenly make us go, okay, let's all age. naturally and let's, let's redefine what beauty is. But I do feel when you have a platform like this and you talk about body positivity and self-love and acceptance, I was like, I have to do an episode about this. And I need to get Ellen on because her book, Pixel Flesh, the distortion of the female body in a world obsessed by image is for me, I mean, it's won awards. Yeah. And it's sort of so neatly, not neatly, but it's, um, it's.

neatly sums up the mess of our brains now because of social media, filters, Photoshop, just how pernicious this stuff has become. And so I went out to my followers on Instagram and asked them their thoughts on tweakments because I know it's a really complex, nuanced thing. And I wanted to kind of read a few of them out for this episode. So someone says, I hate that the patriarchy has made us believe we need to spend our hard-earned money on Botox, but I'd have it if it was free. Yeah. This one is quite trenchant, but I like it.

We like strong opinions and strong views on The Life of Briney. I honestly believe it's the worst possible thing for women in terms of pressure to look young and to conform to a shiny image of a woman who looks like a doll. It's regressive. It's holding women back. Who decided, last. lines on a moving face were unacceptable. The same voice that oppresses women,

the most insiduous distraction to keep women in their place. You're nodding along. Yeah, I have so much to say. Another woman says, I can't afford them. I'm a single mum. And I feel odd being the only one aging visibly. Someone else says, I do them because I'm ugly. They make me feel a bit more acceptable in the world.

And can I just say, if that was you that sent that message, my heart goes out to you. yeah you're lovely yeah and like i just it's heartbreaking and it tells me so much about where we've got to how much value we place on appearance anyway another person said as a portrait photographer of 30 years i really don't like how homogenized and bland everyone looks and then someone says i'm 39 i get Botox in my forehead as i was really self-conscious about the lines i had i now feel so much better about myself it's not for anyone else but me so a real mixed bag of responses there.

Yeah. Ellen, what's your stance? I think you're right. I think we're reaching a real inflection point with this where it has become so normalized to get treatments done, to get work done, to invest very heavily in skincare and anti-aging to the point now where I think a lot of young women and very young women, we're talking women in their teens and 20s are doing these things

purely out of the peer pressure, not necessarily even because they feel the need to or they have lines that have settled or they're having any visible signs of ageing, but purely because everyone else around me is doing it, oh, I feel like I should because otherwise I would have let myself go, quote-unquote, if I'm not looking after myself

and that kind of invocation of that self-care language is quite common. So it's another thing to add the list of things we need to do as women. So our hair, waxing, nails, whatever the list is for you. And that kind of something I talk about in my book is that list of treatments that are considered, you know, standard beauty treatments, maintenance treatments, we might call them, is just getting longer and longer and longer. And whereas, you know, a decade ago, two decades ago it might have been, you get your nails done occasionally, maybe you pluck your eyebrows

and you have your hair done. And now it's like, no, no, your skincare routine must be immaculate. Your skin must be completely smooth. You must be getting injectables. You know, your teeth must be perfect. Your hair must be perfect. Your nails must be perfect. Your lashes must be perfect.

You know, I could go on and on and on. And I completely empathize with the pressure that women are under. You know, there is so much data around the way we are treated differently, the way that pretty privilege operates in society and that operates on, you know, all levels. whether that's in the workplace, in the legal system, it operates, it kind of embalms us in society. But my stance, and I think once you've worked with young girls, school age girls, girls between the age of, you know, eight and 14 who are already recognizing these trends and

these patterns in society, who, you know, we have the girls' attitude survey, which is done by girl guiding every year and it's it's a really reliable um huge data source for trends in in girls attitudes and behaviors and we know observably it's getting worse for young girls you know over half of young girls feel they have to look perfect now and that's gone up 10% since 2016 um it's very hard when you're working with those young people to say anything other than we really shouldn't be doing this I think yes people can say this is for me and it makes me feel better and people can say this is because of a system. This is because of a wider structure

that I'm not in control of, such as patriarchy. I think there is a point where we have to acknowledge that we are part of that system. We are cogs in that machine. And by doing something maybe for yourself, at the expense of everybody else, you are not beating the system, you're kind of cementing it in place.

