Sofia spent two hours working on her face this morning. The 17-year-old’s routine: first, distributing a hydrating serum with a dropper, then the Vitamin C serum, two skin creams, and sunscreen.

Using a sponge, the high school student works makeup into her skin; concealer goes around the eyes and the sides of the nose; she traces along her hairline and cheekbones with a brownish contour stick, places blush in two shades above her cheeks, and then sets everything with powder.

She brushes her eyebrows into shape with gel and fills them in, draws lines with two eyeliners, applies several coats of mascara, and adds accents with a highlighter. With a red pencil, she accentuates the outline of her lips, and finally spreads on a lip mask.

"And finally, the setting spray, that’s important,” says Sofia, closing her eyes, holding her breath, and spraying a mist onto her face. "Done.” 20 products, seven brushes.

Only when she works hard on herself and looks perfect does she feel armed for the day. Before school, she often wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to make this happen. "A full face of makeup like this gives me security,” says Sofia.

The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 45/2025 (October 30th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.

Sofia, a teenager from a high-rise housing estate near Munich, is not alone; millions of people worldwide feel the same way. Young girls are fashioning their appearance like works of art. On social networks, they guide one another on how to bring out the "best versions” of themselves from within the confines of their childhood bedrooms. This is by no means just a mania affecting young women. While they have long been considered the group that places the most importance on looks—because they are most heavily reduced to them—Sofia represents a development affecting society as a whole.

Appearance plays a massive role in everyday life. People spend four hours a day attending to their looks, according to a study involving around 93,000 participants from 93 countries. This covers measures such as applying makeup, hair styling, personal hygiene, and exercise done for the sake of appearance. On average, women spent approximately 24 minutes more on their visuals than men.

It is, therefore, no wonder that the beauty and wellness industry has become as economically significant as the global oil and gas industry or the automotive industry. The difference is that the beauty industry is expected to see more growth in the coming decade than the auto industry. The management consultancy McKinsey values the beauty market (excluding wellness) at $580 billion and forecasts six percent growth by 2027.

Never have Germans spent as much money on cosmetics as they do today. And they are happy to get a little medical help, too. Although aesthetic procedures are more expensive in Germany than in places like Turkey due to medical standards, Germany still ranks among the top in Europe. Breast surgeries, Botox, upper eyelid lifts, and filler treatments are "the Germans’ favorites,” writes the German Society for Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery in its annual statistics. Globally, the number of aesthetic procedures performed by plastic surgeons has risen by over 40 percent in the last four years.

At the same time—and this is the flip side of the beauty hype—many people suffer because of their appearance. "I see so many pictures of myself, and I always notice something different that I hate about myself,” says model Stefanie Giesinger. Although the 29-year-old won the ninth season of Germany’s Next Topmodel in 2014—arguably the most striking evidence of her beauty—she struggles with her body and face. Like so many others.

Model Stefanie Giesinger.

Foto: Claudio Lavenia / Getty Images

While some people undergo surgery or injections as a matter of course, others still stand before it in amazement. But even they cannot have failed to notice: Beauty has never played such a huge role. Where does this exaggerated focus on our exterior come from?

The Booming Business of Beauty

Sofia sits at her vanity table, a mirror lit from all sides like in a hair salon. In boxes and drawers, she keeps countless pencils and dispensers, jars and tubes. While getting ready, she has recorded a video for TikTok. More than 400,000 accounts follow @iamsofiastark, the majority of them young women. Sometimes she gets recognized while shopping, Sofia says; almost always, it is girls between 11 and 14 years old.

On TikTok, the 90-second "Get Ready With Me” video was played more than 1.6 million times. In it, Sofia seems like a normal girl getting ready for school with a bit too much makeup, chatting away. Her beauty routine looks casual, as if it were done as quickly as packing her schoolbag. She makes herself beautiful for others, but in the video, it seems as if she is doing it for herself.

TikTok influencer Sofia.

