I learned early that my body was a problem to be managed and maintained. Threading, waxing, skin lightening, the slow taming of my frizzy curls into submission. It was all delivered with complete tenderness by women who loved me, who were doing exactly what had been done to them.
Nobody called any of this harm. It was just taking care of yourself.
We have all heard the phrase "beauty is pain." We say it laughing, wincing, peeling ourselves off a waxing table or blinking through eyebrow threading. It used to be the price you paid to fit a beauty standard, but in the last few years, the language shifted entirely. Now the chemical peel is an act of self-love. The facial that makes your face bleed is a treat. If you truly love yourself, you will endure. You will maintain it. You will book the next appointment.
This rebranding is crucial to note because the language we use shapes what we can and cannot see. There is a reason why language is being reframed. Acrylic nails cost around $60 per set. Lash extensions run closer to a hundred. The price of maintenance has quietly ballooned into something that needs an effective story to sell it. Vanity or obligation are both narratives that invite self-scrutiny but self-love – that will sell. Picture the Instagram story with the perfect 15-second song segment: fresh set, fresh start. You are not spending sixty dollars on nails because you feel pressured to have them. You are investing in yourself. You deserve this.
The wellness rebrand did not emerge from some collective awakening about the importance of self-worth. It emerged because companies needed a way to make routine damage feel like a birthday gift you gave yourself. Once something is a treat, it becomes very hard to look at directly. The harm slips through, wrapped in a ribbon, and we carry it home grateful.
Gel nails file down the natural nail bed each time, leaving the nails so thin and brittle underneath that going bare is no longer an option. You need infills to make the last set worth it. Eyelash extensions work the same way. The longer you get them, the more your natural lashes thin and snap underneath, until the face you started with is quietly gone. Bleach strips hair of moisture and protein, and as someone who has recently tried to go platinum, I am familiar with the particular grief of watching hair break off in the shower.
There is a cruel pattern in which the treatment erodes the very thing it was supposed to enhance. You come in with a curious hunger, only to leave desperately famished. In any other context, something that damaged the body and created dependency would not be described as a reward. We would call it what it is. An addiction.
This notion is further expanded on by the Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon. In Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon argued that colonialism does not just occupy land, it occupies the self. To exist in the wrong kind of body is not just aesthetically undesirable. It is, under this logic, a failure of identity. The preference for fair skin across countries once occupied by European nations, the straightening of naturally curly or coily hair, and the removal of body hair that grows thick and dark were cultivated under colonial rule. The women who kept me out of the sun were not being cruel. They were passing down a harm so old, so thoroughly normalised, that it had become indistinguishable from love. And that is Fanon's most devastating insight. When harm is sufficiently embedded in culture, those who carry it become its most devoted enforcers, not out of malice, but because the harm has long since been made invisible.
