The Ugly Desire for Perfection

On The Substance, the psychic self-destruction of beauty culture, and the constant quest for more

a still from the substance

In Coralie Fargeat’s body horror The Substance, Demi Moore plays Elizabeth Sparkle, an aging TV star who makes a Faustian bargain: take an experimental substance and live one week as herself, and another as her younger, hotter counterpart. Desperate to restore her fading beauty, Elizabeth physically splits herself into two entities, and Sue (Margaret Qualley) emerges from her ruptured spine in a gory birth sequence. But while Sue’s pert ass and synthetic tits quickly attract the attention and validation Elizabeth lacks, this unholy timeshare comes at a cost: if one tries to overstay her welcome, she will sap the life of the other, leading to a tug-of-war between the two women who, as the fictional advertisement for the substance unerringly reminds us, “are actually one.” 

The film’s body horror is an effective metaphor for the torture traps of contemporary feminism and beauty culture, where superficial body positive marketing doesn’t square with an ever-expanding suite of digital and surgical tools for beauty optimization and modification. On TikTok, I’m regularly served “morning shed videos” and content from women espousing a litany of “high maintenance to be low maintenance” beauty tricks that enable them to wake up refreshed, bright-eyed, and pink-lipped. Some—like fake tanner contour, lip stains, and semipermanent brow tint—knock you down a peg on the beauty scale before they lift you up. You have to tolerate an evening of orange skin, or green lips, or Groucho Marx brows to arrive at a superior, almost-natural state: you, but better.

I’ve engaged in my fair share of these treatments. At age 20, I was briefly addicted to getting lash extensions—a luxury I imbibed in secretly, but couldn’t afford after moving to New York. I’d assumed that, when I stopped, I’d simply have to make peace with my natural lashes. But as it turns out, the extensions had left them thinned and bare, and I felt twice as bad about my appearance. This is the case with many cosmetic interventions: hair dye damages the follicle, makeup makes you break out, filler migrates, and so on. And once you adjust to a certain level of “beauty”—big scare quotes—it can be hard to go back. Many of these treatments build us up just to bring us back down, creating a cycle of dependency that is difficult to break—in part, because their side effects often leave you worse off than you were in the first place. 

This is, of course, by design. The fear of inadequacy propels the beauty industry—and for women in public-facing fields, the invisibility that often accompanies aging it can have a serious impact not just interpersonally, but economically. This is the case for aging starlet Elizabeth Sparkle, who was fired on her 50th birthday and, in a moment of desperation, turns to the substance in the hopes of regaining her, well, sparkle. Much to her surprise, it works—but soon after, Elizabeth faces unwanted side effects when her alter-ego sue begins misusing the substance and stealing time from Elizabeth. “She’s not respecting the balance!” a frustrated Elizabeth yells at the customer service agent, who informs her that this premature aging cannot be reversed.

The fear of inadequacy propels the beauty industry—and for women in public-facing fields, the invisibility that often accompanies aging it can have a serious impact not just interpersonally, but economically.

If Elizabeth was unable to make peace with her imperfections in the beginning of the movie, when she was an objectively stunning 50-year-old woman, this only becomes more difficult when she sees the results of Sue’s indiscretions: new blemishes and a gnarled crone’s finger, which she quickly attempts to cover with a leather glove. But while it’s clear that sue can’t be trusted, Elizabeth keeps handing her the reigns, unable to resist the allure of a better self even as she runs the risk of destroying her real body in the process.

As Elizabeth becomes more and more disfigured, she’s unable to face herself or the outside world—and instead of taking this as a cue to stop the experiment, she spirals into self-destruction, holing herself away in her apartment where she cooks and binges on elaborate meals before switching bodies and leaving her fresh-faced counterpart to clean up the mess. “Control YOUR SELF!” Sue screams upon discovering a mangled chicken carcass the next day, a mantra familiar to any woman whose self-hatred has ever manifested as disordered eating. And, as is the case with the binge-and-starve cycle, Elizabeth’s weaponized indulgence only harms herself—because of course, Sue retaliates in kind.