Foto: Lisa Hörterer / DER SPIEGEL

For Sofia, beauty work is a hobby, but also a lucrative business. "In good months, I earn more than my parents combined,” she says. Cosmetic companies send her creams and eyeshadows unprompted and then book collaborations with her; she receives between 2,000 and 7,000 euros gross per video. "I invest the money back into other things,” says Sofia. By that, she means the gym, clothes, lashes, nails. Her hair alone costs her 500 euros every two months; she travels to a hairdresser in Munich for it, she explains.

What do her parents say? They don’t have TikTok or Instagram on their phones, Sofia says. "They are proud of me because I earn money, but they can’t really understand what I’m doing.”

The question is not as banal as it first sounds: What exactly is Sofia doing?

The Privilege of Beauty

The manufacturing of beauty—a diligent task—today is called "aesthetic labor.” The term clarifies that beauty is a commodity that must be produced, one that holds value as capital. Even if not everyone makes money directly from it.

The psychological phenomenon "Pretty Privilege” describes how beautiful faces lead to a kind of cognitive bias. Better character traits are attributed to these people; they get better jobs, earn more money, score better in oral exams, and are even treated more favorably in court.

That is why we go to the hairdresser, trim our beards, pluck our eyebrows. We need none of this to survive. But to live? Very much so. The catch is: A visit to the barber and a spritz of perfume are no longer sufficient for this beauty work. The visual pressure has long since become immense. Looking young, thin, smooth, and sexy has become a mantra that almost no one can escape. How did this happen?

We don’t just want to make ourselves beautiful, we have to, says British philosopher Heather Widdows. Beauty norms are currently more dominant than ever due to the barrage of images. She refers to the globalized world and the countless images we confront daily on social media, TV, and billboards. The fact that certain beauty ideals are taking hold so massively is due to their worldwide homogenization and distribution, Widdows explains in her book Perfect Me. Never before have we seen so many images of beautiful faces.

What is perfidious is that this development is curbing a hard-earned visual diversity. Years of preached self-love, mindfulness, and body positivity seem forgotten when it comes to "self-renovation.”

The interesting thing about it: Today’s ideal—the template for the aesthetic surgeon or the beautician—is a global average, a mélange of all ethnic groups, according to Widdows. Voluminous lips, thick hair and full beards, high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes with a double lid crease and long lashes, large breasts or pectorals—hardly anyone is blessed with all of this. Conversely, this means: No ethnic group is good enough without help; everyone must be altered or supplemented to match this ideal, which does not actually exist in reality.

Focus on the Face

Gülcan Demir clutches the small Louis Vuitton bag in her lap. She is sitting in a treatment chair in Düsseldorf to have her nose and lips injected. The 30-year-old is not here for the first time; just four months ago, 0.7 milliliters of hyaluronic acid went into her lips to make them look fuller. "Very beautiful, natural,” says doctor Henrik Heüveldop regarding his handiwork. But Demir, whose real name is different, finds the volume insufficient; she wants more. Heüveldop feigns empathy, adding: "I have 20 milliliters of hyaluronic acid in my own face. Chin, jaw, cheekbones, tear troughs—I’ve built up everything once.”

The doctor wants to know exactly what bothers Demir about her face.

Demir: "My nose. When I take a selfie with my right hand, there’s this dent, do you see that?”

Heüveldop: "You have a great, straight nose. You are naturally totally pretty. Less is always more there. Even with the lips, I don’t even know if we need to do them.”

Demir: "Yes. The upper lip especially.”

What Demir presumably doesn’t know: The front cameras of smartphones distort the face, especially the nose. The same applies to webcams. Countless people who look at themselves in camera images are dissatisfied with their reflection. This is another reason for the beauty boom: We look at our own faces via screens today more often than ever before.

A patient of Bettray’s: 45 minutes of pain.

Foto: Marvin Ruppert / DER SPIEGEL

While one used to be able to spend a day without looking at one’s own face for longer than a few seconds while washing hands in the bathroom, today we look at ourselves for minutes, sometimes hours. Since the coronavirus pandemic, conferences, meetings, and conversations take place via video chat, with one thing always present: your own face. Unflatteringly lit, distorted by cameras. Who hasn’t caught themselves thinking they could do without one wrinkle or another on their forehead? Or perhaps the bump on the bridge of their nose?

