The Liz Moody Podcast - The Ugly Girl Era Has Begun (Thank God)

Starting point is 00:00:00 You want glass skin? I'll give you glass skin. How to train your face to stop moving. I did my own Botox for the very first time. Chances are you have an asymmetrical face. You need to be doing everything in your power to be as attractive as possible. I was served to TikTok the other day and it was from a 26-year-old. She was on her way to her Botox appointment and she was talking about how she hadn't gotten Botox in more than a year.

Starting point is 00:00:21 And she was so appalled with herself. And then she shared all of the beauty things that she was doing for the rest of the day. She was getting her face laser and she was getting her eyebrows and her eyelashes. is tinted. And again, she is 26 years old. She had the skin of a 26 year old. And that video tipped me. I am all about people being able to do whatever they want with their bodies and their faces. And I think that the hot girl era is coming to an end. I think that we're entering our ugly girl era and there's some really convincing science as to why this is about to happen. So today, we're going to get into the three factors that have led us to this tip.

Starting point is 00:01:00 being point, this ugly girl era that we're on the precipice up. Social media, the widespread availability of things that alter our appearances like GLP-1s, veneers, and plastic surgery, and AI. We're going to talk about how we got here, what we're going to societally consider beautiful next, and what you can do with all of this, how you can feel as good as possible in your face and your skin and your body today. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where we believe that there is always something that you can do to create a life that feels amazing. And we help you figure out how to find the lever to pull at any moment to actually do that. First up, social media.

Starting point is 00:01:37 There are a few different impacts social media is having on beauty and the pressure that we have to perform beauty. I think the first and the most simple one is just knowing what's available. When I was in my 20s, I honestly am not sure that I knew that Botox existed. I certainly didn't know about any of the laser treatment or all the crazy skincare available. I think I was like still scrubbing my face with the St. Ives apricot cleanser and the orange bottle, which apparently is terrible for your skin. When I was in my 20s, you would read a magazine and kind of find out about celebrities, skincare routines and like little recommendations from editors here and there.

Starting point is 00:02:14 You would maybe get a recommendation from a friend. But social media takes any niche thing. That is available and it amplifies it to millions and millions and millions of people. And here's the more insidious part that I. I think we do not talk about enough. Wellness influencers, beauty influencers, lifestyle influencers need new things to talk about constantly. They are incentivized by their audiences and the algorithm and brands to constantly find and promote new services, new treatments. They get views by saying, oh, I just found this new laser and I tried it and now look at my

Starting point is 00:02:50 skin. They get views by saying, oh, I found this vibrating plate. new things capture your attention and we are in an attention economy. Wash your face and wear sunscreen does not capture attention. This is a downside of an attention economy that people do not talk about enough. It incentivizes constantly seeking out new information and products and ideas and opinions where there might not have actually needed to be anything. So let's follow the chain of that. Something like a salmon sperm facial becomes available because companies need to constantly create new stuff since they're trying to make money in an attention economy. And they pitch it to an

Starting point is 00:03:30 influencer and the influencer is incentivized to talk about it because they have to be able to get attention to keep their job. So they make a video, they post it. And all of a sudden, you are not only hearing about a salmon sperm facial for the first time, you wouldn't have necessarily heard about it at all if this influencer was not trying to capture your attention in that way. But also, other influencers are then trying to capture your attention. So they're also posting about the salmon sperm facial because they see how well it's done on the first influencers page. And they look amazing because their literal job is to perform beauty.

Starting point is 00:04:09 And we want to do what everybody else is doing because in-group, out-group dynamics dictate our lives. This is one of the things that drive so many of our decisions that we do not talk about enough. Historically, being kicked out of the group meant you would literally die. It would be like starving and cold on the outskirts of society. So we always want to be part of the in-group on this very primal level.

Starting point is 00:04:35 So all of the sudden, you're like, wait, well, if everybody else is getting a salmon sperm facial, do I need a salmon sperm facial? And then the influencer needs more content the next week. So she's off doing the new Korean skincare that she found and she posts that. And you're like, wait, is that actually what I need? And so on and so forth. People need new things to talk about all of the time, so they are more incentivized to find more and more things in this attention economy. There are two other main impacts of social media that I want to get into.

