Beauty has always been more than skin deep, it’s also political. It’s not just about what we put on our faces, but what that act means: where we come from, what we’ve survived, and what we want to say without speaking a word.

As someone who’s spent a lot of time interrogating beauty - both professionally and personally - I’ve come to see how we play with our appearance as a kind of cultural archive. It reveals the societal changes we don’t always notice at first, but right now, there’s a tension running through beauty culture that I can’t stop thinking about. On one hand, we’ve never had more beauty available to us; there are (largely speaking) products to suit all hair and skin types. And yet, isn’t it curious that with all this freedom, we’ve gradually gone from bold, experimental beauty - take the huge, multi-hued eyeshadow palettes that have dominated the last decade or the wolf haircuts of the last few years and their rock n roll edge - to a more singular, distinct look.

Now, every time I open my social media, I see a celebrated beauty influencer, or reality tv star, with an eerily similar look. Gone are the bold shades of hair, the trends for ‘unapproachable’ makeup, designated this moniker to decentre beauty from the male gaze, gone is all the glorious experimentation. In its wake an ultra-groomed, hyperfeminine, conservative-coded aesthetic seems to have slowly taken over, in soft pink packages that mask the hard lines of deeply conservative beauty ideals. Although it’s totally fine to have a ‘natural-looking’ approach to beauty - what’s not fine is feeling like that’s the norm, or that doing anything else is a deeply subversive choice. And to me, that’s what the current beauty climate is starting to feel like.

Lately, the beauty landscape has started to feel all too familiar; like the restrictive old rules I grew up with in the ‘90s, just repackaged for a new generation - the same impossible beauty standards, now dressed up as an ‘aesthetic’. Back then, it was teen magazines telling me what I should look like. Now, it’s the endless algorithms - serving up a blueprint for beauty that’s still slim, white, young and poreless.

In my book Ugly, I wrote about how beauty can both trap and transform us. That duality still feels relevant today. Even with more representation, the pressure hasn’t really lifted, it’s just shifted shape - and that sense of liberation often sits alongside something much murkier. Now it’s no longer about fitting one ideal, but constantly proving that your version of beauty is valid. For people of colour, for queer and trans folks, for anyone whose body doesn’t fit the narrow default - the system is already rigged. Every day can feel like a quiet battle just to exist. And right now, in so many parts of the western world, that grind is getting heavier and more hostile. As beauty standards shift back towards something more conservative, more controlled, the space to show up as yourself - boldly, creatively, rebelliously - just keeps shrinking.

But I don’t want to sound entirely bleak. Because among the contradictions, there are also the most extraordinary kinds of self-expression. I think of the Iranian women wearing lipstick in public under threat of punishment. Trans teens experimenting with glorious hair colours in states where their very existence is under attack. In these moments, beauty isn’t frivolous - it’s a lifeline. It connects you to yourself, your values and offers welcoming signals to others who might feel as you do; confined, fed up, and wanting to break free.

There’s also a powerful return to ancestral knowledge - one of the more hopeful shifts I’ve seen in recent years. Diaspora communities - long subject to colonised beauty standards - are reaching for the rituals they were taught to forget. Ayurvedic hair oil recipes are passed down through families. Shea butter stirred in kitchens. Henna painted on to celebrate. These aren’t trends - they’re reclamations. And they serve as a reminder: beauty didn’t begin with influencers. It began with us and those rituals that were built around mindfulness, and community.

What excites me about beauty now - truly - is the way it can bring people together. There’s a strange intimacy in sharing a skincare routine online, or bonding with someone over the best eyelash curler for almond-shaped eyes. We might live thousands of miles apart, speak different languages, and have different beliefs - but in that moment, there’s connection. It might seem small, but in those moments - in sharing the light and the dark - is where change actually starts.

For me, the future of global beauty looks like this: more truth, more connection, more contradiction and much more joy. It looks like a 15-year-old in Lagos doing a killer lip tutorial, and a 72-year-old in Melbourne in bright blue eyeliner, covered in tattoos. But perhaps my biggest hope is for beauty to stop being about what makes us worthy, successful or palatable, and goes back to being a form of creativity, self-expression and joy. The future of beauty? I hope it’s messy. It’s global. It’s unfinished. And it brings us together more than ever before.