And I think I find it very hard, like I said, after talking to an eight-year-old girl who says, I wish I was wearing a filter all the time. And I don't, you know, 14 year old girls I've worked with who say, I don't go outside anymore if I don't have to because I don't want people to see my real face. Wow. It's very difficult to then turn around and say, oh, I'm doing it for me, who cares? I think we have to start modelling the behavior that we want to see in young girls.

I think we have to start modeling the behavior we want from the women around us. And I talk about this in my book as well, how difficult it can be when your friends start getting work done, when those around you start guessing things done. And, you know, you have this, some of my best friends have had Botox and filler. And it's that thing of, oh, well, what happens when we get older? And, you know, I loved your face more than any face in the world.

Like, it was one of my favorite faces. And it breaks my heart that you don't feel it's enough. But also when we're old ladies on rocking chairs, am I going to look decades older than you? all of a sudden. And I, you know, there is one of the people mentioned there, this idea of a very real class divide emerging between people who can afford to not age, to visibly not age, and they can reap the rewards and benefits from that. And a whole group of the population who can't afford to and will be left behind. What happens when half the population

doesn't age and half does, that's kind of dystopian. Yeah, I wanted, so I think this is a really interesting thing and I want to talk about my personal experience of it because I think how old you Ellen I'm 30 this year 30 okay so I'm 45 and you talk about that thing of friends start to get it and then the peer pressure the kind of insiduous pernicious peer pressure so about three years ago I suddenly realized that lots of my friends were getting Botox yeah and I had no idea and they were like of course we are, Brianie. And it was like there was this party going on that I wasn't invited to, you know.

And my head wasn't in a great place at the time. You know, I've written about the depression and the OCD that kind of came back for me. I did go and get some Botox. And it was, I remember, I went into the room and the woman that I had gone to get it from, she looked like her face didn't work her face didn't work

and I thought to myself what am I doing but I was instead of like going actually I don't want this I'm going to walk out I was like no just do it just do it briny and so I had the Botox

she was really professional and it was in a really like a swish place in London and it was all above board you know because I know we can talk about this later there's very little regulation

of the industry but this was somewhere above board. Anyway, cut a long story short, my eye went droopy and I had to go back. Anyway, so I had, so this is me saying, I don't have written about this. I've had, so I had Botox once and I found that it was so obvious on my face that I'd had Botox because my face is so expressive. There are basically like subtitles going along it, telling you what I'm thinking at the time, right? And I just thought, I can't, I can't do this. I can't do this. I can't do this. And so I've never had it again. And, you know, I also, it did feel, like, having done a lot of

work on myself, perhaps almost too much analysing, analysing, of myself, I was like, why am I doing this? Like, what am I, what do I hope, what am I trying to get out of this? Because I know that deep down, um, nothing outside of myself is going to make me happy, you know, like, I wanted to say that now because there there are this sort of like you say in your book to be a woman today is to flounder in a sea of paradoxes yeah you know there is this difficulty and I like how do we exist in a world that criticises women if they adhere to ridiculous beauty standards and yet continues to uphold those ridiculous beauty standards all at the same time yeah that was the impossible question I set myself out to answer um

And there were points writing the book where I was like, I can't fix patriarchy and, you know, capitalism and beauty culture and all of these things. And it is incredibly difficult. Like I said, I come to this with huge amounts of empathy and as someone who has worked in beauty for over a decade who loves beauty culture, who loves, you know, playing with makeup, who loves, you know, getting things done or, you know, going to the salon. That's been my life for the past 15 years now. But I think there is a real need to, like you said, kind of take that step back and ask those questions, ask those maybe confronting questions about, what do I actually get from this? Do I actually want to do this? Is this the way I want to invest my time and my resources? Because I think a lot of the women I spoke to, I interviewed over 100 women for the book, kind of, and since when I've been touring and writing articles since, have kind of come to me and said, I was on autopilot and I had no. no idea. I was just doing things and like collecting products and adding things to my routine

and, you know, adding things to my kind of wheelhouse of treatments. And I've not even thought about why I'm doing it. I've not even thought about how much money I'm spending or how much time I'm spending or if that's even the way I want to spend my time or money. I've just been doing it because I feel like I should and I feel like I have to and my friend does this. So I guess I'll join in. And I think sometimes it is just taking that moment of pause. And, you know, I'm not saying divest from beauty culture entirely. I clearly don't do that. I think it's it's about that negotiation of what actually does feel good for me and feel good on a very like sensorial tangible level. What doesn't just look good to other people and what's expected of me to look how am I expected to look to other