Starting point is 00:05:07 The first is we see in real time the reward that beauty gives. We see people getting more likes, more comments, if they are more attractive. We see the comment sections where everybody is like, drop the skincare routine or like you look so amazing. Pretty privilege has always been real. There's research around people getting more raises, more promotions, more opportunities at work. Obviously, there are dating benefits, all of that. All of that has been real for pretty much forever.

Starting point is 00:05:37 But we have never historically been exposed to Pretty Privilege on a daily basis in the way that we are right now. It is all over our feeds that Pretty Privilege is winning in this attention economy, that pretty people are the people that we should spend our attention on, and pretty people are the people that get listened to. And we all have an innate biological desire to be seen and to be heard, and we're like, oh, okay, I need to be pretty to get that. And then the second thing is related, which is that many of us are posting on social media. Whether we're trying to be influencers or not, we are posting and seeing the likes and seeing the comments and even just from our own

Starting point is 00:06:18 friend group, like, oh, you look really hot here. I've even noticed in my own content. My content is not about beauty. It's really about feeling the best that you possibly can so that you can live your best life. And I don't really have people who are following me. Like, I want to follow a hot girl. That is not my audience. And if I post photos that show more of my body, like photos in a swimsuit or videos where I look more like the societal beauty standard, I get higher views. Like noticeably higher views. I get higher views. I get higher engagement, I get so many comments on those. I can see directly in my content how people react to me and engage with me in a completely different way when I am performing the current societal standard

Starting point is 00:07:07 of beauty. But I don't think that anybody is free from this. We all have cameras on our phones. We take thousands more pictures of ourselves than we ever used to. And then we're looking at these pictures and we are zooming in and we're scrutinizing them. We're all staring at our faces on Zoom all day, every day. Even if you're like, I'm just going to work a normal job forever, I do think that there's a twinge that a lot of us feel like this person is just being paid to take hot photos and videos of themselves while I'm like doing boring Excel stuff. I think all of this has a real felt impact. Okay. Next up is GLP1's plastic surgeries, veneers, essentially this idea that we can buy the societal beauty ideal. Throughout all of history, scarcity has signaled status. We revere things because they are not available to everybody.

Starting point is 00:08:09 Think about an Hermes Birken bag. This is like the pinnacle bag that you see influencers trying to get online. It's incredibly expensive. And then you essentially have to buy a lot of Hermes, like other products from Hermes, and develop a relationship with a store associate before you're even offered the opportunity to buy a Birken. That process, that scarcity, which it's so silly and insane that we're down to participate in this.

Starting point is 00:08:42 But that process of creating scarcity is what creates the perceived value. If everybody could just go get one by cost or opportunity or both, the perceived value would go down. Historically, our societal standard of beauty has been available to a pretty small percentage of people, and a lot of that had to do with essentially how you were born looking. But now, because of GLP-1s, being thin is available to anybody who can afford it. one in eight people in America are on GLP-1s. And I want to be clear, I am not anti-GLP ones. I'm actually pretty pro-GLP ones. I think that the research coming out about cancer is really compelling. The research coming out about inflammation is really compelling. We're actually working on an

Starting point is 00:09:28 episode about whether this is a drug that more of us should be taking for the longevity benefits. And they have made what was once a status symbol of this very thin body available to anybody who can afford to take these injections, which decreases the status of that type of body, because again, status comes from scarcity. We can get fillers to make our lips fuller, to make our face more symmetrical. We can get Botox to smooth fine lines. We can get nose jobs and upper blephroplastys. And we know about all of these procedures in a way that we absolutely did not used to. I do not think anybody 10 years ago, anybody outside of a very small group of people who were really into plastic surgery could have told you what an upper blephroplasty is.

Starting point is 00:10:21 But now, because of social media and the amplification of all of this information, many more of us both know that this exists and then more and more people because of that knowledge are doing it, which then we see those results and it creates this vicious cycle. You have entire social media accounts devoted to all the different things that Hollywood stars are doing, like, oh, here's their veneers, here's the secret plastic surgeries that they're getting that we didn't know about. And the result is, interestingly, that it decreases the status that these things hold. You might have seen comments in comment sections like, oh, I'm not ugly, I'm just poor. But there is this idea that if you can purchase beauty, it loses some of its value because the scarcity, was the thing that gave it value in the first place.

