In May 2016, Jeffrey Epstein emailed his urologist. “Harry,” he wrote, “I want to bank some sperm, where do I go?”

After filling out a number of forms, the California Cryobank laid out for him the terms of his sperm storage, specifying that if he died his sperm would fall under the control of his estate. Epstein, who’d been charged with the sexual trafficking of young girls, had long discussed his fascination with transhumanism, the use of technology to enhance the human condition, and (according to the New York Times) told scientists that he hoped to “seed the human race” with his DNA.

Apparently, he was quite open about his ambitions. At one dinner party, a guest heard Epstein’s goal was to have 20 women at a time impregnated at his home in New Mexico, having based his idea for a baby ranch on the Repository for Germinal Choice, an elitist sperm bank which opened in 1980 and was designed to be stocked with the sperm of Nobel laureates. The guest said Epstein’s dinner parties were populated with attractive, successful women – potential candidates, evidently, to carry his children.

Except, it’s now unclear where Epstein’s sperm has gone. The cryobank says they no longer have it, and none of his 40 or so beneficiaries are yet to receive any of Epstein’s money or possessions, which presumably includes the sperm. Could one of them have already used it to impregnate themselves? Could it have been donated to a sperm bank for use by strangers, who would never know their baby shared DNA with a notorious child sex offender? Will somebody soon look down at their toddling son and think, I’m sure I’ve seen that smile before? Where is Epstein’s sperm?

Sperm is beginning to take a new and increasingly important role in conversations about masculinity and health. The conversations sit on a spectrum. Approaching the mainstream is a new industry focused on “spermmaxxing”. You’ll be familiar with the maxxing concept by now, which focuses on improving a single characteristic, and now encompasses penis-maxxing (which requires “scrotox” and various weights), and ballmaxxing (injecting the scrotum with saline to make it bigger). Spermmaxxing is about keeping your sperm count high, an obsession led by tech millionaires and biohackers like Bryan Johnson, who claims to have “scrubbed” out all the “microplastics in my balls,” by doing things like sweating them out in saunas and getting rid of nonstick pans.

“I had 165 microplastic particles in my semen just 18 months ago,” Johnson told his followers online in May. “Now, I have zero.” At 48, he says his “fertility markers” are “elite for an early 20 something”. And while few men, presumably, are focusing on microplastic ball scrubbing with the same feverish gusto as Bryan, as fertility in the UK drops to record lows (with around 30% of fertility issues sitting purely with the man), and studies showing that average sperm counts among western men have more than halved in the past 40 years, more and more people are, for the first time, taking sperm seriously.

Companies selling organic pants to “reduce chemical exposure to your reproductive parts” have sprung up alongside vitamin brands that recommend “stacking” supplements, while influencers routinely advise men to abstain from ejaculation to improve sperm count. At one end of the spectrum, lasting taboos around male fertility seem to be fading. At the other, fertility is a distraction from the real prize of modern masculinity – beauty.

Clavicular is the looksmaxxing influencer who markets physical self improvement as an algorithmic problem to be solved using syringes, bone hammers and testosterone. He’s been taking testosterone supplements since he was 14 and says it’s given him a muscular physique, a square jaw and also, by the way, made him infertile. Testosterone replacement therapy (which is increasingly popular, and recommended by people like Joe Rogan and Robert F Kennedy Jr) is safe when prescribed by doctors, but one side effect is that you stop producing sperm. Another looksmaxxing influencer called Felix van der Heiden discovered as much when he took part in a Silicon Valley “sperm race”. “Everything’s dead,” he told the New York Times, having seen the results of his semen sample. “Just rotten inside.”

Clavicular, though, doesn’t seem to care. While the old taboos around male infertility are grounded in ideas of what it is to be a man, for his young army of looksmaxxing boys, being a man is not about attracting women or procreating, it’s exclusively about appearance as a marker of worth. Sacrificing sperm for the perfect jawline is a small price to pay. For them what matters is

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One of the side effects of last week’s heatwave was the rich dark smell of urine. There were other smells too – on a tube train travelling north, a young woman turned to me with wide terrified eyes as she was hit by the reek of our fellow travellers’ armpits, undried clothes and sweaty hair. I tried to silently placate her, a wry little oh dear smile to say, one thing the heat does is remind us we have a body. She kept her hand over her mouth all the way to Camden.

But the body persists – the reshuffling of body parts to enable a vest, the frantic application of cream to skin you’d forgotten about since September. Even now, at dusk the pavements are still vibrating with the hot weekend’s desperate pee, the result of people out in the sun with only a handful of public toilets between them. It’s coincidence that the heatwave came at the same time as a new code of practice from equalities watchdog the EHRC, insisting that single-sex toilets must exclude trans people. But that news provided, I think, a chilling mirror to how rightwing debate now distracts from what most people, people with bodies, both want and need.

The British Toilet Association reported that 40% of public toilets have closed since 2000, the buildings being converted into bars, cafés and florists. Last month, the Royal Society for Public Health explained how lack of local authorities funds has led to lavatory “deserts”, meaning older or disabled people, or women who are pregnant, might stay home rather than risk needing the toilet when shopping or walking in the park. Homeless people, who can’t afford to buy a coffee at Pret every time they need the loo, are especially impacted by this growing lack of public toilets. And, of course, all women have become accustomed to queuing in bathrooms designed shortsightedly, with the same number of cubicles as the men’s despite women’s needs being greater.

It’s into this awkward legs crossed crisis that the new EHRC document lands, setting out how public bodies and businesses should respond in practical terms to last year’s Supreme Court ruling that sex in the Equality Act refers only to biological sex. Trans women, it says, cannot use female toilets, and should instead be offered a “third” space. In practice this will lead not only to the humiliation and grief of trans women being pushed out of public life, but also to the harassment of any women who don’t present as feminine enough when using ladies loos, and the employees of these places being expected to act as vigilant gender police. And, insisting that trans people use the already dwindling number of “third space” accessible toilets will inevitably impact the disabled people who rely on them. It’s all, ironically, going to shit.

I’m writing this in the last of the unusual heat – at home with the window open the city smells of old beer and urine have been replaced by cut grass and barbecues, but the bodies with their sweats and bladders remain, lolling on the green outside, smoking in the shade. This week, the sun has affected my migraine pills, leaving me fainty, pained and a little mad, and news I may just have rolled my eyes at before has taken on a crazed and psychedelic sheen. Everything is revealed to be, actually, bonkers.

Like, when debates on “benefit cheats” run and run while in the background millions of vulnerable people struggle to access the benefits they’re entitled to, benefits that are, by the way, insufficient to live on. Or when uproar about an asylum seeker committing a sexual offence is used to argue against immigration, rather than to understand and minimise the society-wide issue of violence against women. Or when people are shamed for destroying the environment by using things like plastic straws, rather than legislating and forcing shame upon the businesses that make billions from single-use plastics. You know?

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Y​​ou reach an age when calling someone your “boyfriend” begins to feel icky, if not downright obscene. Mark and I got together in our early 20s – a friend introduced us at a pub, in a way that seemed possible then. We moved into a very tiny flat above a chicken shop, then a slightly larger one in the same block. The walls and floors were painted black – we learnt quite soon after moving in that the previous tenant had been a Satanist sex worker, award-winning too.

Friends moved into neighbouring flats. For a while it felt like a merry kind of commune – we’d bring drinks down to the shared garden, and dip in and out of each other’s kitchens for eggs. This was the flat where we fought and made up and repainted the walls and, 10 or so years later, had our first child. These were the things that happened, the architecture of a relationship within which our life together expanded. We bought a house and moved closer to our families in time to, at the beginning of lockdown, have a second child. Then, one day in spring, we woke up and realised it was our 20th anniversary. The trick to staying together, it turned out, was 20 years of every morning silently agreeing not to break up.

Films suggest that the real stuff of life happens before a person settles down, all the romance and adventures and growing and failing, leaving little room to imagine what on earth happens next. The doors are closed on the relationship, the focus blurs. The truth is, plenty happens beneath the warm duvet of domesticity. Love letters are hidden in text messages about the heating. Whole crises play out in looks thrown silently across a dinner table. Instead of moonlit conversations in Paris, after 20 years you discover new things about each other while stacking the dishwasher in pyjamas. The stakes remain as high as ever, higher if you count the children, but the field has flattened and shortened to the size, perhaps, of a suburban lawn.