people. What do I think looks good? What do I think feels good? What do I think tastes good and sounds good and smells good. I think that approach to beauty can be a very beautiful one. And I do think beauty is something that was once expressive and cultural and community driven. And, you know, I worked in nail salon's beginning of my career and people would come in because that was a time someone could hold their hand for an hour and a half. You know, it's a very physical community driven thing. Girls would come in off the street into the salon knowing they could charge their phone there so they could get home safe or if they were having a bit of a panic in the city because we were based in Soho, they could come in and have a sit down and it was a space, you know, a cornerstone of like a high

street that they could come into and be safe. And I think beauty, you know, beauty's been cultural for centuries, millennia. I think we, that version of beauty has kind of been taken from us and kind of poisoned and sold back to us as something so devoid from what it ever was. And so I'm, not here to tell you to stop doing any treatments and to reject beauty culture entirely, I'd like us to make our own version that feels as good and as nurturing as possible. And, you know, whether that's ditching the brown eye shadow, because at what point did we decide that was the most fun colour and using glitter instead for a bit or just dye your hair a fun colour

or do something different with your nails or do one less treatment that feels restrictive. wear one less makeup product, conceal one less thing, kind of focus less on erasure and, you know, stopping your face from moving and just see how you feel for a bit and see if that feels any different. And, you know, I've tried to move my body for fun now as opposed to punishing my body. So I do go to Zumba at my local leisure centre

with a whole mix of bodies. And yeah, I do think, I'm not saying this is an easy task and I think every day, you know, I've booked so many Botox filler appointments and consultations that I've just never showed up at. And I feel like I'm constantly that scene in Harry Potter where Voldemort and Harry are like got their wands out and they're just battling back and forward and sometimes it edges closer one way and sometimes it edges closer the other. You know, none of us are immune to the pressures. Well, you talk very much in the book about how much of your life has been spent obsessing about the way you look. Yeah. And in a way that I don't even

think I realized I wasn't going to be in the book at all. It wasn't going to be about me. I wasn't writing memoir. I was going to write about other women and I was going to write, you know, through interview. And I felt at the time that was the most noble thing to do. Like it's not about me, it's about everybody else who wants to hear about beauty culture from a white blonde lady. Do we want that? Probably not. And the more I was writing it and I was writing about my friends and I was writing about these women I would meet who I would ask if they would want to contribute and they would talk to me for hours and they would put their soul on a plate for me. It opened a floodgate of just so many women who I'd never even met before and we'd never spoken

before would give me days of their time and would cry with me and would, you know, tell me things they'd never told anybody else. And it got to the point where I realized that everyone had given me so much for my project. And it was almost, it felt icky for me to not give the same. It almost felt like I was hiding something and I was, there was something that I wasn't comfortable confronting. And so I sat down at my laptop and just thought, I'm going to confess everything, that I'm not comfortable saying out loud and now that's how the book opens that was why I wanted to say right at the top of this episode

oh I have had Botox because I think that the more that we are open and honest and you know and admit to these kind of vulnerabilities in our heads I feel the more able we are to kind of overcome them and fight back against them does that make sense yeah definitely and I think that's been the most empowering thing. I know the word gets overused so much

but about the book for me and I think for the people who read it based on the conversations they have with me afterwards is this thing of how did you get inside my brain? You've just verbalised or you've written down so many thoughts that I've had that I've never even been able to actualise

or I've been able to kind of work through and I didn't realize everybody felt like that or I didn't realize other people felt like that and so it kind of became this very open sharing space where I think a lot of previously unheard truths were said and some of them sound really stupid and that was kind of part of my opening thing was like I feel really silly to say that you know my boobs are my favourite part of my body but if I wear a low cut top I can't go outside or that a cosmetic doctor once told me a kind of off the cuff that my lips are nice

but my cheeks are like uneven and lack volume and I thought about my cheeks ever since that moment at least once a week. And that, you know, when I was a kid, I used to, as a teenager, I would hide in the downstairs bathroom from like the window cleaner or the postman

if they knocked on the door and it had no makeup on because I would not go and answer it. I was terrified of people seeing me without makeup on and that's still something that I'm working through. Okay, so we had a conversation. We did. A couple of days ago, where I said to you, well, how would you feel if we did this podcast without makeup on?