Starting point is 00:11:10 And another really interesting, terrible side effect of that is that the bar keeps moving because anybody can become thinner now. So people are getting thinner and thinner and thinner because we haven't figured out what a good body means in a world where what has been the societal standard of a good body is available widely. People are getting more surgeries, more filler,

Starting point is 00:11:36 more Botox, doing more skin care, trying to have even glassier skin, because the bar keeps moving. The more widely available these things get, the more you need to do to be in that little sliver of the scarcity that actually signals the value on the subconscious level. And I think that's the beginning of where it starts to tip. It's gone so far in this direction of people doing multi-hour-long beauty, rituals or people's bodies disappearing or people younger and younger and younger performing this beauty. The 26-year-olds being appalled that they missed out on their Botox and doing all these laser treatments and all these different things. And people start to feel exhausted. They start to feel

Starting point is 00:12:25 broke and they start to feel sick. And that's where we start to get some of the pushback that's going to transition us into the ugly girl era. And then on top of that, we have AI. As goods become more mass market, we see an increase in the value of things that stand in contrast to that. So the key governing principle for all of this is that scarcity dictates value. As fast fashion has become more prominent in common, more handmade goods have become more valuable. In a time where mass-produced furniture is available, having vintage pieces and pieces that have a story and pieces that have patina has become more valuable. It stands in contrast. Scarcity equals value. And we are already seeing that with AI. Hanging out with people in person

Starting point is 00:13:14 has become more valuable. Things with a human touch have become more valuable. If AI can make things perfect, having typos, having a weird cadence to your writing, that becomes more valuable because it stands in contradiction to the thing that is available to everybody. And there are some ways in which AI is bringing this democratization to beauty. You can have it analyze the best haircut and skincare routine and do color theory for you and things like that. But it's going to be more of a general sentiment. And I think we're already seeing this where imperfection becomes a signal of humanness and reality. And that becomes the high value thing in this increasingly technologically shiny perfect world. I've been drinking El L.Ele. I've been drinking El

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Starting point is 00:16:57 macha drinker. It has more al-thianine than other machas, so it really eliminates any jitters, and it just gives you this very, like, calm and clear energy. And it tastes so good. It's not fishy or grassy like some of the maches out there. If you're a macha drinker, you know what I'm talking about. It's 100% organic. It's ceremonial grade, and it's tested for radiation and basically everything else on the planet. It is time to commit to intentional health. You can unlock 20% off and establish your powerful foundation for sustained well-being at peaklife.com slash Liz Moody. That's P-I-Q-U-E-Life.com slash Liz Moody. As a lot of you know, I lost 30 pounds after getting some gnarly blood test results back.

Starting point is 00:17:45 And I'm also very happy to report that my APOB, which is one of the top markers of heart health, is down 40 points to 74, which is wild. And I am so, so proud of that. And a huge part of how I took that journey was working, with an RD. And one of the things that she pointed out was that my snacks were not filling me up, and they often didn't contain a good fiber, fat, and protein ratio. And one of the healthy on-the-go snacks that she suggested, completely unprompted, were the Paleo Valley Superfood bars. The Paleo Valley Superfood bars are not just protein bars, although they do have 10 grams of protein

Starting point is 00:18:20 per serving. And even more importantly, they have a whopping 12 grams of fiber per serving, which is more than a third of your daily recommended intake. Honestly, one of these bars contains more fiber than most of us get all day long, which is really awful because fiber keeps coming up over and over and over in interviews as the number one thing that we are not paying enough attention to. It's a big reason why all these GI cancer rates are rising, and 95% of Americans are not meeting their recommended daily amounts. And so on top of that, we've got the protein, we've got the fiber,

Starting point is 00:18:55 and the superfood bars have a ton of nutrients from real plants like kale and broccoli and blueberry, which is so important because there's more and more research coming out about how many of us are not getting all the nutrients that we need. And also these antioxidants are really important for our skin health and our gut health and just for our bodies to function optimally. And somehow, this is the part that I find the most confusing personally, but I am not here to question things. They also taste amazing. Like you read the ingredients list and you're like, way, but they actually taste so good. The apple cinnamon and the red velvet, also the dark chocolate's really good, but the apple, cinnamon and the red velvet are my personal favorites. These are the kind of