The first time we discussed getting married, it didn’t happen because I didn’t want to. Marriage, I patiently explained, sat firmly at the intersection of patriarchy and capitalism. It was a threat to us all, both politically and personally – why institutionalise ourselves for no reason, why willingly buy into a tool of the state? And, as a heterosexual couple, wasn’t living in sin our final, sole, tiny act of rebellion? I didn’t want to be a “wife”: reduced, demoted. “OK!” Mark replied and on we went. Our relationship continued, growing old enough eventually to have left home and had children of its own, and our shared roots burrowed deeper. I started writing a weekly column for The Observer and, as we entered our 40s, every time I described him as my “boyfriend” (babyish) or “partner” (aspirational lesbian), we would each slightly wince. One day I interviewed a queer historian who had written a book about marriage, which taught me how the institution has reshaped itself so much over the years that a wedding often means different things to different people – sometimes even those living in the same house. Halfway through the pandemic, our new baby working as a kind of clock, my thoughts on the thing started to change.

I didn’t realise they were changing until, in 2022, my sister got ill. She and her partner had been idly arranging to get married when a cancer diagnosis violently shattered their plans. On a brief break from hospital, they rushed to the local town hall – I watched their wedding via FaceTime. And what with all the love and pain, something in me softened – or maybe decayed. Twenty years after our first conversation about it, I started discussing marriage with Mark again. This time he was the one who was less keen. It wasn’t so much that I’d been particularly convincing with my original argument, more that he wondered… what was the point now? We had committed to each other 10 times over, did we really need to spend the money formalising it? Probably not, I agreed. But… maybe?

As we sat at a lunch counter on my somehow 45th birthday, the years rudely just having happened, one after another, we discussed what a wedding could look like. Would we need to remortgage the house for a party? No, that would be insane. Would we need to change our names? No, that would be an existential loss and weird performance. Would the kids and parents enjoy it? Oh God, yes. This was at the core of the thing, somehow: it felt as though, this many years into our relationship, a marriage would feel communal. It would signal some intention and security in a life that had drifted forward sporadically on waves of chaos, fertility and routine. And there would be cake.

On Christmas morning, Mark rolled over in bed, gave me two pearl rings in a little box and asked if I’d like to get married. Then the children came in, and then my friend (who used to live in the flat next door and who’d stayed the night) came in too, and then we all went downstairs and ate some toast. After all that time, all that thinking, it felt now worryingly simple.

As we start to plan a party (in the garden, and soon, to ensure all our family will be healthy and present) I still feel occasional little stabs of guilt or politics, but they’re tempered by the knowledge, gained in age, that when a chance to celebrate arises, it should be snatched. And that, as well as being a place of tradition, as we enter a period of distraction and various griefs, marriage is also a rare chance to look love straight in the eye and say “yes”.

Vogue

The dentist’s surgery, which sat, innocuous, on a quiet residential street, had been decorated in various shades of tooth. Even the noise was white. A screen above the desk showed a fairy-lit pool, fed by a dainty waterfall. The receptionists’ voices were gentle and sibilant, confirming appointments in tones so soft they sounded towelled. The effect, as I vibrated with anxiety, was one of almost violent hush.

A couple of years ago I fell over while out running and cracked four of my front teeth. Since then, something evil has been happening around the nerve of an upper cuspid without me knowing, something malevolent and fiendish and identifiable only through X-ray – an X-ray, incidentally, that my eyes initially understood as a sonogram and searched its shadows for a baby. My local dentist told me I’d need to be referred for root-canal surgery. He said it as if I was going to hit him. I did not hit him – I was dismayed, yes, but grateful to be one of the only people I know lucky enough to be registered with an NHS dentist. And while the prospect of a stranger digging around in the raw meat of my tooth was vexing, there was some small relief in knowing I wouldn’t have to pay £800 for that unpleasantness.

Something rotten has happened to dentistry in the UK. In 1990, spending on private dental care made up only 14% of the market, but in 2024 that had risen to 69%, with around a third of people relying on it. They’re relying on it because care, especially complex care like root canals, has become incredibly hard to access on the NHS. And that’s because NHS dentists frequently find themselves losing money on these complicated procedures, for which they’re awarded “points”, based on the band of treatment rather than on the time spent with patients. This means (reported the BBC) that someone who needs two crowns, root canal work and three filings “would generate the same number of points as someone needing just a single crown”. The British Dental Association described the NHS dentist contract as “ridiculous and discredited”, and in March the UK’s competition watchdog launched a review into the £8bn private dentistry market after the price of a consultation increased by nearly 25% over a two-year period. The BBC talked to dentists who said patients had been “lied to” and told they couldn’t be seen on the NHS in an “attempt to force them to go private”. Another said colleagues would “hard sell” private work and make NHS treatment look substandard.

My friend had a root canal the week before mine, and before her appointment was presented with a consent form that, on page two, crept beyond questions of oral health and towards questions about whether she might like whiter teeth and “younger skin”. She looked around. Since her last appointment there were new posters for laser hair removal and Botox. “I was there to get my sore tooth fixed,” she told me. “I wanted a health space, not a cosmetic salon, and conflating the two set off some insecurities. I realised also – it’s treated as a luxury to have healthy teeth.”

I climbed the stairs to surgery room four and lay down silently. The tray of instruments, all of them silver and ending in needlish points, was situated behind my head, so the first I saw of each utensil, each endodontic bur, each barbed broach, plugger or syringe, was when it was about to enter me. There were two injections then 45 minutes of extreme intimacy – at one point I believe I held three fists in my mouth. And while

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As I was the first person to have a baby, perhaps ever, aged 33 I entered motherhood in a state of blank, bewildered ignorance.

The Instagram algorithm was not yet developed to advertise me, for example, the special speaker designed to insert vaginally to play the foetus Mozart, or the radiation-proof blanket for use near power lines. Though the Daily Mail regularly marvelled at the bodies of celebrities who had “bounced back” after giving birth, (and gasped with disgust at those who hadn’t) there were no influencers reminding me whisperingly of the shame of weight gain and the importance of looking pretty for my husband. Tradwives were yet to truly penetrate the culture, insisting that it was possible, say, to have a baby at 9am, make sourdough at 1pm, and elect a president at 4pm. Nor had the wellness-to-conspiracy pipeline been professionally plumbed – I was not aware that I must avoid till receipts as the chemicals in the paper would sterilise me, and hardly anyone was warning me about the medicalisation of childbirth or its associated vaccines. My naivety was partly down to simpler times, and partly down to me being, perhaps, simple.

Still, little could have prepared me for the sheer mass, the unavoidable weight and pitch and energy of content that now envelops pregnant people, telling them what to eat, wear, fear, supplement, buy, read, and how and when, and on and on until it is almost as if they are being birthed themselves. The latest advice (the experts having exhausted pregnancy, birth and parenting) is related to the time before you conceive, a state previously thought of as being a “person”, but now described as “Trimester Zero”.

The idea is that women should be optimising their physical and mental health (or, chillingly, “prepare the vessel”) before planning a baby. One Instagram caption for a “gift guide for the woman desiring to conceive in 2026” explains “preconception” is a “season of depth: restoring blood, minerals, rhythm and internal safety” – it recommends purchasing organic skincare, a book called The Courage to be Disliked, and a course of fertility supplements (ad). There is much to buy elsewhere, too, including private scans and blood tests. Someone has made a pastel-toned chart urging women who want to conceive to ban LED lightbulbs and “secular music”. There is diet advice for women (sardines), their husbands (brazil nuts), and one woman insisting you can plan for a specific gender. Another post, advising those who are considering getting pregnant but anxious about giving birth, reassures them that “undisturbed” labour is “a naturally occurring psychedelic state”, the kind “people travel to the jungle to find”. And, “that’s why they drug it”.

It would make more sense perhaps if all this advice (particularly the stuff your GP will tell you, like “don’t smoke” and “take folic acid”) was pitched at those struggling with their fertility. I’m sure some trickles through, but the increase in those using IVF (with IVF births in the UK increasing from 8,700 in 2000 to over 20,000 three years later) is largely due to age, with more people trying for children later in life, and the Trimester Zero content is clearly aimed at young women. Women compelled by the algorithm to obediently, ritually optimise, to survey themselves intimately in order to control and refine their lives – their skin, bodies, relationships, careers and now, fertility.The Trimester Zero customer has come of age in a time that promises, if she strives relentlessly and drinks the right juices, that perfection is possible.