Yeah. So this won't mean much to anyone who's just tuning in or like listening. But if you are watching on the YouTube, we don't have makeup on, do we? I find it very liberating. It was really nice to wake up and not have to think about it. And I will caveat that my eyelashes were tinted a while ago. So eyelashes are dark. Yeah.

I was like, I was going to do that thing. You don't need makeup, Ellen. Oh, it's just, and it's one of those things. Like another confession in the book was people compliment me and I don't believe them. I just, there is some kind of barrier there that I think a lot of women have where it's like, no matter how many times a friend or a partner or someone that you love and care about and trust says that to you. It's years of conditioning that you have to kind of undo and unravel. I also think I have this thing about compliments though as well is that the confidence.

compliments we give other women, by and large, tend to be about their appearance. I really consciously try and give people compliments about their characters, their personalities. Instead of saying you look lovely, I like to say you are lovely. And the kind of subtle switch that that has had in my brain over the last, I think it's about 2019 I started doing it, has, I don't know, it just, it definitely has changed my sense of self-esteem of my sense of self-worth, you know. And obviously, as I say, it's not always, you know, it's not always perfect. You know, I'm not, myself, not immune to beauty culture. Yeah. And I don't, I don't wear that much makeup. So it's not something that

personally terrifies me, but there might be other things that do scare me. You know, everyone has their different things. Yeah. Like, for me, it would probably be wearing a really tight top. Like, that wouldn't make me feel comfortable. Yeah. Which might surprise people, given that I run around in my underwear. But, you know, we all have our, we all have our things. But I was like, I know that if I say to someone or haven't got any makeup on, they'll say something like, oh yes, but you've got such lovely skin, you know. And it's like, but that isn't what it's, it's kind of like it's not what it's about. It's about saying I'm more than this. I'm more than my appearance. I am capable of more than this. Definitely. And I thought about

this a lot when you suggested we do this makeup free. And I knew she was like, ah. And then I was like, No, you need to, I'm very big on trying to practice what I preach. And one of the things I say in the book is that, like you said, everyone has their thing. For me, it might be makeup for someone else. It might be having their natural hair or eating three meals a day or, you know, letting not covering their belly rolls with a cushion when they sit down. Everyone has little things that will push them into that place of discomfort. And I'm really an advocate for sitting in that discomfort for a bit and seeing how you feel.

And it's something I spoke to, I speak to a lot of women about, particularly around this idea of beauty burnout, which I've written about recently. But this idea of how much time and resource we lose to these things. And what if I could just wake up and not put makeup on and show up at work for the day? And how much extra time would I have? And how much time, extra time do my male colleagues potentially have in the morning or in bed asleep? or that they can invest in other opportunities or hobbies or activities that I simply don't have. And I think it's important, one, to acknowledge that, but then two, to kind of stress test it a little bit.

Like we've kind of said, oh, I can't, I can't show up at work like this, or I can't show up in the office like this, or I can't show up on a Zoom call like this. And maybe in some more corporate offices, that is a thing. I would challenge it if it was. But I think stress testing that a little bit and saying like, well, what happens if you do? What happens if I show up to a podcast with no makeup on? And most of the time, it's probably fine. Nothing happens.

Nothing happens. And yeah, I kind of had those very thoughts over the weekend of what I have to say is interesting enough. I don't, it doesn't need to be about if I can be the most glamorous person in the world. And it's something I really struggled with when the book came out was this idea of, you know, I came to all these big conclusions about beauty culture and how I wanted to be and how what was and wasn't healthy for me. And then it's like, okay, now go be visible, go promote your book. Go be this like shiny marketing influencer girly. And I was like,

oh, I don't want to do that. And I don't know how to be visible in a way that feels responsible and that feels in line with, you know, how I want to be perceived and how I want to come across. And so that's been a process over the last year since the book came out of dealing with how to be visible as a woman. And my next book kind of focuses on that a little bit more as kind of where is that balance in like a very hypervisual world, how much kind of gloss is necessary to disseminate ideas? Like how much do we have to kind of negotiate that power? Can we talk a bit about beauty burnout? Yeah. I was thinking about this, how diet culture has become completely unacceptable.

