“Beauty is pain.” It’s a phrase that can be traced back to at least 1800s France (Il faut souffrir pour être belle), and has been passed down through generations of women to justify the physical suffering that comes with maintaining relentless beauty standards. But recently, the inverse mantra has entered the spotlight: pain is beauty.
From Charli xcx’s car-crash music visuals and Chappell Roan’s bruised skater look to Natasha Zinko’s bashed and bruised runway models, it seems that pain has become a trend in the beauty world. While hurt and violence have long served as reference points for art – heartbreak has been a muse for countless ballads, while war as a subject for literature and film is as old as the mediums themselves – a growing appetite for brutal aesthetics has now permeated the beauty landscape. And while looking sickly has, at various times over the centuries, influenced trends, these looks have taken a more gory approach. La Maskarade’s models sport fake scars punctured with piercings, Avavav models’ bleed out of their bandages and Chopova girls’ flaunt gloomy glittery black eyes.
For a generation raised online with little supervision, it’s no surprise that we’re drawn to the darker side of the human experience. From bouncing between Omegle video calls and Kik group chats as tweens to now living under tighter internet restrictions, censorship has only amplified our curiosity towards pain. The allure of the taboo and the instinct to explore the unknown has drawn us toward grittier visuals. “Everyone likes what they can’t have,” says Porsche Poon, the make-up artist behind various pain-influenced looks including Charli xcx’s bloody Von Dutch video. “Having a scar and dirty, bloody make-up and still looking hot isn’t something we see in everyday make-up.” Beyond make-up, pain aesthetics have found their way into even more permanent outlets, with tattoos of skin-deep scars and purple bruises emerging from Korea.
This attraction to visceral imagery is further fueled by a collective boredom with the state of current cultural aesthetics driven by the sheer oversaturation of content we have access to. “We all want to feel something,” SFX artist Tilda Mace explains. ”We’re in a world where the impact of people’s behaviour is so numbed out because we’ve seen so much.” Mace says that many artists are expressing pain in their work as audiences are increasingly reactive to emotionally-charged art. Cinematic representations of pain also add to the cultural allure of these aesthetics. Poon shares that films like Fight Club frequently inspire clients to request bloody looks. Similarly, the influence of David Cronenberg’s Crash – the provocative 1996 film that explores the fetishisation of serious injuries – has inspired both the eponymous SS24 Mowalola show and Charli xcx’s 2022 album visuals.
The exploration of brutal beauty aesthetics represents an ultimate evolution of ugly beauty – the unsettling beauty style that arose from a collective fatigue with pristine ideals. “I think creating discomfort within a look brings us opportunities to step over that line of normality and comfort, wandering into new territory where we test how others react,” says Mace. Known for her playful approach to prosthetics and gore, she views this as part of a broader shift in beauty culture toward more visceral, reaction-provoking designs. ”We are artists creating in a society where all typical beauty trends are being subverted, and we are testing the boundaries of what we can bring to the table artistically.”
Yet, moving beyond the unsettling to the extreme has left many feeling justifiably uneasy. While responding to violence and pain through art is natural – take Francisco Goya’s haunting wartime scenes or much of Frida Kahlo’s work – there’s an inherent responsibility in how pain is represented, particularly when abstracted for aesthetics. Without context, these stylised depictions of bruises, cuts and scars can seem empty, with any subtext erased by the brevity of our online interactions.
This issue is intensified by what photographer Alice Zoo refers to in her Substack as “the collapsing of contexts that happens on Instagram,” which feels particularly charged at a time when visuals of real violence and injury in places like Gaza and Ukraine sit alongside “pictures from brands, colleagues posting career achievements, friends’ holiday pictures, celebrities, whatever.” In this instance, staged violence and real human tragedy collide, creating a jarring clash. As art writer Jennifer Good explains, “There is no vacuum in which images have ever come to us, or could ever come to us, in pure isolation,” noting that even traditional media once placed lifestyle ads next to war photography. Yet the rapid blending of these images on social media risks distorting our ability to discern real suffering from curated violence, reducing it to an aesthetic that can be consumed without deeper reflection.
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag discusses how constant exposure to suffering, whether real or staged, distances viewers from the true pain behind the image. Jennifer Good calls this ‘compassion fatigue’, explaining, “When most of us encounter streams of horrifying imagery, if we eventually feel the need to look away, it will not be because we have been desensitised. It will be precisely the opposite; that we are too sensitised.” By reducing injuries to surface-level beauty, the audience becomes shielded from the deeper trauma these images represent.
Runway shows, too, present pain as spectacle. Often platforms for storytelling, they are frequently misunderstood when taken at face value. Such was the case with the SS24 Mowalola show Crash, where models walked the runway with stitched scars, bruises and surgical nose tape. The show received backlash from domestic abuse charities like Refuge and Women’s Aid for glamorising violence. Mowalola addressed the controversy herself, tweeting: “We run from pain but we need pain to survive.” Her collection, she said, wasn’t about glorifying violence – it was about human resilience.
There’s a fine line between exploring pain and commodifying it. While not every bruise or scar stems from violence – think hickeys or eyebrow piercings – these stylised visuals can inadvertently romanticise abuse. As Sontag cautions, repeated exposure to suffering risks desensitising us to real human pain, overshadowing the necessary conversations about trauma and healing.