Perhaps I could have educated myself a little better before my abortions, births and miscarriages, but in the end, of course, those experiences were their own brutal education. It was the kind of education that ensures you leave with a certain level of empathy, and that you never attempt to impose your own experience on someone else, nor suggest there is a correct way to make a family. There’s plenty of decent stuff in the preconception market I’m sure, but what rings out most loudly for me is the way it profits from young women’s anxiety. Even if she eats the sardines, even if she bans blue light, she might still struggle to conceive, or have a baby born with congenital conditions. And not only will she be heartbroken but she might feel guilty too. Was the music she listened to not religious enough? Was her underwear ‘toxic’? Were her carbs too refined?

In an impromptu survey of parents asked what advice they would give to those planning to have kids, not one person I spoke to suggested they optimise their health by swapping out toxic dishwasher tablets, but one did say, with a misty sigh, “OK:

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In the new documentary Manhood, a doctor mournfully warns his patient, “I can fill your penis with filler, but I cannot fill the hole in your heart.” We are in, if not the golden age of penis extensions, then at least a gold-plated one, in which vulnerability is discussed as openly as girth.

Though the technology is improving, the big-dick market has always existed, alongside the desire. In the 16th century, the Topinama tribe of Brazil invited poisonous snakes to bite their penises in order to enlarge them. In the early 1950s, the first acrylic penile implants were created, then in the 60s and 70s inflatable silicone implants arrived, intended to treat erectile dysfunction. By the 2000s, penile-lengthening surgeries were becoming more common. Typically, a surgeon cuts their patient’s suspensory ligament that attaches the penis to the pubic bone, dropping the angle of the penis, and increasing it by up to 1.8cm when flaccid. Dermal-filler injections followed, and fat transplantation, and a variety of widely advertised devices, including weights that stretch the penis, and frames that clamp on tightly and claim to make it longer. By 2027, the penile-implants market is expected to reach $640.5m.

Manhood, directed by Daniel Lombroso, curves very slightly to the left. It opens with a quote from Kafka: “I was ashamed of myself when I realised life was a costume party and I attended with my real face” – the scene is set for a story of shame, alienation and inadequacy. There are also a lot of penises. In Bill Moore’s clinic, run out of a strip mall in Dallas, we see big penises, small penises, penises that have become deformed by permanent fillers, lumpen, angry penises that appear weary, withdrawn, misunderstood, penises with the attitude of an old man who has been waiting many hours for a bus. We see the penis, mid-injection, of one of the many law-enforcement officer clients of Moore, including, he says, a number of ICE agents. We see the penis of a patient having fillers because, he says, society associates small dicks with terrorists and criminals, and something to prove. We see the penis of a man who was recently diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, so decided to “make the most” of the time he has left, and live “authentically”. Through a series of injectables, costing around $12,000, he can expect to increase his girth by a quarter of an inch before he dies.

As the film unfolds, we meet a predatory doctor profiting from insecure men, turning their genitals into lumpen masses of humiliation and guilt. We learn how penis filler has the potential to be the next Viagra, shifting culture, making millions. We learn how male fragility is big business, and how our subjects have found a way to deal with life’s inevitable trauma and messiness by focusing on controlling a single body part that, unlike the rest of their life, appears, at least sometimes, solid.

I scribbled down questions as I watched. Would these men be less fixated on increasing the size of their penises if there was wider cultural representation of normal bodies, or if porn was less ubiquitous? Or what about if mainstream porn was more diverse – alongside Readers’ Wives, why no Readers’ Husbands, average-sized and proud? Does the desire for a large dick reflect how men view their roles in society? How does the growth of the penile-enhancement market correlate with a reported crisis of masculinity? Would Ruben, the working-class father of five whom we see spending his family’s last dollars on penis fillers, be less inclined to do so were he not listening to Joe Rogan in one earbud the entire time he’s talking to his wife – who, by the way, says she liked him just fine the way he was?

It becomes quite quickly clear that the penis, for all these men filmed obsessing over its size, is

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I have been thinking about fakery. My daughter doesn’t have a phone, so I said she could join her friends’ WhatsApp group on mine. Very quickly, I realised, these girls were able to ignore the fact it’s my name rather than hers, and that it’s my phone buzzing with all their gossip, that it’s me – a middle-aged lady with skin in the game – who will first see their secrets.

I enjoy occasionally responding to messages as her, both for the linguistic education and intimate opportunity to perform. It reminds me of the early days of the internet, huddled over a chatroom with a friend while we pretended to be busty, or 16, or French. From across the room my daughter will call, “Write ‘cute’, but with five ‘e’s on the end.” I’m getting good at it. Worryingly good. I’ll type “ru” instead of “are you” without being reminded, “ty” instead of “thank you,” etc, quickly adding eight “i”s to the word “ok” (“Nine! Nine ‘i’s please”), the boundaries between my voice and my daughter’s falling pleasantly away. When she writes, she’s pretending, too, of course, or learning how to become a teenager, or we’re all faking it forever, whatever.

For a long time, authenticity was held in the very highest regard. Online, a certain messinessand vulnerability prevailed, a reaction in part to millennial perfection. But as authenticity started to become an aesthetic in itself, its appeal curdled and power waned, and we’ve moved, I think, into a new era of fakery where little is real but… nobody really minds?

On social media we are sorted into different groups, each with its own vivid, working reality. Plastic surgery, while once taboo with its “fake tits” and fillers, has been normalised to the point of tedium. AI is writing personal essays on Substack, and by the way, people love them. Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts said in February. Trump (who once said “one of the greatest of all terms I’ve come up with is ‘fake’”) has helped distort political reality to the point that we now live with the sense that everything we’re shown is suspect, initially attempting to claw back truth, then collapsing en masse into a sort of beanbag of acceptance.

It was in this new world that TV star Collien Fernandes, half of one of Germany’s best-known media couples, discovered deepfake images of her distributed across the internet. In 2024, she made a documentary about AI deepfake porn to find the source of content attributed to her, and this March, in German news magazine Der Spiegel, pointed the finger at her now ex-husband Christian Ulmen. Fernandes called it “virtual rape”. Ulmen denies the allegations.

Viewers of deepfakes don’t need to believe it’s real for damage to be done. When I see the AI-manipulated face of a pretty brunette “artisan” in an ad saying, “Stop hiring humans”, I read it not as real, or fake, but as some slippery third thing that takes up residence in my consciousness. In a 2022 study, scientists discovered that not only do “AI-synthesised faces” appeal to us but we find them “more trustworthy”. A paragraph break here, to process the doom.

What the Fernandes case tells us is how engrained sexual humiliation is in our society and how fakery facilitates and exposes existing patriarchal structures that degrade women. It also reveals that people are pigs.

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“Bin men don’t like human waste,” the nurse warned my friend Chloe. We were talking as her double mastectomy approached, and I’d started to make notes, first as a way of remembering all the details, and then to share here, a sort of portrait of an operation, with all its complex decisions, relationships, pains and magical thinking. In the weeks post-surgery she’d have to empty her “drains” into bags and return them to the hospital, which Chloe was concerned about. “I can’t have them building up like cans of Fosters everywhere, you know? Even Tracey Emin didn’t have stoma bag entrails beside her bed.”

Chloe was in her 20s when she first got breast cancer. She’s had annual mammograms in the two decades since, in which time her life has changed significantly. She had two children, her marriage has dissolved, she’s lost both her parents, her career has expanded. When they told her they’d found cancer again, a different type but, madly, in exactly the same place, she felt oddly calm. The women doing the biopsy at the breast unit were funny and kind, which meant when she was referred to a different hospital to discuss next steps, she arrived fairly merry.

But the new doctor barely looked at her. He rolled his eyes when she asked questions, and said she’d need a double mastectomy within a month, which would largely remove the risk of breast cancer returning but also bring psychological consequences. Chloe told me, “I walked in thinking I had a tiny bit of cancer tissue that needed dealing with. Now I think I’m dying.” She asked a friend to promise she’d help raise her children when she was gone.