You know, we call it out all the time. But I feel it's just shifted into beauty culture. Yes. You know, it's the same thing, different packaging, basically. And you talk about how people will kind of wake up and go, oh my God, I have a 27-step skincare routine or something. I worry about the effects of, you know, we talk about eating. you know, disordered eating or eating disorders,

but it almost is like we need to have a sort of like beauty disorders. Like there needs to be some sort of new phrase for that because there are people from, you know, women my age through to, as you say, eight-year-olds children who are obsessed with this stuff and whose lives are actually controlled by it. Yeah. So beauty burnout is something I coined a few months ago and it's something that I think is being experienced very viscerally

amongst, you know, I see it amongst my friends, I see it amongst women in the workplace, I see it amongst like a lot of female founders, for example, who feel they have to look a certain way and invest in themselves to a certain level in order to get PR, in order to get funding, in order to be taken seriously, in order to be seen at work. And we know that women are also rewarded less for their investment in beauty than men are. Men are rewarded more in the workplace for their investment in beauty culture, even though their investment in beauty culture, even though their investment in beauty culture might be getting a haircut. And women's might be, you know, this list of 10 treatments that they've investing in. Having a shave. Having a shave, having a

hair cut, showering, you know. So there's a very real, I think, exhaustion with not just the maintenance, but then the trends on top of that and this constant like, oh, what's the new thing I need to be thinking about and focusing on? And once I've kind of fixed one part of myself, oh, there's another part of myself. I didn't even know existed. But this is the thing you say, the point is that these, you know, trends, when we say something's a trend, they swap in and they swap out. So fashion trends, you know, like say if we follow fashion really, really strictly, and some people do, and that's fine. We don't have to, we don't feel that we still, we like swap out what was in trend last autumn for what's in trend now, right? Whereas with beauty trend, they're not

They're not interchangeable. They're cumulative. So you're having to add each of the trend onto each other. So what was cool last autumn is to be added to what is cool now. So the thing I'm hearing about is, was it polynucleotides? Yeah, that's the thing. Right. And people talk about that as if that's a sort of nice beauty treatment. But it's injecting salmon spunk into your face.

Yeah. And most of these things sound, you know, like torture devices. And most of these, you know, most of the equipment and most of the, you know, the one where they kind of prick your face with microneedling, where your face gets covered in lots of tiny pin pricks. And you end up looking like, they say in the book, like a Lichtenstein that's been left out in the rain, just kind of dripping in blood. And on your point around disordered eating and kind of the conflation of that with, with them, skincare and beauty and how they're kind of moving almost indistinguishably from one to the other. It is something that's, being recognized and it's being recognized by doctors who are identifying it in, you know, again, very young girls. It's been coined as dermorexia, but this idea that a lot of the same behaviors, the very obsessive behaviors and this idea of control and this idea of routines and regimented rituals and a numbers game that we would have maybe around food and calories is just kind of very easily being applied to skincare. So it's this idea of, I have to, I have to, apply these products at this specific time, I have to wait 30 seconds between this product

and this product and 60 seconds between that product and that product. And if I don't wear SPF, I cannot go outside. And if it's sunny outside, I won't go outside between these specific hours of the day. It's incredibly obsessive. And we're seeing that kind of behavior emerging in, like you say, kids. Teenagers, the thing I've heard is now is they're obsessed with the UV index. Yes. Because it's about their skincare. Yeah. So it kind of trickles into a lot of other areas if we think about anti-aging that can mean not going out in the sun it can mean not wanting to sit by the window in a car or like taping up the window of the car when you sit in the car it might mean not going in the sea because of the salt water being bad for your skin and bad for your hair

it might mean not eating certain foods because they are you know bad for your skin um it's becoming you know it's when we talk about anti-aging we're not just talking about one or two creams and lotions, we're talking about a whole ecosystem of do's and don'ts of what you can and can't consume about what isn't isn't considered healthy. And you're right, it is just another form of disordered eating and it's another form of diet culture just taking on a whole new insidious form. Okay, so now I want to talk to you about how this has become such a big thing. And obviously that has got a lot to do with social media. The gap between online and offline worlds gets ever bigger.

