Ellen Atlanta knows beauty: the guts of a surgery treatment room, the gossip and secrets held in a nail salon, the chaos of It-girl table service at a club, the neurosis and self-doubt when you’re looking in the mirror and, despite hours of meticulous ritual, feel like you’ve done not quite enough. And she knows how to deftly navigate the questions of self-worth and cultural crisis beauty brings up – having done so to great effect in her newly launched collective memoir, Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women – out now in bookstores around the UK. 

Pixel Flesh opens with a personal, in-your-face confessional of the cost of beauty and rolls out like a palace made of friendships, surgeries, salons and insecurities. Atlanta brings you into the proverbial girl’s bathroom of the world, the consultation table at every surgeon’s office, the poolside cabana in which friends, both well-known and not, discuss the struggles they confront about their looks and self-worth. It’s like a long talk at a sleepover, weaving in Love Island and lip filler, Foucault and eating disorders. Beauty, in her hands, is taken seriously as the life shaping cultural language we all experience.

I met Atlanta years before she began writing this beauty book when I was early into writing my own. I’d been in town to profile her boss, and we’d hit it off. We talked for hours about beauty’s possibility over fried chicken as people clambered around us. Now, years later, the world can know her for her unique point of view: one of empathy and incisiveness in equal measure. I sat down with her on Zoom a few days before her launch to talk about beauty culture, the collective harms it can impose, and how there is resistance through community care.

The opening chapter is very much, ‘Let’s get into my very guts and go from there.’

Ellen Atlanta: It wasn’t meant to be like that. Originally, I was going to try to be like Joan Didion in my reporting style – ‘I’m going to be a wolf.’ I’m going to observe, I’m going to write about women and girls. And that just felt increasingly more dishonest the more I was doing it. I felt like I was avoiding something. And these women, they would just give me everything, they gave me things they’d never told anyone else before. So, I sat down and wrote a list of what I was scared to talk about. It felt like a necessary sacrifice – without doing that, I wasn’t practicing what I was preaching. But it’s a lot to say – ‘I think about my face a lot.’ Why does saying that feel embarrassing?

It’s like saying water’s wet. I don’t understand when people don’t have vanity. How does one circumnavigate this huge landscape? A lot of the time it’s like, oh, it’s because they’re white, wealthy men. 

Ellen Atlanta: What must that be like, to not have anxiety? A lot of times, people would dismiss the topic [of beauty] when I brought it up because they don’t wear make-up, or they weren’t going to get filler. ‘I don’t really want surgery, so it’s not really relevant to me.’ And then we’d still end up in conversations until four in the morning and everyone’s crying. When we talk about beauty you’re thinking about your relationship with your mother, food, diet, exercise, pregnancy, relationships, sex, pleasure. All these things are intertwined with beauty. It’s something we both work on. Beauty being [thought of as] trivial and frivolous and an unimportant domain – it’s so frustrating to me.

Some of the responses I got were like, ‘Oh, it’s a Kylie Jenner beauty book.’ And – no. It’s a book about politics, art history, colonialism. All the things, and beauty, are all the exoskeleton of my life. And so many other women’s lives, whether we want to admit it or not. To refuse to admit it feeds into a belief system that it’s an unimportant pursuit.

Getting into these spaces, these stories in the book – it can be hard to reconcile being a writer accruing stories and being an empathetic human witnessing an intimate confessional. What I admire about this book is how obvious it is that the people you write about are people you genuinely care about and love. They’re not just sources to you – they are your best friends. They are people you know and that comes with knowing their ugliest parts. As a writer, sometimes you notice things they may not want people to notice about them. There is this responsibility – I want to be a good friend, but I need to be an honest writer. How did you navigate dealing with that, knowing people you care about who are in this book will see it?

Ellen Atlanta: I’m glad you asked that – nobody else has talked about this with me. I originally pitched this as a collective memoir. Melissa Febos’ Body Work is a favourite book of mine, and she says that people can only consent to you writing about a version of themselves that they can perceive. They can’t possibly understand how you’re perceiving them, or you are perceiving their actions. The weight and responsibility of writing about real people is terrifying. I wanted to respect the candour, honesty, and trust that they gave me. And I was shocked at how honest people were willing to be.