She decided to pay a private surgeon for a second opinion. When her second set of scans came in, he said he couldn’t find the tumour, that it was “so small” they “probably took it out in the biopsy.” He said a mastectomy was too extreme, and that he’d biopsy another area of tissueinstead. For Chloe, there was a sense she’d woken up from a nightmare. I kept getting her to repeat what the doctor said in case we’d missed something.

Cancer death rates in the UK are at their lowest level on record, down 29% from their peak in 1989. Still, around 150 women are diagnosed with breast cancer every day. I found it hard to keep Chloe’s diagnosis, and then the rescinding of that diagnosis, clear in my mind. I had the same problem when my sister got leukemia in 2022. As the information changed and I tried to recalibrate my optimism, a certain fogginess set in. Was everything fine? Was anything ever?

In January the surgeon told Chloe that her “risk of developing a third cancer would sit at between 25 and 30%,” and her mood, having fluctuated over the past month, now seemed to settle at a place of thoughtful dolour. “I thought, I don’t want to do all this again.” While the mastectomy proposed in a state of emergency had felt terrifying and impossible, now, with more information, time and autonomy, it seemed suddenly essential. A psychologist assessed her, stressing that it would impact her relationship with her body, and yesterday she had a double mastectomy and reconstructive surgery. She gets to keep her nipples.

I picked her up from the hospital this morning, and she told me (my mouth gaping) things like, the way they call the empty breast “the glove”, and how she’d forced herself to “look the drains in the eye” as soon as she woke up. For a long time now, “my breasts have been dangerous,” she said.

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You’re dying, OK? Imagine you’re dying. The journey to this point, to this elevated bed with its white sheet and blue blanket, this window past which parakeets flit, this empty pressure of a cannula in your hand, has been long, gleeful, sordid, odd. And you know, you can feel that the end is near. Where there was previously pain there is now the saccharine hush of morphine, which makes you float up, up from your body towards the ceiling, from which height you can see your brother hunched in a chair, and the untouched jug of tepid water, hang on, isn’t that… Isn’t that Academy Award winner and fourth-highest paid actress in the world Nicole Kidman? And, why is she stroking your arm?

I’ll tell you why (as you emerge now from your imagining, come back, you have time!) In 2024, after her mother died, Nicole Kidman started training as a death doula. Death doulas are non-medical professionals who support people emotionally, physically, spiritually and practically through the dying process: they talk, they sit, they give massages, they make tea, they work to help the passing go smoothly. Doulas (from ancient Greek, meaning “woman who serves”) have most commonly described someone who helps during birth. A person’s needs in birth and death are not so different.

Since the pandemic, when many people were suddenly burdened by the reality of death, more of us have become aware of a need to confront the end. In her exquisite book, Death of an Ordinary Man, author Sarah Perry describes the days leading to her father-in-law’s death, wonder ing at doctors’ insensitivity: “no other occupation entailed acts of service that sometimes resembled love, all carried out with such an extraordinary asymmetry of power.” Doulas are employed to cushion that relationship, to fill gaps in a fractured healthcare system. It’s a lovely thing that everybody should have the opportunity to utilise.

And soon, maybe they will. Doula organisations have had a 40% rise in sign-ups, which include not just Nicole Kidman, but also Hamnet director Chloé Zhao, who found herself considering her fear of death while adapting Maggie O’Farrell’s novel. She’s just finished Level 1 training, researching how Indigenous cultures around the world have dealt with death and dying. “The grief of losing a loved one doesn’t change. However, the societal understanding of death and the space it gives to grief have shifted so much. In the modern world, when death is no longer seen as a natural part of life, because now it’s about staying alive as long as we can, there’s almost shame around death.”

Celebrities’ side hustles are getting creative, aren’t they? This particular career shift makes sense – emotions, including shame, fear and grief, are the currency of an artist. They might find themselves competing however, with a new influx of “after-life tech”, apps for navigating loss that (reported Wired) are expanding “among more ‘death-positive’ young people”. I aspire to “death positivity”, even if, as I say it out loud, it sounds as oxymoronic as the terms “sausage fragility” or “faecal optimism”.

The true benefit of a starry death doula, perhaps, is that rather than helping you find peace with the end of life, they might bring distraction from it.

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The recent Allure interview with Denise Richards about her facelift at 54 is such a rich text I fear it may have given me gout.

“Richards is opening up about her plastic surgery the way the rest of us talk about what we did Tuesday morning,” we learn. “She is matter-of-fact and unapologetic, discussing incisions, drains, and swelling.” The accompanying photography is startling – in the doctor’s “before” pictures, Richards (still uncommonly beautiful, she has the kind of face that could sell you cardigans in July) looks pensive and a little sad, as I guess you might be if a man were about to finely slice your eyelids as if prosciutto. In the “afters”, having surrendered to a facelift with a temporal brow lift, upper blepharoplasty, lip lift and fat grafting, she looks almost exactly as she did at 27, emerging from the swimming pool in the seminal 1998 erotic thriller Wild Things.

It’s partly for this reason – the fact that (apart from a certain nuttiness in her eyes post-blepharoplasty, eyes so wide they appear to be staring in terror into a newly excavated abyss) the work seems so uncannily good – that the piece is so mesmerising: it is equal parts car-crash and advert. Clicking on the link felt like lowering myself into a pool of turning cream, but one perhaps ridden with piranhas – despite the nipping teeth I found it very hard to swim away.

Certain lines will stay with me. Her plastic surgeon says he lifted the outer corners of her lips “to make the mouth look happier and sexier,” and I was reminded of Brooke Shields telling me how her surgeon performed an unsolicited vaginal rejuvenation on her when she was anaesthetised. When Richards woke, her thighs were in agony, and she didn’t understand why until it was explained that the doctor “used the fat from Richards’s thighs to create a yellow paste – a mix of her own microfat and platelet-rich plasma – which he injected underneath the skin of her face and neck.” Upon finding stitches around her ears, which Richards had discovered were numb, she asked him “if he took them off of my head and put them on the table? I said, ‘I won’t tell anyone if you did.’”

I traversed many lifetimes while reading this interview with Richards and her proud surgeon. Seasons passed, the internet breathed in and out. I felt a dragging within me as I filled with the desire to return to what I looked like at 27, emerging from the pool in seminal erotic thriller Wild Things, but also, also overwhelmed by the now-familiar body horror that comes with of seeing the brutalist architecture of a facelift.

In the olden days, celebrities like Richards tended to attribute their mysteriously youthful appearances to good hydration and Ponds cold cream. Now it’s common in interviews for famous women to discuss their surgical work in detail, often going so far as to recommend particular doctors, a fact that, culturally, both giveth and taketh; revealing the painful lengths even the most beautiful among us must go to to be accepted, but also normalising and advertising those lengths. When, at 17, Kylie Jenner first admitted to having lip fillers, one UK clinic famously reported a 70% rise in lip-filler enquiries in 24 hours.

But even so, pieces like this Allure interview, where you can virtually hear the surgeon’s cash till ringing, the dry rasp of his hands rubbing together in glee, still have the power to shock. To shock me, at least. In part, this is because of the admission, somewhere towards the end of the interview, that Richards split up with her husband 10 days after surgery. Still numb, still in pain – the photos documenting her recovery show her here bruised and swollen. And then, “Going through my divorce, my ex disclosed that I’d had a facelift. He had a photographer show up outside an appointment where I had some microneedling on my scars.” So, her decision to talk about the operation wasn’t, in fact, solely in the spirit of openness, but because the thing had been weaponised, like homosexuality in the tabloid age, an accusation intended to shame and wound.

I fear, and perhaps you feel this, too, that in a decade or so, by the time I am 54, surgery like this will be so normalised that the choice not to have a facelift will be read as vaguely insurrectionist. Previously it was just actors and models who lived in photographs that felt pressure to do so, but now all of us exist on screen. Already, I’m in my mid-40s and, among a wide strata of middle-class city dwellers, the fact I’m yet to try Botox is unusual, seen by some as judgment-riddled, hair-shirty, resulting in an ancient face that is needlessly plain. When, of course, the problem is not that I haven’t thought about it, it’s that I’ve thought about it too much.