Talk to me about the celebrity you once worked with whose face just doesn't work. Yeah, so this is a reference to the fact that I worked with Kylie Jenner for a full day, but we shot her for the cover of a magazine that I was working for. And so I was in L.A. at the time, and we did the photo shoot with her. and one of the strangest days of my life honestly I think about it all the time and it's the it forms kind of the opening chapter of my book is me talking about the day I met Kylie Jenna interwoven with stories of my friends who have grown up being influenced by her

because I was very much of that generation that grew up with the Kylie Jenna lip kits the lip filler boom when we were kind of teenagers and her very much being the model of beauty in the 2010s. And yeah, it was very confronting to see her in the flesh in real life and to realize that she had crafted a face and a body that didn't quite work in real life. And it wasn't supposed to work in real life. You know, this is someone who only a handful of people will know,

truly, in the flesh face to face, but who millions of people know digitally. and so her face you know to me from my my perspective it was very obvious that she'd had a significant amount of work done on her face and body um to me the you know the BBL was very obvious it was very overt um the filler and the Botox were very overt um and it was very uncanny it she looked odd you know and when she talked and when she smiled like how Her face just didn't quite operate in a way that translates physically in real life. And it was a really strange day. Again, I come to this with a huge amount of empathy and I talk about that in my book. You know, this is a young girl who was essentially groomed since she was a teenager. You know, the first episode of keeping up with the Kardashians, you see her as a nine-year-old spinning around on a stripper pole.

this is someone whose mother earns they takes 10% of her earnings who profits from her looking a certain way she first got filler when she was underage and it's you know you can only do that if you have a parent present and so I can completely empathise with the amount of pressure she was under and the environment she was raised in but then I was also looking at her thinking but you're a mother and you're a billionaire and you've transcended this you should you should be able to fix this now and I was so angry. I would oscillate between being so empathetic and so sad for her and then being so angry at her because I've got so many friends who, you know, would do the Kylie Jenna lip challenge where you suck your lips into a shot glass. I used to do that and people

would split their faces or burst blood vessels. You know, I did stupid squat challenges for months obsessively because I thought I would get that body. And there's so much deception around the beauty work that she's had done. And so much of it she attributed at the time to puberty and to getting older. And, you know, we grew up at a similar time. And puberty for us was actually this kind of live bodily betrayal. It wasn't this ascent into perfect, smooth, glossy hourglass womanhood. It was body hair and periods and blotting and, you know, cellulite and feeling weird in yourself.

And I was so angry at her. And I really wanted to just grab her phone and just like live streamed the whole experience and like set the record straight. And so yeah, it's it was hugely confronting. And it was I also have, you know, my job at the time, I interviewed her. We did it on video. I also have loads of behind the scenes photos. That was my job to get them. And none of them were approved.

The cover shoot was approved, but none of the pictures were. the interview wasn't either the pictures can't go anywhere the videos can't go anywhere i would never publish them anywhere knowing that she didn't want them out there um but it is now this kind of thing of Kylie jenna's trapped in my phone we're all trapped in this this cycle and if even the most one of the wealthiest women in the world one of the most influential women in the world she was at the time the most followed woman on instagram if she can't transcend this if she can't get out of it. What hope is there for any of us? And so yeah, it was a very confronting experience for sure. While I'm listening to you, I know there will be people who will go, well, and well, isn't part of the

problem that we're focusing in on one woman instead of looking at the patriarchal society that contributes it to it. And I find there's this kind of almost gaslighty thing where feminism gets used against anyone who tries to stand up and point out how fundamentally unhealthy this culture is. Yeah. They go, well, for some people it's empowering. They're making their own decisions. There's this kind of really confusing sort of world where people are being told that

unfeminist for making feminist points. Does that make sense? No, 100%. If I've confused you at home, I do apologize, but it is confusing. And that's why I wanted to have this conversation. Yeah, I think there's something I'm thinking a lot about at the minute. And it's kind of like an evolution of choice feminism, which we all know to hate now. But instead of the line from choice feminism being, you know, it's my choice for me.

So therefore it's empowering. The rhetoric is now, how could she make any other choice? Look at what she's up against. Like look at the circumstances. is look at the system. And I think in the same way that kind of the empowerment language around choice feminism kind of ended the conversation, it's very much a full stop, the same goes for this, right? If you say, well, how could she do anything else?

