Tag: natural beauty

Natural Beauty is a novel about the luxury beauty industry, being an outsider, and what it means to make something beautiful. The protagonist was a promising piano player, studying at the Conservatory to the delight of her parents who fled China during the Cultural Revolution, until an accident left them in a medical facility and her unable to play. When she is offered a job at Holistik, a beauty company that offers cutting-edge treatments for a high price, it is an opportunity not only to pay her parents’ medical bills, but to gain access to the world she couldn’t join through piano playing. As she becomes entranced by a new friend and her body starts to change thanks to Holistik’s products, she starts to realise that there’s a price being paid for what Holistik and its sister companies are doing.

This book is a combination of body horror and literary fiction with dystopian thriller elements, using this to explore the wellness and beauty industry as a concept, ideas of perfection in beauty and art, and personal experiences of immigration and race. It’s both satirical and not, as good body horror often is, and there’s a lot of little details that aren’t as explored as the main narrative, but are fascinating too (like the owner of the company also making money from a body modification business because alongside the ‘culture’ of beauty and wellness there’s always a ‘counter-culture’).

The unnamed protagonist tumbles down the rabbit hole whilst the reader is faced with knowing it isn’t going to go well, seeing the warning signs she misses. Her story highlights how the beauty industry often preys on people who need solutions to other problems in their lives, but also how when someone is desperate it is easy to not see things that don’t seem quite right. The parts of the book in which she’s thinking about music and the need for dissonance and harshness were some of my favourite parts, and beyond the obvious parallel with beauty, it also shines a light on ideas of who plays music and what they should look and seem like.

Natural Beauty is a gripping descent into a dystopian world of body horror. You can really picture it being adapted into a film that would sit well alongside a lot of recent films, not just in terms of the concept but in the fluid, hazy way it unfolds.