Heüveldop photographs his patient with his phone and opens the app Facetune, with which he can morph—model—her face. He alters Demir’s nose and chin on the screen as if painting a picture. As if he were an artist.

Heüveldop: "This is what it would look like if we lifted the nasal tip a little. A nuance, but it would make the overall image appear more harmonious. Personally, I find it unnecessary.”

Demir: "You say that every time.”

Demir books hyaluronic acid for the nasal tip, 450 euros, durability maximum two years; and another 0.6 milliliters of hyaluronic acid for the lips, 350 euros, durability nine to twelve months. She pays 100 euros extra to be treated by Heüveldop personally; after all, he is a known TV face. The doctor chats about his last vacation in Antalya while he injects Gülcan with so-called "Russian Lips” via 25 punctures. They are named like this because the look and technique come from Russia; the heart-shaped lips resemble Matryoshka dolls.

Gülcan Demir is sitting at Aesthetify, the beauty practice of those two doctors who call themselves "DR RICK & DR NICK” on television. They praise minimally invasive procedures as luxury goods. Female clients should feel as if they are doing something good for themselves here. Injections as self-care.

Doctors Bettray and Heüveldop.

Foto: Marvin Ruppert / DER SPIEGEL

Doctors Henrik Heüveldop and Dominik Bettray are so business-savvy that one gets the impression they studied marketing instead of medicine. They wear three-piece suits, Rolexes, rings. They smile obligingly and speak eloquently of pioneering roles, seriousness, expansion strategies.

In their practice: dark marble, lilies in tall vases, a coffee table book about Rihanna. Wrinkle-free assistants in stilettos serve caffè lattes at a bar. A woman checks in for an appointment; she has to show her ID because she looks so young. The next client is in her late 70s; she manages the stairs to the upper floor only slowly.

Heüveldop and Bettray met during medical school in Hungary, they say. Today they operate six practices for hyaluronic and Botox injections. In a documentary series on ProSieben television network, they praise their beauty work like a religion, posture as stars, drive Porsches, party, and hit the gym. Heüveldop tells DER SPIEGEL he is currently getting a pilot’s license. Particularly wealthy clients like to be flown to the practices.

Filler treatment.

Foto: Marvin Ruppert / DER SPIEGEL

44-year-old Anne Finck (name changed) took the train from East Frisia to Düsseldorf to have "the complete face overhauled” for 2,500 euros. For her, that means: Hyaluronic acid in the lips, in the chin for an optical elongation of the face, and under the eyes against that curve called the tear trough. As well as, once again, Botox in the forehead and between the eyebrows. "You have to keep repeating that, preventively, otherwise the muscles start working again, and we don’t want that,” says Dominik Bettray. It becomes 45 minutes full of pain; Finck’s eyes water, she curses, and then comforts herself with the words: "My grandma used to say: whoever wants to be beautiful must suffer.”

Whoever endures suffering for beauty is admired and rewarded—that is the promise that has spawned a billion-dollar industry since Grandma’s time. Pain, time, and money are simply the sacrifices one must make. Must one?

Search for Beauty

Perhaps one needs to take a step back at this point—to understand which flaws are to be eradicated, one must know which ideals are being aspired to and why. And where this desire to optimize oneself comes from. Because it has existed for as long as we humans have.

Creating certain looks almost always has to do with the desire to fit into a social group, says journalist Rabea Weihser. Visual markers promise recognition, wealth, happiness. In her book How We Became So Beautiful: A Biography of the Face, Weihser examined how aesthetic ideals have changed from antiquity to today, sometimes flipping into their opposites. Weihser’s specialty: the eyebrow. One learns from her how Queen Elizabeth I of England had her brows plucked and her hairline shaved for a look of holy detachment. That Bond actor Pierce Brosnan appeared particularly elegant thanks to his angular brows, and that model Cara Delevingne led the female world to cultivate their brow hairs into bushy beams.