Look at the system. Look at patriarchy. Look at the structure. You can't go anywhere from that. And I think it's actually more helpful to acknowledge that, yes, there is a system, but we are also within it. Like I said earlier, we are very much cogs within a machine, especially someone like Kylie Jenna, who is one of the most influential people in the world, just because she is a woman

doesn't mean we can't critique her and hold her accountable for her choices. And I'm in favor of not total empathy as the end goal, where we just, everyone is excused for everything purely because of, for being a woman. You, you know, I don't think that's particularly feminist. And I think instead, it's, it's much more empowering to me to say, what are the things I can do as an individual to make that system better? You know, our everyday actions create that system, create this world that we live in. And so I think we have to stop thinking about, you know, as much as we can, nebulous systems that we can't quite put our finger on and call out a name and start talking about tangible action. So what are the ways, Ellen,

that we can make positive changes in our lives so that our daughters, I've got a 12-year-old daughter, you know, I don't want her growing up thinking she has to have Instagram face. which is that one look that is now so popular. Yeah. What are the things we as women can do to reclaim beauty for ourselves so that it serves us instead of undermining us? Yeah, and I think this is, we've kind of summarised. We've gone through a lot of them in this conversation

and I think it's quite nice to kind of summarise them. One of them I have in my book, which you pointed to earlier, which is not always reinforcing beauty as like the primary topic. in conversation and not making it the first thing you say when you see a woman is what she looks like or complimenting her appearance but instead talking up to her spirit or her soul or you know her work or something wider instead of saying oh my god you look amazing which can just come out so easily and actually i'm not blaming anyone for saying that saying i've missed you or i've i couldn't wait to see you i'm so excited to talk about ex that you did recently um and that's been shown in

studies to have a really positive impact, not just on people in the conversation, but the people overhearing the conversation as well, the people in the vicinity. I think the other thing that we've spoken about is this idea of modelling comfort. I think sometimes it's easier, and especially as women, to not necessarily think about doing it for yourself, because sometimes that's really scary, but think about doing it for other people, thinking, oh, if I, actually, if I put my swimsuit on and I let my belly out, or if I sit without covering my tummy, um, That's going to make everyone else in the room relax a bit. And the idea that we talked about with not wearing makeup

with the fact that there's some sorority in it that we're both not doing it together. I think that's really powerful as well. That is a really interesting way to flip thoughts because I think that people, when they don't wear, when they're not, they're scared of putting on a bikini or they're scared of not wearing makeup because they think people are going to judge them.

But what if you flip that and go, what if you make someone feel better? Yeah. What if you give them permission to be? themselves and love themselves today because that's a really empowering sentiment, isn't it? Yeah. And you do have that power. I think another huge part of this is realizing that whilst we might be talking about influences online and we talk about people with a huge amount of following, you know, research would suggest that the most important and influential women in your life are

the women closest to you. It's your sister, your mom, your daughter, your auntie, you know, your best friends. They have the biggest influence in your life and how you perceive yourself. And so if you think about yourself as a as hugely influential in those circles, it becomes then so much easier to make, you know, sacrifices or to do hard things when they're in service of those people that you love. And it's some experience I had during lockdown that I opened the book with when I was out sunbathing with my friends in that super hot summer where we couldn't really do anything. And everyone was in their swimsuits and bikinis and no one had really shaved because it was locked down and everyone gained weight because it was locked down and everyone was doing

less with beauty and in my head that garden is like you know it's like a renaissance painting of my friends and their bodies and their stretch marks and their belly rolls and their razor burn and their body hair and it's i found that super empowering so really creating those spaces for yourself and for other people in the book you talk about an anthropologist who theorizes that human brains are only ever meant to maintain networks of no more than 150 connections, right? So obviously that is all thrown out by social media. And we are living in a world where we are bombarded every day

with images of people. We will see over 150 different faces digitally every day, but they will probably all be filtered. Yeah, this is the thing. It's not the fact that it's just over 150, I don't know, it could be 1,000 in a day. it's the fact that it's not a sample like representative 150 people of the population. It's the most algorithmically beautiful 150 people that you could imagine whose faces have

been, have likely had worked done, have likely been filtered or edited in some capacity. There is an angle, there's lighting, there's all these things going on. And so we become, you know, our idea of what we're supposed to look like, about what women are supposed to look like, about what our own faces are supposed to look like. is completely warped. And so there's, there is a therapist that I speak to, she specializes in eating disorders, but one of the things she also encourages is that

when you're out and about, when you're on the bus, when you're on the train, when you're on the tube, when you're walking around, take the time to look at people, like look at people's faces, look at people's bodies, re-emerse yourself in this, in a real life, you know, community, re-emerse yourself in what bodies are supposed to look like and how they're supposed to move

and how they do on an everyday level, not just this kind of algorithmically ordained subset of beautiful people because you can very easily be duped into thinking everybody looks like that and I'm the only one whose face moves and I'm the only one whose skin doesn't look as glossy as my phone screens does and I think it's a lot easier for us to do that when we didn't necessarily grow up with those images I think it's a lot harder now for young people to have that exposure