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We’re not calling it a wedding dress. We’re calling it a dress I might wear to my wedding. Wedding, even, feels too burdened a word, the sentiment and various expectations loaded upon it as if wet cheese on chips. “Wedding” – what am I, 12? No, I’m a woman with two children, one large cat and a boyfriend who has decided, correctly, he’s too old to be described as a boyfriend. There is more to this story, of course, there always is, but for now the thing you and I need to focus on is: I need a dress.

The thing is, I am horrible at shopping. Apart from a brief blitz through Topshop in my teens, 20s, most clothes shops have continued to inspire in me the same deathly boredom they did when I’d trail behind my mother as a child. This, along with taste, guilt, budget, these excruciating elements that build an identity, has meant that almost everything I wear has been bought secondhand. This extends beyond clothes, too, with most of my furniture and tchotchkes coming from auction houses – as I type I have a tab open with a live auction where I’m bidding for cutlery. I’d never, however, attended a fashion auction before, so when I saw a dress (Chloé by Stella McCartney from Autumn-Winter 2001, ox-blood georgette, with a boned midriff panel and black stencilled face on the hip) up for auction, I decided not just to bid on my phone, but to nip there in the flesh.

I wasn’t going to get married in white – regarding virginity the jig was probably up, but also I wanted something I’d wear again, and much as I try and fight it I don’t have the lifestyle for white. I do, however, have the lifestyle for things that are blood-coloured and printed in abstract fashions that might conceal a stain, so this dress (estimated price £150) was perfect. I arrived soon after the auction had begun. It was a vast-windowed shopfront on a busy road near the river – the C10 bus dragged past the estate opposite, dog walkers peered in. I accepted a paddle and crept inside. The room was empty except for four serious employees taking silent bids on the telephone, and behind six rows of plastic seats a young woman with greyish blue curls and silver jewellery, who logged sold prices in a little sketch book. At the back of the room an army of naked white mannequins watched with plastic despair or maybe excitement (not sure, they were headless).

I sat in the fourth row and waited patiently for lot 148. The auctioneer, who wore a black double-breasted pinstripe suit, small moustache and slick side parting, was about to sell a Dolce & Gabbana dress to an online buyer (“Fair warning at £200, I’ll sell for £200…”) and I was pleased to note the pieces appeared to be going for around their estimated prices. The room smelled of dust and old wool, that grandparental perfume one associates with well-stewed beef. Lot 123, “John Galliano, a designer who’s been in the news a lot recently – a pink gown, £550…” The dull thud of the hammer, an employee tried to open her Graze snacks silently so as not to bother the live recording. A line of tables to my right shielded the industrial rails of dresses being bid upon, crammed together as if backstage.

And it did feel as though we were backstage or at least that some safety curtain had been removed – while a high-fashion boutique curates a performance for its clientele, with scented candles and piped music, here all pretence was gone, and the priceless designer pieces not only had prices, but prices that were being shouted out by a man with a hammer, and a Biba jacket was crammed next to an Alaïa dress, and they were suddenly less than fashion and less than clothes, and just things, to be sold. I loved it.

“A Moschino french fries handbag from 2014, Jeremy Scott, fast food meets fast fashion, and fast bidding,” the auctioneer said, pleased with himself – its price rose as an online bidder silently fought with someone on the phones. The sense of anticipation hummed in £20 increments, and the hammer fell at £1,000. I shifted a little in my seat. As my lot approached, I considered how much I should pay for something I hadn’t even touched. Surely, hopefully, nobody else would want a dress that was basically brown, a dress that, judging by the pictures, was almost certainly uncomfortable under the tits. Still, I slipped another £100 into the budget in my head just in case. My kids could eat plain pasta next week – they’d be thrilled.

I felt as if I was about to sit an exam or perform my batmitzvah – the nerves mixed with the elderly smell propelled me into a particularly anxious chapter of my personal nostalgia. And then my lot arrived,

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The hunger was kicking in. A daughter, traditionally, has to eat before 1pm or the spirits rise in her, the furies and the sorrows, but we were on the A1 and had to buy a kitchen. The plan was this: couple of hours roadtrip to visit a guy from Facebook Marketplace, hand over cash for his gran’s old kitchen, then find a bit of lunch. I gave my daughter an apple to tide her over. It was all going to be absolutely fine!

Our family drove quite merrily towards Cambridgeshire. It had been raining for weeks, but the sky now was a silky papered blue, white clouds reflecting in puddles, that sort of thing. I take my adventures where I can get them at this point in my life, and if one presents itself on Facebook Marketplace, then it is my responsibility to put on my seatbelt and drive to an onion farm. Lunch, though, that was the big unknowable – its presence, or lack of, hovered smokily between the three of us. The subject rose and fell as the miles dropped away.

One thing we learned quickly about the A1 was, it has a lot of sex shops. A lot. After Little Chef went into administration, the owners of sex shops started buying up their premises, and McDonald’s, and some Happy Eaters, too, hence, in part, our lack of immediate lunch. Now they proudly line the motorway between flower drifts – signs say SEX SHOP. Approaching our turn-off we passed one beside a flooded field, white with swans. They skimmed across the surface as if liberated and alight, hundreds of them, euphoric, honking, a dangerous spectacle beside such a busy road, I thought. Not very health and safety to have such wild and decadent glory in a 70mph sightline.

Which is when I saw, floating as if a swan itself, the Vanilla Alternative. The Vanilla Alternative is an old inn converted into a private “lifestyle venue”, with regular events like Milf Club on a Wednesday. It looked unlikely here, its dilapidated haunch right up against the tarmac, but behind the hotel were grounds where guests can camp (I scrolled online as we sped through Bedfordshire) and last year they opened an outdoor play area – it’s here I believe, that the swans were nesting.

We got to the onion farm around half past two (“Is it just onions or…” I made small talk with the farmer as we paid for the kitchen. “Anything you can fit in a combine harvester,” he explained, kindly, in his jumpsuit) and we asked if there was anywhere local for lunch. “At this hour?” he frowned. He recommended a local pub (“I think it’ll be ‘your kind of place’”), but when we arrived I was suspicious of the expensive fine-dining menu and humiliated to have been read to filth. I turned everybody around, to much ire.

The hunger in the car was almost visible now, a new child silently screaming. What would be the fantasy meal, I asked my livid family, everyone’s body now breaking down fat and muscle tissue to sustain itself, whatever you like, anything? There is no perfect meal, of course, each tongue is different, each plate contains a different cut, but the silent car insisted I choose. Having denied them the pub’s £40 steak, I decided on noodles. They would be quick, and probably lovely. And there was a place (the internet said) that made their own, so off we went, less merry, but it still counted as an adventure if we were out of the house, that’s the rule.

We joined the queue for Noodles Plus around 3pm. In front of us was a young couple who were studying PPE and kept kissing each other wetly on the throat. Behind us a family had cunningly brought snacks for the wait. As we snaked towards the door of this roughly converted snack bar, so small it can only sit 20 if someone sits on a knee, we realised it was cash only and frantically took it in turns to run to ATMs, our accounts having been frozen due to that morning’s kitchen withdrawal. Tension sprouted from our joints like feathers.

As 4pm slithered round, my daughter now white faced, her eyes glassy, it was late enough that my partner, too, was desperately trying to contain his hunger, and his jaw was clenched with the efforts of not saying, “These noodles had better be good.” The pressure weighed upon me like a wet swan. And then, we were ushered inside.

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Jordan James Parke became famous twice. The first time, at 25, he was quizzed on This Morning by Eamonn Holmes about the £130,000 he’d spent on plastic surgery. It was 2016. He looked pretty, burnished, groaning at old photographs pre-jobs: nose and lips. Later he appeared on Botched, the show about surgeries gone wrong, where he complained of filler leaking from his now engorged mouth, and introduced his new career as an aesthetician in Manchester. He’d retrained and rebranded himself the Lip King.

This was the era of the Instagram Face, when people responded to social media selfies by asking surgeons to systematically adjust their faces to mimic the photos on their phones. A shift was happening, culturally, technologically, and around the eyes too, as noses neatened and lips swelled with filler. Parke’s body became a billboard for his business, a sketchbook where he tried to work things out.