An important catalyst for this constant change: technology. The first It-Girl was silent film beauty Clara Bow, after she starred in the film It. Bow was one of the most famous flappers—those cheeky young women in the 1920s who cut their hair into bobs, listened to jazz, drank alcohol, smoked, and of course: wore makeup. "Her look stood for a lifestyle of rebellion,” says Weihser.

Clara Bow shaped the ideal of heart-shaped lips due to a makeshift solution on the film set, according to Weihser. Normal oil-based makeup would have run under the hot spotlights, and red tones were depicted as black in film anyway. Therefore, a makeup artist named Max Factor primed her mouth white, stuck his fingers in black pomade, and pressed just two prints onto Bow’s lips. The legendary "Bee Stung” was invented—a mouth that looks swollen.

Silent film actress Clara Bow in "Wine."

Foto: Donaldson Collection / Getty Images

Silent cinema was followed by talkies, television; advertising gained importance, then came YouTube and TikTok. Every imaging technology changed our perception of beauty and triggered new fashions, says Weihser. Because: "Everything in the face expresses something, transports a message, is received consciously or unconsciously. Even if we don’t want it to.”

Our appearance communicates against our will?

Lars Penke teaches as a professor at the Georg-August-University Göttingen. The personality psychologist knows pretty much everything about human aesthetic preferences. He says our sense of beauty is significantly shaped by current trends as well as social and cultural factors. Sure: The bushy brows Weihser analyzed are only considered great for a certain period. Someone moving in a subculture with many tattoos and piercings will find exactly that particularly beautiful. Often it is also about status symbols: Tanned skin was long a sign that one could afford a vacation, meaning one had time and money.

And then there is the other essential part. "Our sense of beauty is also clearly biologically anchored through evolutionarily pre-shaped perception tendencies,” says Penke. As a species fixated on faces, humans make a first judgment about the attractiveness of a face after just about 300 milliseconds. Whether we find someone beautiful or not is decided in the blink of an eye.

Basically: Humans tend to prefer the average, not the exception. Tests have shown that the more images of faces are superimposed, the more beautiful we find the result.

And: Beauty can be calculated quite profanely. If proportions are close to the so-called Golden Ratio, they are considered attractive and aesthetic. The Golden Ratio divides a line into two parts so that the sections are in a ratio of 1:1.618. We find this harmonious—whether in paintings, architecture, or landscapes. And in faces, too, this ratio appeals to us, as shown by empirical aesthetics, which can measure a viewer’s pleasure based on brain activity.

According to this, a pretty face is one where the distance between the eyes in relation to the width of the face is 1:1.618. The same goes for the ratio of nose width to mouth width. The lower lip must be about one and a half times as high as the upper lip. Eyebrows are perceived as harmonious if they end in an imaginary extension of the corner of the mouth and the outer corner of the eye.

There are AI-based analysis tools that rate faces according to these standards. Such as the app "Face Rating AI,” which is approved in App Stores for children aged four and up. A British cosmetic surgeon once calculated which celebrities have the ideal facial features: Actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson reached 93 percent flawlessness. Model Bella Hadid and actresses Anya Taylor-Joy and Zendaya achieved similar scores.

Other features—full lips in women, a defined jawline in men—reflexively trigger pleasure because our perception links them to fertility, health, or strength, which are positively charged evolutionarily, says Penke, "quite independently of current partner search, desire for children, or sexual orientation.” If you ask people of different ages, genders, and cultural backgrounds to rank photos of faces by attractiveness, the result is always similar.

The human being is: unfortunately also an animal. Its prejudgment of fellow species members based on their appearance is genetically determined. As a political person, one doesn’t like to hear everything Penke says about human aesthetic preferences. After all, we know (and not just from blonde jokes) how discriminatory, racist, and marginalizing they can be.

But the pull toward conformity is significantly stronger.

Just a Craze?