Starting point is 00:19:34 bars where you like think about them all day and you're getting excited about them and you're like, oh yeah, that's like my little treat. They also have a hundred percent money back guarantee, so there is zero risk to trying them. And while you're over on paleovali.com, you can check out their protein powders, their other amazing supplements. They are all made with the same incredibly high standards. head to paleovali.com slash Liz Moody or use code Liz Moody at checkout for 15% off your first purchase. That is Paleo Valley.com slash Liz Moody or use code Liz Moody at checkout. So all of this swirls together where the bar of the beauty standard is moving to this place where we're wondering if it's worth the time and the effort and the money and they're like 15-year-olds

Starting point is 00:20:20 doing multi-step skincare and 40-year-olds getting facelifts. And on top of that, the value of the beauty that we're working increasingly hard to perform is actually declining. Humanness is growing in value and all of that together is going to align to enter us into our ugly girl era. If everyone can buy perfect teeth, it's suddenly much more interesting to have a snaggle tooth. If everybody can buy this perfectly symmetrical, straight, sloped nose, it becomes so much more interesting and unique and human to have a nose that adds interest and dimension to your face.

Starting point is 00:21:03 Pretty privilege isn't going anywhere. But what we consider beautiful is going to change to people embracing what makes them uniquely them. The Ugly Girl era is a reclamation of the word ugly. There's a scene in Sex and the City where Aden is talking to Carrie about a table that he made and he's pointing out an imperfection in the table and he says that the flaw is the best part of it. The flaw is what makes it beautiful. That's what the ugly girl era is. It's an era where we're going to embrace our quote-unquote flaws as the things that make us the most beautiful, where we will appreciate the appeal of rough wood, hand, hand,

Starting point is 00:21:47 carved benches versus mass-produced IKEA tables, where we'll look for beauty that ties us to history, whether it's having the hips of our mothers and our grandmothers before us, or having a table that's been in family dining rooms for decades. We'll look for the beauty in the story, not the mass-produced aesthetic. So what am I doing with all of this? First of all, I am exhaling. I hear older women say all of the time that one of the reasons their 40s or 50s or 60s felt so much better than their 20s or 30s was because they developed more of a fuck-it energy. They just didn't feel like they had to play the game of beauty in the same way. And I think that entering our ugly girl era means the same thing. We can all just take this sigh of relief.

Starting point is 00:22:42 We can relax a little bit and say, the beauty is me looking real and human and like myself. But then, I do want to acknowledge that I still want to feel pretty and it's hard to change your wiring that quickly. We're still being confronted with all of these social media videos. We're still being sold all of these treatments and skincare routines. And I want to acknowledge that contradiction and I want to say, that's okay. Am I going to stop wearing makeup completely? No. Am I going to stop getting extensions? Probably not. I really like my extensions. And I'm going to give myself permission to embrace the things that make me me. I thought about getting veneers for a few years just because it's just

Starting point is 00:23:28 so hard to see your face on camera for hours every single week. But then I was like, you know what? I like my snaggle tooth. I love Kirsten Dunst smile. Have you seen her smile? It's phenomenal. It's one of the things that makes her her. And I can notice the moment where I appreciate real faces. I can notice how beautiful I think Kirsten Dunst is. And then I can reflect that back on my own real face. When we talk about how we liked that in the 90s movies, people had real teeth and real skin and faces that moved and they were free or like slightly more free of plastic surgery, we can reflect that back onto ourselves and we can say, okay, clearly, that realness is desirable.

Starting point is 00:24:16 I can embrace those things in myself. I also must mention one of my life mottos here, which is your body is for living, not looking. We are entering the living era. We're entering a time where people are sick of spending their days, staring at screens and having experiences that they're recording or filming to be consumed by other people or watch later, versus being live and in the moment and really feeling it.

Starting point is 00:24:43 I think we can take that to our feelings around beauty as well. We can really try to feel what it's like to live in our bodies, to live in our faces. We can enjoy the feeling of our face moving as we laugh and react to the people around us. We can enjoy the feeling of the sand in our toes at the beach. We can enjoy the strength of our thighs as we go on a hike or go dancing with our friends. Whatever living our bodies are capable of doing, we can enjoy that feeling. And I think that that feeling is going to be revered even more as people push back against this era of sitting on screens and looking at screens and living for what we share later on screens. The absolute last thing that I want is to add, ugly girl era is yet another thing that we beat ourselves up for not living up to.