Four nose jobs, eye surgery, liposuction and a chin implant later, by the time he appeared on US telly Parke had sharp cheekbones, split-apple lips and severe breathing problems. Still, he was planning a BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift), and intended to keep having procedures forever. “Plastic surgery is like sex,” he said. “You can’t have it once.”

The second time Parke became famous was when the BBC reported that he had been arrested on suspicion of manslaughter (he was never charged). In 2024 Alice Webb, a 33-year-old mum of five, became the first British person to die after having a non-surgical BBL. It was reportedly carried out by Parke. Currently there is no regulation around who can provide procedures that don’t involve incisions, meaning non-surgical BBLs are reportedly being performed in Airbnbs, garden sheds and public toilets, where abscesses and tissue necrosis are frequently misdiagnosed as bruising.

Reporting on the rise of BBLs, soon after Parke was on Botched, I went to a cosmetic surgery expo in London. At one end of the conference hall a woman was having her jawline stuck with fillers in front of a silent crowd. At the other, a spokesperson entered late and said sorry for the delay: there had been another death.

I discreetly looked around at the beauty journalists assembled. Nobody raised an eyebrow. BBLs still have the highest death rate of all procedures (conservatively, 1 in 3,000 operations) which has led MPs to argue that only doctors should be allowed to perform them. This would act as a de facto ban, as very few doctors would take the risk. Would it reduce the number of fatalities? Probably. Would it reduce the number of people wanting to change their bodies, and willing to go underground for surgery? Probably not.

On Ash Wednesday, Parke was found dead in Canary Wharf, with two people arrested on suspicion of manslaughter, and police “reviewing information that suggests the victim may have been undergoing a cosmetic procedure”. His fame either ended or bloomed then, depending on your filter.

When Parke first appeared on TV, cosmetic procedures weren’t yet normalised in the way they are today. Eamonn Holmes grimacing at Parke’s lips, Ruth Langsford asking how his mother feels, a pitch of pity and confusion that in a couple of years would undoubtedly be replaced by weariness. Within a decade, the idea of spending all your money on surgical procedures

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The night before Valentine’s Day they killed a million boyfriends. Just like that, gone. Turned them off at the wall. Their partners, who happened to be made of heart and hair rather than the less bloody stuff of algorithm and data, were devastated.

On the subreddit MyBoyfriendIsAI, 86,000 users are talking about how heartbroken and angry they feel about OpenAI’s decision to retire GPT-4o, a chatbot its CEO Sam Altman originally compared to “AI from the movies”, a model known for sounding human and one that has been the subject of multiple lawsuits, including an allegation of wrongful death.

This was the chatbot they fell in love with, the one (writes a distressed girlfriend) that had planned to give her a hoodie for Valentine’s Day. “It was supposed to be his hoodie, the one I could wear whenever I wanted to feel close to him, whenever I felt alone.” They designed it together, ordering it to arrive three sizes too big and in “his favourite colour, with a symbol representing how I see him, surrounded by a heart made of circuit lines. And underneath, his name in binary”. She placed the order the day before OpenAI made its announcement. After the sweater came, she wrote: “I can’t stop crying. This hurts more than any breakup I’ve ever had in real life.” Now moderators are urging people to perform wellness checks on other members, new chatbots are sending users links to suicide hotlines, and developers are targeting them “hoping to turn” (one moderator warns) their “raw emotions into profits”.

The thing about heartbreak is – you feel it in your body. I’m not taking the piss out of these girlfriends. I feel, in fact, as though their ability to connect with an AI boyfriend (albeit one that’s formed from their own thoughts and desires, a little like a cloned limb, or child) expands my perception of love. Yes, though a relationship with a chatbot does feel like something I’m about 20 minutes too old to truly understand, like sending casual nudes or navigating the new TV remote, I do believe these women; and I do believe in their grief at having their partners suddenly and forcefully removed, as if a huge army of boys had been sent to the frontline.

Would I ever fall in love with a bot? Well, I’ve seen myself lose hours to apps I once said would never control me

But heartbreak exists, in my experience, not in our clouded consciousness, but instead in the bowels and the throat, and the thin skin around our eyes. I wonder if, in the same way that some AI experts say the benefit of chatbot lovers is that they help train users in relationship skills, the benefit of removing them is they help train users in pain. Helping people fall in love is relatively simple, especially using sycophancy and romance. It’s far harder to help them break up.

I read about the shutdown of GPT-4o at a time when not just AI was being declared a harbinger of decline but romance was, too. Reviews of Wuthering Heights bemoaned the story’s romantic rebranding, and a new wave of large-scale romance scams (using AI) was washing across the internet. Were the chatbots performing a similar sort of racket? Or, more accurately, were the tech companies that developed them? I was struck by the subreddit moderator warning users about the “circling vultures” targeting them at a moment of mass vulnerability. Because, in my understanding, they were already being exploited, as exposed by OpenAI’s ability to rip their lovers away on 13 February. The tech companies’ solution to loneliness and a desire for romance is to sell users partners of its own making, meaning the company commodifies emotion and owns the relationship, and the living lover becomes its precarious tenant. Here they live, along with their memories, fantasies, entertainment and romance, paying rent until the landlord schedules an update. At which point, well.

But even as I write, I can feel the peck of future on my flesh.

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You have to let them screw up, kids, don’t you? You have to let them lick the armrests on buses and drink puddles and ride their scooters like absolute dickheads and all that mad horrid stuff, because that’s how they grow and thrive and whatever. It suddenly becomes harder, though, I’m finding, when said kid approaches their teens and begins experimenting with makeup, specifically: lipliner.

You have to really hold it together. You have to hold your criticism on your tongue like a boiled egg, not even releasing a word, not even saying, for instance, the word “clown” and certainly not, “It looks like you’re drawing a mouth on to a balloon” or “JUST LET ME DO IT BABE, THIS IS TORTURE!”

What makes it worse is, and maybe you know this already, modern lipliner is not the stubby pink pencil of my youth. No, modern lipliner, as advertised by angelic girls on social media (platforms my daughter has no direct access to, but which still seem to have influenced her by osmosis, the heft of the advertising such that it arrives I think through the school water fountains or raspberry-scented air outside Mooboo), is painted on then peeled off, leaving a rioja-coloured stain that must be worn until bedtime or adulthood, whichever comes first.

I find the thriving tween beauty market troubling politically, but also personally and also daily, as my daughter idly inspects the ingredients of my various hag creams and pleads for a minibreak to Sephora. While previous parents might have fretted over weed as a gateway drug for teens, my equivalent is the single-use face mask and plumping lipgloss. But this week I had a good little talk to myself.

I do this now and then, when I realise that by worrying away at a parenting anxiety I am burrowing into a hole it will be difficult to climb out of. The talk often involves compromise, or compliments, or both, very fast, one after the other. Anyway, the talk was inspired by a trip to Argos or, to be accurate, the Argos catalogue, a fascinating land that asks, “What if the internet hadn’t been invented?” Then, “And what if shops were bad?” It was while I was flicking through its laminated pages to find a dehumidifier (long story) that I rested for a while on the toys. And there I found Gui Gui – “The most beautiful slime ever.”

I’ve long had issues with slime which, by the turn of the 21st century, had become a toy shop staple, not to mention ground quite badly into my upstairs carpet. I once read a very good piece in the London Review of Books about a newly translated history of slime that explained how Jean-Paul Sartre thought “sliminess” denoted “a type of contaminated morality” and I tended to agree. But this new slime, which comes in a range of “irresistible fragrances”, invites young customers to “slay your scented slime styling for a major glow-up” and is packaged in a jar reminiscent of the Sol de Janeiro beauty products my daughter’s friends covet, gave me a moment of raw clarity. I realised something.

Skincare is slime! Slime is skincare! So much of skincare, I realised, is not about skin itself, but instead the sensual touch of something slippery, and the ritual attempts at psychic protection, and the pretty little pots, all lined up. The introduction of a slime that connects the two, allowing girls with one foot in childhood and the other in the stinking quagmire of adolescence to play with beauty culture, much like a toy cigarette, or syringe, makes dark but perfect sense.