Anna-Maria Ferchichi, wife of German rapper Bushido, resisted the genetic nature of one of her daughters early on. She had the school-aged child’s dark hair above the upper lip removed with laser technology, Ferchichi recounted in her podcast. Ferchichi—herself a beauty influencer, operated on her breasts, tightened at the stomach, injected in the face—received criticism online until the daughter defended herself publicly: "A lot of people said, you are a boy, you are a boy—even though they see that I am not a boy. I just have a little more hair,” the eleven-year-old said in an interview. "That has nothing to do with beauty mania, but much more with care,” Ferchichi added.

The advantage of meeting beauty standards and its positive effects are known in the English-speaking world as "Pretty Privilege.” Who wants to accuse a mother of wanting to protect her daughter from stigmatization? Of wishing her an easy life with "Pretty Privilege”?

Or is it something more, namely the first step into an optically optimized woman’s life, the beginning of an endless spiral of submitting to a "male gaze”?

This ambivalence runs through all facets of the beauty boom, especially for women: For some, beauty work is a form of empowerment and self-determination. They decide how they look. Who they are. And how they are perceived by others. Imagination knows no bounds.

For others, this work is a mania—and proof of coercion, submission, and brainwashing. For them, inner values count. Anyone striving for outer ones is considered superficial, misguided, obsessed.

Either way: Treatments like that of Ferchichi’s daughter ensure that the corridor of norms becomes narrower for everyone. This is evident, for example, in the nose. The uniformity of operated noses has increased enormously over the past 40 years, according to author Weihser. "The ideas of an aesthetically acceptable olfactory organ have significantly narrowed,” she writes, "there are simply too many Barbie snub noses walking around now.”

What does that do to all those who do not (yet) have one?

Philosopher Widdows argues that we repress the discomfort of not matching ideals by reinterpreting the deficit as self-competence: Today, everything is doable, everyone can model themselves, so spit on your hands (roll up your sleeves), let’s make ourselves beautiful. We see ourselves as agents, not victims. The ideal is not perceived as wrong; rather, the individual feels wrong.

It is probably not an understatement to say: Beauty work has become a substitute religion of capitalism that guides human action and promises meaning. Its imperative: You shall become more beautiful. Its promise of salvation: It will be worth it. You belong if you work on yourself. Those who do not are seen as failures, as having failed because they are not striving for a better self.

And the denomination naturally has its own prophets: influencers. The most impressive proof is reality star and entrepreneur Kim Kardashian, 45, net worth: 1.7 billion dollars. She became known with the family soap Keeping Up with the Kardashians, later as the wife and ex-wife of Kanye West. 354 million followers watch her Instagram content, where everything revolves around consumption. Kardashian has released a fashion line, a mobile game, cosmetic products, shapewear. One of her latest coups: a face strap made of compression fabric for 48 dollars, intended to tighten cheeks, neck, and chin overnight—a promise of beauty while you sleep. The utensil, actually used by doctors after surgery, sold out in no time.

The Kardashian family Khloé, Kim and Kris Jenner.

Foto: Star Max / GC Images / Getty Images

This works because Kim Kardashian is simultaneously considered "Patient Zero” of the world of body modifications. People come to plastic surgeons with her as a template, says artist and author Moshtari Hilal. In her book Hässlichkeit (Ugliness), she approaches beauty via its antipode. The book is biographically influenced. Hilal, 32, suffered greatly as a teenager due to the shape of her nose and felt marginalized multiple times as an Afghan immigrant. Her book clarifies how deeply viewing habits and ideas of ugliness play into our thinking about people.

Influencers like Kim Kardashian are heroines for many beauty disciples because nothing about them is natural, Hilal believes. "And if nothing is natural, everything is reproducible. One is almost invited to be a copy of her since she brings the matching products to the market.” Hilal is convinced: The torn state between joy and suffering in a world of limitless self-renovation is not a private matter—but a highly political, societal question.

