It's not a Pink Tax, It's an Arms Race

A money and soul audit of the true cost of "Unrealistic Beauty Standards"

This is Part One of a two-part series. Part Two will be on the Blue Tax.

A year ago, I spent just over $11,000 and 145 hours between Lashes, Nails, Facials, and Dermal Injections¹. 

Not including Haircuts and annual highlights.

Not including red light treatment and cryotherapy - to reverse aging, tighten skin, and (allegedly) lose weight.

And, of course, not including make-up or skincare products. Don’t make me laugh. Or cry.

$11,000 annually, $916 monthly, about 3 hours per week, on just four things.

$11,000 that could have gone into a retirement account and been about $50,000 upon withdrawal, paid for four week-long surfing trips in Nicaragua, or paid all tuition and fees for a Private Pilot's license—with the time invested, I could have qualified for the minimum hours flown several times over. 

The three hours per week was even worse.

If I kept up this level of maintenance over a lifetime, I would spend 10,000 hours, the ones Malcolm Gladwell asserted were “the key to achieving true expertise in any skill” - playing the violin, writing poetry, acquiring knowledge in a field of science - just attempting to be incrementally more beautiful - even as aging set me up for worse and worse outcomes to reward my inputs. 

How many women have lived and died with equal talent to luminary greats, with so much of their effort and energy gone unrealized because it went into this gaping maw of being beautiful? 

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Being laid off prompted me to do this calculation. An audit was obviously necessary as I figured out my financial runway.

At the time, I lived in Los Angeles, which made all this maintenance completely normal for those around me. I was maybe even below the median of the girls I knew in the city—or the ones I knew in New York—I didn’t get any cosmetic surgeries done, for example.

If someone had suggested to me back then that my hobby was “being beautiful,” I would be hard-pressed to win any counter-argument. What else do you call something you spend so much time and money on?

I would have argued it was required maintenance and upkeep, similar to what you need to do to keep a house in good working condition, particularly when that house is one that you’re putting on the market.

It didn’t matter that by this point, I was fed up with driving thirty minutes to the facialist.

I was fed up with laying down for two, often more, hours while someone fussed with each individual lash to make it as full and as long as possible.

All this seemed like a normal everyday cost of being a woman.

Maintenance expectations would build slowly and then all at once. The first glimpse of the transformation would be addicting. “Look how much my eyes pop!” “Look how clear my skin looks!” Then, slowly, over time, it would become a chore to stay at that baseline. 

When I looked around, I was reassured this was normal. All my girlfriends had similar maintenance routines, some slightly more and some slightly less, but the standard deviation between us was always negligible.

None of us worked in professional careers that strictly required keeping up appearances - we worked in finance, consulting, medicine, accounting, big tech, big law, advertising, e-commerce start-ups…all the typical respected corporate big-city jobs. But we all did some variation of this level of upkeep.

Significant time and money that could have gone into falling in love with hobbies, reading, writing, learning, meeting new people, walking dogs, and meeting ourselves—into this bottomless void of being beautiful.

Step one was always to diagnose what was deviating from the ideal (our nose, lips, eyes, legs). What was stopping us from achieving our best aesthetic potential?

Step two was to research all the potential ways to fix, enhance, minimize, or conceal this problem.

Step three was to make that appointment. Buy that tool. Hand over the credit card.

Step four was to find the next thing that was wrong.

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The tragic part is that I don’t think it was irrational. I think it made perfect sense - we were all optimizing and positioning for the best chances of finding love and success within an uncaring system. 

Was it for ourselves? For romantic partners? For our friends, our coworkers, and our general sense of value? Probably all of the above.

Beauty has always been a currency, and it’s always had a mysterious aura of being bestowed by luck or the Gods. But now it has its own proxy stock market in the form of Dating Apps and social media—an approximate value-keeping system aggregating the thoughts and opinions of others.

Of course, Beauty is not a 1:1 exchange rate for Love and Connection. It’s, at best, a Slug, a counterfeit coin that can illegally make purchases if it can passed off as its more valuable look-alike.

Naturally, Slugs deceive best in non-human environments, such as parking meters and vending machines. The rise of non-human environments—and the amount of time humans spend in them—is perfect for this deception. It’s why social media fails to capture social and relational value accurately and instead just manages to track a counterfeit indicator.

The tragic comedy is that connection is created by vulnerability. Trying to come across as this perfect avatar of an off-the-shelf partner makes genuine connection and affection in friendships and romantic relationships much more unlikely, even as more time, effort, and money are invested. In Sales terms, focusing too much attention on physical appearance increases top-of-funnel leads while harming the actual value proposition. 

As I became increasingly burnt out and resentful of maintaining this physical appearance of myself, I only became more empty. I didn’t have maniac pixie dream girl energy, or that “it girl” spark or Joie de Vivre; the joy I sometimes felt bubbling up unsummoned was just snuffed out at the source as I became more anxious over my appearance.

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An Arms Race is an escalating competitive acquisition of capability in order to achieve superiority.

Like societies going from arrows to nuclear, our beauty standards have gone from…probably blush made out of berries? child-birthing hips to suggest to potential mates you won’t die?…to AI-generated girls.

Recent search results for “long bob haircut”

The beauty standards are now so high that not even gifted genetics and invasive cosmetic surgeries can compete.

But when designing a video game, it can’t be impossible to win, or people will get frustrated, defeated, and quit.

It’s one thing if the beauty standard seems just a procedure or two away, but if it’s impossible, what is the point of playing anymore? 

As of today, I’ve forsaken all over and above beauty routines, but I still maintain hair and makeup; I still feel the pressure all around me; it’s the water I swim in - it’s just now tempered by the understanding of the time and money it will take from other things I love that fill my cup.

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I didn’t learn this until recently, but The Matrix was created by two trans women who weren’t yet publicly out. When Neo is offered a choice between the red and the blue pill, it’s a choice between embracing the truth that he is living in a simulation or continuing in ignorance.

This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill - the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill - you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.

But for the writers, it was the choice to embrace the truth of who they were at a level deeper than their physical presentation - or to continue maintaining the correct physical avatar for an uncaring system.

Will you choose the red pill or the blue pill? Will you follow the script you’ve been handed, or write the one you were born to create?

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1. Botox for slimmer jaw, dermal filler for undereye