And at the same time, I knew I didn’t want to write a book that went, ‘You do you, babe. It’s all good.’ I knew that wasn’t going to be my conclusion. And the more people I spoke to, the more I knew going, ‘you do you’, wasn’t an actual solution. I wanted to find the balance between empathy and criticism. That is the point of the book – to look ugliness in the face and confront it. And to let people know, you’re not on your own and feeling these ugly things. It might feel icky, but at least we’ve created a safe space to do so. 

When did you know you had to write this book? What moved you from working in beauty to writing about it?

Ellen Atlanta: I left my job working at a beauty tech platform because it felt like almost overnight, we went from talking about the beauty industry in general to Botox, filler, face injections. [In the beginning, we] were using nail salons to bring women together to talk about different things. I always experienced beauty very much through community. Suddenly, I felt like I was in marketing. I felt myself slipping into this kind of choice, neo-liberal feminism. And I couldn’t reconcile it. I started writing questions down. And I realised no one had updated The Beauty Myth in ages, and that there was no cohesive reference point for this generation.

I have my own version of that list you wrote. I remember the day I wrote mine. It’s special we get to have these moments. Now that you’ve written this book, gone through its journey to come to terms with the price of beauty we all pay for and cannot escape from – you’re on promo tour, promoting it in beauty media, and you’re going to continue working in the space for some time. How have you reconciled that?

Ellen Atlanta: This is the big question, isn’t it? I really struggle with complicity and what it will mean for me going forward. There’s been times I’ve been like, ‘I should just be invisible.’ I didn’t know what to do – I can’t turn off the world and how it responds to the way I look. I know how I present myself contributed to my book deal in the first place. It will contribute to how well my book sells, the press that I do – if they put me in photoshoots and TV, or if they don’t. I struggle with it. And my immediate response is to glam it up.

But I end this book with the idea of collective responsibility – just try to do one less thing. I was very much speaking to myself. Everyone has their own line in the sand, and I have my own. Everyone has the ability to be brutally honest with themselves. As much as I want to approach these things with empathy, I also don’t want to use empathy as a crutch. The last journalist I spoke to thought I was too hard on myself. I don’t think I am. People who look like me, very fair-skinned, blonde-haired, blue-eyed – we have more responsibility to face that, confront that, and do things that are harder. I understand that it is difficult. It makes me embarrassed to even say I find it difficult to not wear make-up.

The difficulty is the point. If it feels difficult, it’s because there is resistance to something – and we have to talk about that difficulty. A lot of conversations about self-care are about finding a frictionless point of positivity – just love yourself, and all other things will be solved. And that’s simply not true.

Ellent Atlanta: Saying, ‘oh well, I want to feel good and that’s all that matters,’ is a cop-out. Everytime I struggle with [challenging myself around beauty culture], I think about the eight-year-old girls I talked to who said they feel like they can’t go outside anymore because they don’t feel pretty enough. It reminds me, this is why we’re doing this. I went into that session [with them] with a full-beat glam and at the end they wanted tips on how to replicate it. It was incredibly confronting.

Empowerment discourse is a filter. It feels like concealment. It’s a way to be like, ‘I don’t want to talk about this anymore, we don’t need to go any deeper.’ Another interviewer expected me to be cured after this book – that I did all this work, and that I’d be fine. But no. The deeper you go, the more paradoxical it gets. We have to get used to tension and get comfortable with tension, to be empathetic, while holding yourself accountable. To not slip into individualism, to just focus on self-care as empowerment. Like, ‘that’s it! That’s feminism!’ But self-care [historically] was always tied to community care. You look after yourself so you can look after others – resting so you can be part of the revolution, part of the fight. It was not supposed to be a reason to not get involved.

Pixel Flesh: How Toxic Beauty Culture Harms Women by Ellen Atlanta is out now