Beauty is no longer dependent on genes, but on the size of the wallet. The booming industry has understood this—and incessantly invents new tools for optical optimization: Have you heard of LED face masks? Of salmon sperm injections? Radiofrequency microneedling? There is nothing that doesn’t exist to get closer to the Holy Grail.

Pressure from Social Media

Aesthetify doctors Heüveldop and Bettray explain their success by saying they grasped "the influencer game.” "We sat in our first practice in Oer-Erkenschwick and thought, let’s do this properly now,” the doctors told DER SPIEGEL. They state that they stream their treatments live on TikTok twice a day, film consultations, and show before-and-after photos: thin lips become plump, humped noses become straight.

That is prohibited, however. Hyaluronic acid treatment may not be advertised with before-and-after depictions, the Federal Court of Justice confirmed this summer. The Consumer Protection Agency of North Rhine-Westphalia had sued Aesthetify for an injunction due to a violation of the Law on Advertising for Health Care Products. The impetus came from a mother worried about minors. "Beauty via syringe is not a harmless trend but a medical intervention—and must not be marketed like a lifestyle product,” the consumer protectors found; people must be protected from manipulative advertising. The judges agreed with this argumentation.

This legal defeat is unlikely to worry the beauty docs much. The trial spread their names in the media, and follower numbers on TikTok are rising.

Do the doctors feel responsibility? Is it clear to them that they, too, increase the pressure to be beautiful? "The biggest factor is social media. The comparability established there,” Dominik Bettray dodges. "And the filters. Just turning on the camera on TikTok activates a built-in Facetune. That causes insecurity. Young women see images of supposedly perfect other women and ask themselves: Why can’t I look like that?”

He is right on at least that point: Those who frequently expose themselves to above-average attractive faces learn different standards. Researchers have called this the "Charlie’s Angels Effect” since the eighties. The name is based on an experiment: After men watched the series Charlie’s Angels—centering on three very attractive detectives—they judged their partners as less attractive.

"Charlie’s Angels" actresses Farrah Fawcett-Majors, Kate Jackson and Jaclyn Smith.

Foto: ABC Photo Archives / Walt Disney Television / Getty Images

Today, one would probably call it the Kardashian Effect, and naturally, it doesn’t just apply to women. Men, too, work on their six-packs, pump up jaw muscles with mouthpieces, go under the knife for pectoral implants, have hair transplanted in some places and lasered away in others. The view of oneself shifts when the comparison group changes. "Online, we are exposed to perpetual super-stimuli. It’s as if people only ate industrial sugar. The sense of taste would then be distorted,” says psychologist Lars Penke.

It is obvious: Eighties television is nothing compared to the reality shift that Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok are capable of provoking in us. It has long been impossible to recognize what is real.

For those who aren’t truly beautiful can at least virtually ensure a breathtaking overhaul with filters like "Bold Glamour.” Beauty filters soften skin texture in seconds and retouch wrinkles. They shape cat-eyes or doe-eyes at will. Lips are enlarged, noses narrowed, lashes lengthened and thickened, the face morphed into a heart shape. "Bold Glamour” alone is used in 287 million TikTok videos.

Kim Kardashian.

Foto: Stefanie Keenan / SKIMS / Getty Images

Through the constant consumption of tuned images and the general tendency—intensified since COVID-19—that people meet less frequently in person, the majority fixates on the above-average and devalues themselves in the same breath, psychologists found. The permanent upward comparison has a negative effect on one’s own body perception. People perceive themselves as ugly even though they have no conspicuous beauty flaws. Beauty doctor Tijion Esho called this phenomenon "Snapchat Dysmorphia,” noting that more and more clients try to adapt their bodies to their own filtered images.

The times when people worked against supposed flaws in secret, though, the era of fraud and false labeling, seem largely over. Some have emancipated themselves from the demand for naturalness, from the contradiction between artificiality and beauty. Today, hardly anyone claims that wrinkle-free skin comes solely from drinking water and sleeping.