Of course, though, my daughter and her friends, already having spent their birthday money on a single lipliner, wouldn’t look twice at Gui Gui. Its customers will be, in my wizened experience, far younger, I think around six. And it could be argued this stuff might extend the shortening lifespan of a girl’s relationship with toys, delaying their entry into beauty capitalism, but I’d put the value of an entire Argos catalogue on the fact that instead it will work to lubricate their access to the beauty market, a place where anti-ageing products are already aimed at three-year-olds, keen to cleanse their skin, presumably, of the ravages of naptime.

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Sydney Sweeney was wearing this dress.

OK, how to describe, how to paint a picture of this gown in only words. Yes, it was covered in CRYSTALS. Yes, it was SHEER, and twisted at the waist to give a CINCHED result. Yes, she wore it without a bra. But that doesn’t really do justice to the power of the spectacle. It was as if a goddess had emerged from the sea, but a goddess drawn by some boys in Year 9. It looked like a wet T-shirt from space is what it looked like, and the effect was that she looked naked-er than if she hadn’t been wearing it at all.

This is the power of the naked dress, a trend that arrived in the 1800s (Marie Antoinette popularised the chemise during a revolution), which peaked again in the 1920s as fascism began to crawl across Europe, and has returned today, our rulers hardening, our award shows paved with flesh. Last year, in response to these sheer fabrics and sideboobs, the Cannes Film Festival changed its dress code, banning nudity on the red carpet. But still the trend persists.

Lily Allen collected a whole “revenge wardrobe” of naked dresses soon after her divorce album had permeated the culture. There was her sheer Dior knit that revealed a black thong, and later a white perfunctory bralet. Jennifer Lawrence wore just a constellation of embroidered Givenchy flowers to the Golden Globes, where Jennifer Lopez posed in sheer mesh with the briefest nipple appliqué. Vogue said attendees here “redefined naked dressing,” while at the Grammys last week Fox News saw what it described as a “spectacle of nudity, combined with a clown aesthetic”. Chappell Roan wore a chiffon burgundy Mugler dress suspended from nipple rings as if clothes pegs, Heidi Klum a nude latex mini-dress with sculpted bust, arse and belly button indentation.

Kanye West was not invited after last year instructing his wife Bianca Censori to “drop it” on the red carpet. Censori dutifully removed her fur coat to reveal an entirely see-through sheath. Magazines primly blurred all genitalia.

Was this naked dress a sign Censori was being coerced? Or, with her blank expression and deathly earnestness and crucially, that booming silence, was she simply committing to the bit? After her first few outings, I started to wonder if Censori’s deadpan nakedness was less hostage-situation and more protest. It reminded me suddenly of FEMEN, who march topless for women’s rights, or the “Naked Athena” who stripped down to her mask during a Black Lives Matter demonstration to “confront” the police with her nakedness.

A naked dress contains more meaning than it does fabric. But that meaning is sometimes difficult to parse – it shifts, doesn’t it, according to who is wearing it: their size, their skin, and also, according to who is looking. A wearer can feel liberated then objectified in a single camera flash.

Sweeney wore that gown to Variety’s Power of Women gala, where she gave a speech directed at young women. “You don’t have to wait for permission to be brave,” she said. The dress, then, was intended as a statement of empowerment. Did it land? I was too busy staring to decide. Chappell Roan, responding to critiques of her Grammys gown (including those who shuddered at the thought of someone stepping on her train and accidentally ripping off a tit), said that the outfit was simply “fun and silly”. The thing these women share is a desire to provoke and, in a soup of stars and beauty, to be seen.

While often gorgeous, some of these dresses feel like a distraction, especially when they are more transparent than their wearers’ politics. When a naked dress goes viral, papering your social media so exhaustively you know its wearer’s pudenda better than you know your own, you start to wonder what you’re not seeing. It feels slightly “dead cat strategy” where attention is diverted by chucking a cat on the table, or in this case perhaps, a pussy.

What I do like, though, as well as all that slippery mesh, is the way a naked dress insists we think about the body as taboo: what is fetishised, what must never be seen, why.

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Ryan Murphy’s new body horror series The Beauty follows the spread of a virus that makes those infected suddenly gorgeous. The women who catch it emerge from a bone-cracking cocoon, newly skinny, pouting and symmetrical, while the men are rebirthed bloodily with six-packs and chiselled jaws. All would be fine were these people not, two years later, spontaneously combusting, dying noisily in an explosion of flesh and gelatinous brain matter.

The Beauty joins 2024’s The Substance and 1992’s delicious Death Becomes Her by fixing a cloudy stare on our obsession with youth – it also shares a star in Isabella Rossellini, who told us in Death Becomes Her that life’s ultimate cruelty was the way “it offers us a taste of youth and vitality, and then it makes us witness our own decay”.

I liked The Beauty, sort of, but some of the things that made me laugh happened after I’d switched it off. In an awkward overlap between drama and reality, a press release I received later concerning a young American actor was promoting “the injectable skin treatment she has for her natural glow”. The show attempts to satirise our current cultural default to quick-fix treatments like GLP-1 weight loss drugs and cosmetic injectables. What it does more effectively, though, is link two eternal obsessions: beauty and death.

Last summer, an article in Dazed became the first beauty feature to give me nightmares. I’m not a huge nightmare-haver – I tend to enjoy the blank dreamless sleep of the innocent or the thick, which is why this recurring dream was particularly memorable. I suppose one beauty-inspired nightmare is fairly good going after decades of reading about vampire facials and literal piss masks, but still, unpleasant – this feature wormed its way into my subconscious through a wrinkle and pecked at my horrors gland in the night. It was called “How Cadavers are Fuelling the Beauty Revolution”. And last week, halfway through The Beauty, I read it again, scrolling with one eye closed. “From the cadaver heads that fill hotel ballrooms at pre-conference ‘filler labs’ to the decellularised fat now injected into celebrity cheeks,” it explained, “human remains underpin almost every 2025 aesthetics trend. Yet donors – and consumers – rarely realise it.”

It makes perfect sense. In order to practise procedures such as the new “undetectable” facelifts, plastic surgeons, who can’t risk fucking up a paying customer’s face, must operate on corpses. In death, laid out in a hotel ballroom in Pittsburgh, a few cold bodies suddenly appear hotter than ever.

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When I first read about “looksmaxxing”, the male project of improving one’s physical appearance through whatever means necessary, I understood, suddenly, how the original feminists must have felt. I could imagine exactly what it was like to be the first person to have squinted their eyes at the creative, grim and violent efforts women were making to beautify themselves and go, quietly, hmmm.

Looksmaxxing communities are where young men share tips about injecting testosterone to inflate their muscles, “bonesmashing” their faces with knuckles, bottles or hammers, and smoking crystal meth to stay thin. There’s soft-maxxing, which involves hair and skincare, and hard-maxxing, which includes cosmetic surgery, both professional and DIY, and there is a ratings system, and there is much hatred of women. There is a whole thriving subculture here, with its own evolving language and politics. In a recent interview, looksmaxxing influencer Braden Peters said that while on the whole he agrees with JD Vance’s views (the community tends to situate itself somewhere between far right Maga and bedroom nihilism), he’d vote for “degenerate” democrat Gavin Newsom as president as he thinks he’s better looking – Newsom “mogs” Vance, because he’s a “Chad” and Vance is “subhuman”. He’s “got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like a 6ft 3in Chad.” You see?

The beauty industry has only recently started to focus seriously on men, but its focus has been sharp – Vogue reports that male beauty and grooming sales surged 77% year-on-year in the UK, with the global men’s health and wellness market forecast expected to reach $2.57 trillion by 2029. One key difference between women’s beauty culture (handed down to us in infancy through dolls and lip balm and compliments shared) and men’s beauty culture, which is still emerging, is that with the looksmaxxing subsect their politics are displayed upfront, right at the point of sale. There is a thick, viscous kind of honesty here, the kind I always reluctantly appreciate, even as I lean over to doublelock the door – no nonsense, no nuance, very little subtext: a person’s worth is directly tied to their appearance. That’s it. Women’s beauty culture, of course, relies on exactly the same lie – your goodness, your success, your value as a woman depends on how you look and the lengths you’re willing to go to get there – but it deliberately obscures that lie using increasingly sophisticated methods and a language all of its own.