So just making sure that for young people, one, that their time on social media is limited. And all the psychologists I spoke to, their number one advice was just delay exposure for as long as possible and monitor exposure when teens are online. But also really instilling this idea of that is not real life. The people who built those platforms do not have your best interest at heart. This is how they operate. This is how they make money. This is what, you know, this is the end game. for these platforms.

We're reminding, but, you know, like, it's one thing, yes, I tell my child that, but I need to remind myself of that. Yeah, yeah. Of how emotionally manipulative they are. Yeah. You know, that thing of this, the algorithm, which was, this is an amazing book called Careless People

written by a whistleblower from Facebook, who writes about how the algorithm was programmed so that if a teenage girl uploads a picture and deletes it within two minutes, they assume it's a selfie and they will then feed her all sorts of weight loss stuff, beauty culture. You know, this stuff is built manipulatively to work on the most sort of addictive, vulnerable bits of our brains. And it's worth pointing that out to our children,

but it's also worth reminding ourselves of that. Absolutely. And I think these tools have become, these platforms and these tools have become so normalized in our culture and in our society that it becomes, you know, we forget to critique them because they're so every day they're so you know first thing you see when you wake up last thing you see before you go to bed for so many people and I think we can have empathy with ourselves if we've fallen into those traps but I think it's again also about accountability and how we can move out of them but yeah I think it's really important to re-emerse ourselves

in reality as much as humanly possible I want to say I want to finish by saying that if you listen to this and you still want to get Botox or carry on getting Botox or fillers, that is okay. Like again, it's your decision. And I really want to underline that this is a completely judgment-free community here on The Life of Bryony. The only thing I will say is please, for the love of God, go somewhere reputable. Because I was reading this morning about people who are starting to self-inject

themselves with Botox because it's cheaper. and just don't put your health in jeopardy. Like go somewhere that is, I think, that go somewhere legit. I think there are new regulations being brought in, aren't there? Yeah, it's constantly evolving. I would just say go to somewhere where you're being injected by an actual doctor. I would always recommend to go to someone who's medically certified.

And yeah, make sure you're having a consultation. make sure that you're not being upsold on anything. Make sure it's not a, oh, but have you considered this part of your face and this part of your face? And if you feel uncomfortable, you are 100% within your rights to leave to not get the treatment done. Listen, if I wish I'd listened to myself, you know, and that's an example of it. And I'm always happy to expose my mistakes in the hope of helping other people. Yeah, and there's no, there's no shame in it. I really, like I said, here with a lot of empathy and with no judgment and just this, you know,

complete understanding of the ecosystem in which these decisions take place and how difficult it is to resist on a daily basis, the pressures to conform and to tweak and to edit parts of yourself when there are so many messages telling you that that is advantageous and necessary. So if it's a decision that still feels necessary right now, whether that's for, work or for your mental health or for whatever reason, I complete, you know, my, my heart is with you. It's just a thing of having that critical thought and having those critical conversations. And if it's still the decision you come to, then it's totally fine. But just make sure that that critical thought is going into it. Because I think a lot of what we're seeing

right now is, oh, well, all my friends have this, so I'll just go and get it. Or this is everywhere online now. So I'll just go and, I should do it. Everyone's doing it. And if I haven't done it, I'm not taking care of myself or I'm less than and that simply isn't the case so yeah what I want to say to everyone listening is whatever the fuck you look like whatever the fuck you do with your skin or your body I want you to know you are fucking awesome amen to that Ellen thank you so much for coming on the show it's been a pleasure thank you for having me a huge thank you to Ellen there. I don't know about you, but I found that absolutely fascinating, not to mention quite confronting, but that's what we're all about here on The Life of Briney, discussing

the issues that we find hardest to talk about. Ellen's book, Pixel Flesh, is currently available. I would love to know what your thoughts are on this subject. Please, please, please get in touch with us via Instagram DM or on the WhatsApp in the show notes. And if this conversation got you going please like and subscribe but most of all look after yourself i'll see you next time