The Prophets

At a certain age, you need vitamins, Botox, and collagen, supermodel Cindy Crawford said in an interview. Ex-footballer’s wife Simone Ballack raved about fish sperm injections last year. Pop star Robbie Williams spent "a small fortune” on fuller hair. Entrepreneur Claudia Obert filmed herself in a hospital bed after a facelift under general anesthesia. Musician Bill Kaulitz had himself botoxed in his reality show. Author Sophie Passmann described her trip to the lip filler doctor as strangely cathartic; moderator Riccardo Simonetti had his lip filler dissolved again.

Supposedly, body work is being destigmatized, but this also normalizes it. Tuned-up faces may bring advantages to individuals in a capitalist world. But every adaptation by an individual shifts the norm into the unrealistic and marginalizes what is defined as ugly.

An extreme example is musician Katja Krasavice, 29, who calls herself "Plastic Barbie.” Her brand core is provocation through exaggerated artificiality. The rapper looks like her own avatar, a walking Instagram filter. The first nose job at 18 was the most important moment in her life, Krasavice said in her podcast, "but actually I should have gone to a psychologist.” Krasavice now advises therapeutic counseling before procedures. She believes people "need someone who listens a bit and gives self-love,” and warns listeners: "Don’t think that you will finally love yourself after an operation. You might have a small nose then, but you will feel the same as before.”

Musician Katja Krasavice: "Don’t think that you will finally love yourself after an operation."

Foto: Kochan / Eventpress / picture alliance

Dividing Society

The TikToker Sofia believes she would prioritize her appearance even without social media, but the internet has amplified this interest. She feels that her appearance matters always and everywhere. Sometimes she feels envy, she says, "of girls who have to do less than me to be pretty. That is actually a real pity. I don’t want to be like that.”

Sofia was nine years old when she got her first smartphone. Her appearance hadn’t interested her until then, she says, but now she saw Reels on Instagram that were about nothing else. Shortly thereafter, her mother, a singer by profession, brought her a used makeup case from the opera house.

At ten years old, Sofia painted herself in rainbow colors, chattered in childlike English, and uploaded her first video to YouTube. Today, she searches hyper-attentively for every tiny flaw in her face.

Other girls in her circle were driven into anorexia by beauty pressure at 12 or 13, she says; they became depressed, ended up in clinics. Now, for many, their 18th birthday is approaching and with it, a new freedom. However, they are not saving for a driver’s license, not longing for wild parties. What the girls crave are their first procedures. "If I continue with social media, I definitely want to get my lips injected and have my face narrowed with Botox,” says Sofia. "Pretty sure liposuction too. I will always find something I want to have done, I’m sure of that.”

DER SPIEGEL journalist Padtberg together with Sofia.

Foto: Lisa Hörterer / DER SPIEGEL

Decorative cosmetics: Tools of the trade.

Foto: Lisa Hörterer / DER SPIEGEL

If the trend continues, people might have to budget monthly for body modifications starting at age 25 in the future just to look "normal.” Those who cannot afford it would stand out unpleasantly—and experience disadvantages up to exclusion. We are on the way to a two-tier society—here, those who can afford lifelong beauty work, anti-aging, liposuction. There, the others who do not have the means.

We cannot escape the power of beauty, but it is also a question of the wallet. Anyone who wants a just world must ask how much weight this commodity should occupy. A first step could be to explore for oneself whether what we find attractive is actually what is propagated worldwide as beautiful. And to become aware that both conforming and resisting are not just private decisions, but have effects on how free others are in their beauty actions.

When talking to Sofia about her "aesthetic labor,” she often says apologetically: "I know, I am superficial.” But she is not. She is a child of her time.

Next to the ring light for TikTok stands a music stand with the score of a romance by Beethoven. She has played the violin since she was four years old. She is learning Italian to better sing arias by Mozart. She has also squeezed a piano into her approximately twelve-square-meter room.

Sofia suspects that music can give her more than the shaping of her mortal shell. Nevertheless, she continues. "I know that the kind of beauty I am currently striving for makes me insecure at the same time. I know that beauty comes from within. When you accept yourself as you are.” She knows that.

But every morning at 5:30, the alarm clock rings.