The inevitable result of Elizabeth’s actions is a double life is secrecy, shame, and isolation. She spends her off-weeks running out the clock, while sue spends her days doing jazzercise on national television, ogling herself in the mirror, and hooking up with modelesque guys in her opulent apartment, which is roomy enough to accommodate the body of her former self stashed within its walls. This proverbial skeleton in the closet—and the specter of her imminent discovery—hangs over these scenes, tainting what little connection or intimacy she has with other people with the fear of being found out. Elizabeth desperately wants to be beautiful, yet the measures she’s taken to achieve that goal force her to keep other people at a distance. The cruel irony is that her pursuit of perfection keeps her from developing meaningful connections, even as she labors to be viewed as someone worth loving. 

Elizabeth desperately wants to be beautiful, yet the measures she’s taken to achieve that goal force her to keep other people at a distance. The cruel irony is that her pursuit of perfection keeps her from developing meaningful connections, even as she labors to be viewed as someone worth loving.

I relate to her character, because I’ve dedicated countless hours of my life to this kind of private labor—particularly in my teenage years, when I was much less comfortable with myself than I am now. This behavior took many forms, from starving myself thin to applying “barely there” makeup while my boyfriends slept. These actions gave me the illusion of control over how I looked and therefore, how I was perceived. But I could never really actually enjoy the fruits of this labor, because every compliment I got on my appearance was a reminder of the pressure I felt to maintain it.

Haley Nahman put it perfectly in a recent essay, reflecting on the many micro-adjustments she used to make before taking a photo of herself: “an invisible orchestra” of instant, subconscious tweaks intended to address her insecurities and make the pictures more flattering. But when people told her she was “photogenic,” she felt ashamed, attributing the praise not to her beauty, but to their ignorance of the effort involved. This is the curse of laboring for beauty; even if others think you look good, their praise feels hollow—and in rigging the results, you rob yourself of being accepted for who you really are. 

In our recent conversation for my forthcoming podcast, Jessica Defino—a genius beauty critic whose newsletter you should subscribe to here—put it this way: “There are all sorts of material benefits to being more beautiful as defined by the society you’re living in. At the same time, everything has its cost. I think it's helpful to think of these things as the economic power you receive, versus the existential power that is drained from you.” 

I’ve dedicated countless hours of my life to this kind of private labor. But I could never really actually enjoy the fruits, because every compliment I got on my appearance was a reminder of the pressure I felt to maintain it.

Like me, Jessica has participated heavily in beauty culture at different points in her life. And while she’s now dedicated her career to unpacking the industry’s dark side, she doesn’t feel worse about herself than she did when she was in its thrall. “People ask me, after years of doing this work, do you feel good about yourself all the time? and I’m like, no, I feel like fucking shit most of the time,” she tells me. “But I don’t feel any worse than I did. The difference is, I’ve freed up a lot of my actual sources of power: my time, my money, my energy, and attention, and the amount of myself that I now have to dedicate to other pursuits. As a result, my life has materially improved in a lot of ways that don’t currently include feeling great about what I look like.”

This is my experience, too. For years, I labored toward a perfect exterior at the cost of my own interiority, hobbies, and passions. Now, I’ve stepped off the treadmill of self-enhancement, and no longer attempt to solve my feelings of insecurity through physical measures. I don’t always like how I look, but when I feel tempted to revert to back to my old ways, I try to remind myself that an emphasis on beauty has never solved my insecurity. It only exacerbates it, because the more time and attention you place on physical appearance, the more it integral it is to your identity. 

I once thought that solving my physical insecurities would free up the psychological space otherwise dedicated to fretting about our appearance, allowing me to focus on other things. But instead, each action I took to create the illusion of perfection ended up paradoxically lowering my self-esteem when I inevitably failed to maintain it. For me, divesting from appearance means prioritizing my first-person experiences over other people’s perceptions of me—and this entails learning to tolerate my insecurities, instead of laboring to fix them. It’s an ongoing effort, and I don’t always respect the balance, but I try to. 