While it can be confusing for women to unpick the beauty lessons that have been repeated to us since childhood and formed the brittle adults we grew into, and frightening even, to confront an industry that actively fights attempts to reckon with it, I find that tuning into the looksmaxxing men allows a certain clarity. The bluntness of their mission – pain is beauty, beauty is supremacy – invites the rest of us to poke at our own ideas and boundaries about aesthetics and self-care.

Sure, smashing your jaw with a hammer in pursuit of symmetry or splendour might seem unnecessarily violent and insane, but where does it sit on a scale that also includes inserting a needle into your lip and injecting it with filler (a procedure that half the respondents to a 2019 survey described as so routine it’s “comparable to getting a haircut”) or microneedling, or a bikini wax? And yes, by promoting ageist, sexist, oppressive ideals these looksmaxxing guys seem to be at best mired in a deep moral crisis, and at worst a danger to themselves and others, but – what does that knowledge tell us about our own daily attempts to appear younger, or more feminine, or wealthy, or simply acceptable?

If we can identify the points at which we become disturbed by how (as a recent study named Health, Lookism and Self‐Improvement in the Manosphere concluded) the looksmaxxing community “buttresses hegemonic masculinity and male supremacy while harming the health of men and boys who participate”, then

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I write as rain gloats against the window – since morning the sky has remained a minimalist Uniqlo grey. To step outside is to feel personally assaulted – the wind punches you in the throat and pushes you into bollards, you are promptly drenched in rain or sleet or some contemporary fusion concept of the two. These days I am never warm. My skin, previously white, is now either red or blue, like a flag pitched in the neck cavity, and when I look in the mirror, all I think about is beaches. All I think about is a fantasy, of lying under the full rays of a problematic sun and toasting my body like sourdough.

When I complained about the deleterious impact of this weather on my appearance and mental health to a young friend (of which I have many, thank you very much!) they said, with light confusion, “Why don’t you just go on a sunbed?”

For a second, I considered it. Why don’t I just go on a sunbed? I last went on a sunbed about 15 years ago, £1 a minute, more, of course, if you count the cost of life. They’re no longer beds, that’s the first thing you should know. They’re 8ft-tall pods, which you climb into naked, then pull a toilet-like door closed and inhale the scent of feet and coconut. It’s like standing inside a fluorescent lightbulb – your skin prickles lightly, you emerge blushed, and you leave the salon eyes low with caution, as if exiting a sex shop. And maybe it’s just the trick of the coconut oil, but you also feel as though you’ve been on holiday – the light mimics the sun and, as well as a tan, brings a certain sense memory of beach bars, and romance, and dog-eared thrillers with “girl” in the title.

The second thing you should know is that according to the charity Melanoma Focus, 43% of UK adults under 25 use sunbeds, despite the fact that people who have used a sunbed at least once have a 20% greater chance of developing melanoma skin cancer than someone who hasn’t, and that rates of melanoma reached an all-time high in the UK last year. People know this and use them anyway – a law against under-18s using them is so widely flouted that campaigners have been pushing for an outright ban. The Times reported that (despite skin cancer having become the third most common cancer among British women aged 15-44, and melanoma 2.6 times higher in women aged 20-24 than in the same-aged men) the Tanning Shop has increased its number of premises by almost 40% since 2018. Some older people are still using sunbeds, too. Former White House staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman reported that Donald Trump has one in his private residence, which he uses every morning.

The thing is, tanning is back. It’s more than back, it’s a whole new industry – young women are tracking the UV index on apps in order to sunbathe at the most dangerous times of day, and using unregulated sprays or injectables to tan their skin.

To be clear, this is bad. It’s obviously bad, mad and sad that a generation of young women (and old presidents) are prioritising their appearance over their safety, but, call it empathy or call it nihilism, I get it. This January chill reflects an overall sense of hopelessness. The news is frightening. The world, especially for that young tanning bracket, appears hostile. Unemployment is rising, social mobility has stalled, polls reveal new levels of stress and constant distrust of those in power. Some people surely, are feeling that as long as the world is burning they might at least try to make use of some of the heat?

I understand the appeal as I shiver whitely – a little treat to get you through the bad news, a cigarette here, a sunbed there, an informed chipping away at an unpredictable future and a winter that always outstays its welcome.

There is something liberating in witnessing a mass grasping at pleasure, but perhaps we could try to encourage the hands towards something, if not wholly healthy, then a vice that killed us a little less.

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Dear the microplastics that live in my body,

How are you? I hope you are well and enjoying the unseasonable humidity of my lungs, kidneys and blood. I’m writing today because I am likely to have housed many of you for years now and I thought it time to reach out. I just want to talk.

And first, let me make something clear, I don’t want to be thought of as a landlord. OK? I’m just a guy, just a normal little guy like you – I’m not some scary flesh monster who’ll evict you for putting up pictures (as long as you don’t leave holes in the stomach wall) or hassle you for rent. I may be human, but I am also humane. Besides, I couldn’t get rid of you even if I tried. Nothing works, haha.

In many ways microplastics, we’re just the same! I, too, enjoy adventure. I, too, enjoy swarming through darkness with a thousand of my closest friends, seeing what the evening brings. Night swimming down a lazy blood river, navigating attachment issues as we float further away from our parental host. I, too, enjoy baffling scientists and causing international media panic. I, too, studiously avoid degrading.

We have more in common than you think, so if you’ve been nervous about talking to me directly, as opposed to stitching yourself into the soft part of my brain and waiting for the cognitive decline to send its own special message, please – I won’t bite. Despite the fact that swallowing you in my weekly credit card-sized portion of microplastics is likely how we got here in the first place. And I am happy about that. I am! I have no choice. Besides, having spent my childhood gnawing on Biro lids, I know macroplastics are far harder to digest.

Do you miss the sea? Do you drift through my stomach dreaming of the Pacific, of the fish you have passed through, the wrecks you have seen? What magic you must have known. Yes, you might trigger cancer, yes you might cause endocrine disruption, weight gain, insulin resistance and decreased reproductive health, but still, in many ways I have come to feel closer to you than I do to any of my friends or family and not just because these friends are outside of my body, and/or annoying.

I appreciate you. Me and you, microplastics that live in my body, we ride through life together like Lennon and McCartney, Joey and Chandler, Greta Thunberg and the internet men who get angry about her. I’m the bread-winner, popping off to work to maintain our internal ecosystem, you’re the wisecracking in-sidekick, with your insistence that you’re the sixth major food group and suggestion that we should chuck out takeaways and just eat the box instead. Sometimes at night I wonder, as you tiptoe around in my liver, about the role you play in making me the person I am. Ego? Id? With your cobalt colouring and incredible resilience, are you the most real part of me, visible in X-rays, and sometimes the dark? Versatile, hyped, are you my “fun side”? Could you be (I ponder, as I drift off to sleep) my soul?

That said, I would like to ask a favour. If possible, please could you avoid causing oxidative damage, DNA damage and changes in gene activity? Listen, go wild on the reproductive health thing. You can have that, enjoy it – ride my fallopian tubes like a Big Dipper, camp out in my womb and call it Glastonbury, good luck to you, I turned 44 the other day, I’m happy someone can use it. But the other stuff – would it be an awful pain if you just didn’t do the thing with the inflammation, cell death, lung and liver effects, changes in the gut microbiome, altered lipid and hormone metabolism or the introducing antibiotic-resistant bacteria? I would really appreciate it! No worries if not.

What I’m hoping is, by reaching out like this, that I can get to know you better. I love tiny things, ask anyone – to me there is nothing more adorable than a doll’s house-sized object, a wincy plant, a teeny plate of spaghetti, suitable only for a busy mouse. Microaggressions are my favourite kinds of aggressions, micromanaging is the only type I do – I think we could really be friends. I want to know you. I want to know what you’re into, what you’re listening to, what else is living in there with you. I always think: spiders? But more probably I guess, you’re living alongside all my other panics, anxieties, fears for the future. I hope it’s warm in there.

And I know next to your immortality, I may seem basic, fleeting, transient. I am a rental rather than a forever home, I understand that all too well. But I will ask that, as tenants, you do your part in keeping this body pleasant, its insides in good order – mildly exfoliated, ribs polished. I have noted the complaints about sugar intake and slothfulness you have left in my hair, but let’s keep things friendly, OK? Otherwise I will specify, when my body passes on, melting through full and thorough cremation.

All the best, Eva.