Starting point is 00:25:35 Again, I think we all have to figure out what feels good for us. For me, right now, Botox does not feel good for me. I feel like I don't even look better or younger when I do Botox. I just look more frozen. But like I said earlier, hair extensions do. I want to embrace my snaggle tooth. I want to embrace the unique way that my body looks, which is really similar to my mom's body and my aunt's body and my grandma's body.

Starting point is 00:26:01 And I also want to wear cute outfits. And I'll probably get a laser once a year or so, especially because some of the lasers do help with skin cancer, which I really like. We can all find our own balance. But I do think this era where we enjoy and embrace what makes us uniquely human is coming. And I, for one, am very, very excited for it. Let me know in the comments if you agree, if you disagree, if you've already noticed some of the things that I talked about in this episode and your feelings on it.

Starting point is 00:26:31 Are you excited about ugly girl era? Are you like, no, girl, I want to keep doing my 25-step skincare routine? Let me know. I love you. I love how open you guys are to nuanced discussions. It makes me so proud and so happy that I've cultivated a community where we can dissect these cultural and societal things going on and we can form our own opinions about them, even if they deviate from what we're being told that we should think or feel. So thank you for listening. Thank you for being here. And I will see you on the next

Starting point is 00:27:03 episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional. You've probably seen red light everywhere lately, and honestly, I was very skeptical of it. Like, how can one thing help hair growth and skin and period cramps and thyroid health and energy? So I brought Dr. Vivian Chen, who is the founder of Loombox, onto the podcast, and she finally explained the science in a way that made it all make sense. The short version, red light targets your mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of your cells, so it literally gives your cells more energy to repair, regenerate,

Starting point is 00:27:50 and function better. That's why you get these localized benefits like less knee pain or better scanner, calmer stomach, and more systemic energy. In fact, there are over a thousand studies showing benefits from quicker COVID recovery times to healthier thyroid function, to less depression and anxiety to better joint pain to skin health and hair health and scalp health and all of these things because the red lights work on the mitochondria in the different places that you put it and then it's also going to work on your body as a whole. Dr. Vivian gifted me her red light and I dove into the research around it and then Zach and I both tried it for over six months and I loved it so much that I literally begged her to become a podcast partner so that I could get a discount code for you.

Starting point is 00:28:33 I have been gifted so many red lights over the years. It is a perk of this job. And this is the only one that I feel like actually helps with those deeper issues. That's because it has something that is called higher irradiance, which is essentially the dose and a metric that a lot of red light companies do not even disclose. And also it uses red light, which helps with the surface stuff like your skin and stuff like that and near infrared light, which is going to penetrate deeper into your cells. You just put it over whatever area you want to target. So I'll put it over. my lower belly to help with period cramps and it makes a huge difference. I use it for headaches. So I'll like put it over my head and it makes them basically go away. It's amazing. Or I'll just sit with my loombox during a short meditation or breathwork for mitochondrial support and having it like on my skin on my face. I've gotten a lot of compliments on my skin health recently and I fully give Loombox a lot of credit for that. Loombox is third party tested for radiance. Remember that is the dose. That is the thing that most red light companies are not even testing for, much less disclosing, is crazy. It's also third-party tested for wavelength and it's FDA registered, which is so, so

Starting point is 00:29:39 rare. I think of a lot of red lights is more like beauty gadgets and then this is more like a medical device that can also be used for all the beauty purposes too. Plus it's portable so you can use it anywhere on your body and you can also like take it on vacation with you. Now is the perfect time to try loombox. You can use my link for 40% off. Just head to the loombox.com slash Liz. That is the loombox.com slash Liz for 40% off. I'm genuinely confused how masterclass gets literally the absolute top people in every single field to teach every single one of their classes. I use it when I want to learn things directly like the cooking class from Thomas Keller has all of the wisdom that you would normally have to go to culinary school for. But also, I'm being honest,

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The Liz Moody Podcast - The Ugly Girl Era Has Begun (Thank God)

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