I once thought that solving my physical insecurities would free up the psychological space. But instead, each action I took to create the illusion of perfection ended up paradoxically lowering my self-esteem when I inevitably failed to maintain it.

This is made easier because my profession isn’t tied to my appearance, and unlike many women, I am not directly penalized for not participating in beauty culture. It’s more complicated for actresses like Moore, who, like her character, experiences tangible economic benefits for adhering to beauty norms, and must navigate an increasingly narrow window when it comes to aging “appropriately” in the public eye. But while Elizabeth loses her job at the behest of a sexist studio exec, that’s not the great tragedy of the film—it’s that she consistently chooses external validation over her own internal experience, trading the appearance of perfection for her own personal wellbeing time and time again. Even as Sue’s abuse of the substance gradually saps her of what little beauty she has left, she fails to learn from her mistakes, gradually transforming into an unrecognizable monster as a billboard of her better half sits outside her window—a mocking reminder of the younger, more perfect self that’s destroying her from the inside out.

still from the substance.

The Substance has been called a film for the Ozempic era, but it’s also an apt commentary on the division between our virtual and physical selves. Social media splices us into pieces, and lets us rebuild our images from scratch. From filters to fillers and FaceTune, the new technologies of beauty enable us to represent our face and bodies as we imagine them to be at their best—incentivizing us to view any version of ourselves that falls short as less real than our true (which is to say idealized) form. “We see this a lot in the beauty and diet industries—you know, ‘lose those 20 pounds and feel like yourself again,” Jessica says, noting that through this messaging, the beauty industry effectively rebrands the manipulation of our appearance as the human quest for self-actualization—aligning an artificial desire with a fundamental one, and packaging image experimentation, body modification, and consumption as liberatory.

In present-day beauty culture, the negative influence of unrealistic standards is widely acknowledged. Yet the quest for eternal youth remains a patriarchal imperative, even though “it’s always slipping away at every moment,” as Jessica observes, and “the all-consuming focus on the prevention of aging leads to more instances of appearance related anxiety, depression, and dysmorphia.” The methods we use to prevent it can be further alienating: as she wrote in a tweet-turned-article, eliminating micro-expressions via botox effects our ability to connect with others sexually and romantically. Not only does this common beauty procedure “decrease activation of key brain emotional centers,” potentially altering the way the brain “interprets and processes other people’s emotions”—it can also“flatten your affect, disconnecting you from your [own] feelings.”

This is the false promise of self-optimization. We’re often encouraged to see the time-consuming labor of beauty as a means to achieve secondary goals, like greater quality of life, career success, or stronger romantic connections. But more often than not, the reward for our efforts is an emotional void and diminished connection with the people around us. And just as the division of time between Elizabeth and Sue is zero-sum, dedicating our lives to one pursuit necessarily eclipses the possibility of another. 

The Substance, in all its grotesque glory, fittingly reflects the psychic toll incurred from a life trapped buffing one’s surface at the expense of cultivating an inner life.

This increased focus on the self comes at a cost. And The Substance, in all its grotesque glory, fittingly depicts the psychic toll incurred from a life trapped buffing one’s surface at the expense of cultivating an inner life. This cruel irony is evident at the end of the film, when Elizabeth tapes a photo of her former self over her ruined face. the unspoken message is that she would be more than happy to trade her grotesque visage for the one she once spurned—yet even with the writing on the wall, she still doesn’t stop, turning once more to the promise of salvation that has only delivered her misery. 

The day I saw the film, I wasn’t feeling great about myself. Makeup-less, frizzy-haired, and tired, I peered into the mirror in the bathroom of the movie theater, registering my own self-criticisms with a vague bemusement, even as my mind swirled with thoughts of Elizabeth’s demise. Better to quit while you’re ahead, I thought to myself, applying a swipe of tinted lip balm. But that’s easier said than done.