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Sofia spent two hours working on her face this morning. The 17-year-old’s routine: first, distributing a hydrating serum with a dropper, then the Vitamin C serum, two skin creams, and sunscreen.Using a sponge, the high school student works makeup into her skin; concealer goes around the eyes and the sides of the nose; she traces along her hairline and cheekbones with a brownish contour stick, places blush in two shades above her cheeks, and then sets everything with powder.
She brushes her eyebrows into shape with gel and fills them in, draws lines with two eyeliners, applies several coats of mascara, and adds accents with a highlighter. With a red pencil, she accentuates the outline of her lips, and finally spreads on a lip mask.”And finally, the setting spray, that’s important,” says Sofia, closing her eyes, holding her breath, and spraying a mist onto her face. “Done.” 20 products, seven brushes.
Only when she works hard on herself and looks perfect does she feel armed for the day. Before school, she often wakes up at 5:30 a.m. to make this happen. “A full face of makeup like this gives me security,” says Sofia.
DER SPIEGEL 45/2025
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 45/2025 (October 30th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL.
SPIEGEL International
Sofia, a teenager from a high-rise housing estate near Munich, is not alone; millions of people worldwide feel the same way. Young girls are fashioning their appearance like works of art. On social networks, they guide one another on how to bring out the “best versions” of themselves from within the confines of their childhood bedrooms. This is by no means just a mania affecting young women. While they have long been considered the group that places the most importance on looks—because they are most heavily reduced to them—Sofia represents a development affecting society as a whole.
Appearance plays a massive role in everyday life. People spend four hours a day attending to their looks, according to a study involving around 93,000 participants from 93 countries. This covers measures such as applying makeup, hair styling, personal hygiene, and exercise done for the sake of appearance. On average, women spent approximately 24 minutes more on their visuals than men.It is, therefore, no wonder that the beauty and wellness industry has become as economically significant as the global oil and gas industry or the automotive industry. The difference is that the beauty industry is expected to see more growth in the coming decade than the auto industry. The management consultancy McKinsey values the beauty market (excluding wellness) at $580 billion and forecasts six percent growth by 2027.
Never have Germans spent as much money on cosmetics as they do today. And they are happy to get a little medical help, too. Although aesthetic procedures are more expensive in Germany than in places like Turkey due to medical standards, Germany still ranks among the top in Europe. Breast surgeries, Botox, upper eyelid lifts, and filler treatments are “the Germans’ favorites,” writes the German Society for Aesthetic and Plastic Surgery in its annual statistics. Globally, the number of aesthetic procedures performed by plastic surgeons has risen by over 40 percent in the last four years.At the same time—and this is the flip side of the beauty hype—many people suffer because of their appearance. “I see so many pictures of myself, and I always notice something different that I hate about myself,” says model Stefanie Giesinger. Although the 29-year-old won the ninth season of Germany’s Next Topmodel in 2014—arguably the most striking evidence of her beauty—she struggles with her body and face. Like so many others.
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Model Stefanie Giesinger.
Foto: Claudio Lavenia / Getty Images
While some people undergo surgery or injections as a matter of course, others still stand before it in amazement. But even they cannot have failed to notice: Beauty has never played such a huge role. Where does this exaggerated focus on our exterior come from?The Booming Business of BeautySofia sits at her vanity table, a mirror lit from all sides like in a hair salon. In boxes and drawers, she keeps countless pencils and dispensers, jars and tubes. While getting ready, she has recorded a video for TikTok. More than 400,000 accounts follow @iamsofiastark, the majority of them young women. Sometimes she gets recognized while shopping, Sofia says; almost always, it is girls between 11 and 14 years old.
On TikTok, the 90-second “Get Ready With Me” video was played more than 1.6 million times. In it, Sofia seems like a normal girl getting ready for school with a bit too much makeup, chatting away. Her beauty routine looks casual, as if it were done as quickly as packing her schoolbag. She makes herself beautiful for others, but in the video, it seems as if she is doing it for herself.
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TikTok influencer Sofia.
Foto: Lisa Hörterer / DER SPIEGEL
For Sofia, beauty work is a hobby, but also a lucrative business. “In good months, I earn more than my parents combined,” she says. Cosmetic companies send her creams and eyeshadows unprompted and then book collaborations with her; she receives between 2,000 and 7,000 euros gross per video. “I invest the money back into other things,” says Sofia. By that, she means the gym, clothes, lashes, nails. Her hair alone costs her 500 euros every two months; she travels to a hairdresser in Munich for it, she explains.
What do her parents say? They don’t have TikTok or Instagram on their phones, Sofia says. “They are proud of me because I earn money, but they can’t really understand what I’m doing.”The question is not as banal as it first sounds: What exactly is Sofia doing?The Privilege of BeautyThe manufacturing of beauty—a diligent task—today is called “aesthetic labor.” The term clarifies that beauty is a commodity that must be produced, one that holds value as capital. Even if not everyone makes money directly from it.The psychological phenomenon “Pretty Privilege” describes how beautiful faces lead to a kind of cognitive bias. Better character traits are attributed to these people; they get better jobs, earn more money, score better in oral exams, and are even treated more favorably in court.
That is why we go to the hairdresser, trim our beards, pluck our eyebrows. We need none of this to survive. But to live? Very much so. The catch is: A visit to the barber and a spritz of perfume are no longer sufficient for this beauty work. The visual pressure has long since become immense. Looking young, thin, smooth, and sexy has become a mantra that almost no one can escape. How did this happen?We don’t just want to make ourselves beautiful, we have to, says British philosopher Heather Widdows. Beauty norms are currently more dominant than ever due to the barrage of images. She refers to the globalized world and the countless images we confront daily on social media, TV, and billboards. The fact that certain beauty ideals are taking hold so massively is due to their worldwide homogenization and distribution, Widdows explains in her book Perfect Me. Never before have we seen so many images of beautiful faces.
What is perfidious is that this development is curbing a hard-earned visual diversity. Years of preached self-love, mindfulness, and body positivity seem forgotten when it comes to “self-renovation.”The interesting thing about it: Today’s ideal—the template for the aesthetic surgeon or the beautician—is a global average, a mélange of all ethnic groups, according to Widdows. Voluminous lips, thick hair and full beards, high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes with a double lid crease and long lashes, large breasts or pectorals—hardly anyone is blessed with all of this. Conversely, this means: No ethnic group is good enough without help; everyone must be altered or supplemented to match this ideal, which does not actually exist in reality.
Focus on the FaceGülcan Demir clutches the small Louis Vuitton bag in her lap. She is sitting in a treatment chair in Düsseldorf to have her nose and lips injected. The 30-year-old is not here for the first time; just four months ago, 0.7 milliliters of hyaluronic acid went into her lips to make them look fuller. “Very beautiful, natural,” says doctor Henrik Heüveldop regarding his handiwork. But Demir, whose real name is different, finds the volume insufficient; she wants more. Heüveldop feigns empathy, adding: “I have 20 milliliters of hyaluronic acid in my own face. Chin, jaw, cheekbones, tear troughs—I’ve built up everything once.”
The doctor wants to know exactly what bothers Demir about her face.Demir: “My nose. When I take a selfie with my right hand, there’s this dent, do you see that?”Heüveldop: “You have a great, straight nose. You are naturally totally pretty. Less is always more there. Even with the lips, I don’t even know if we need to do them.”Demir: “Yes. The upper lip especially.”What Demir presumably doesn’t know: The front cameras of smartphones distort the face, especially the nose. The same applies to webcams. Countless people who look at themselves in camera images are dissatisfied with their reflection. This is another reason for the beauty boom: We look at our own faces via screens today more often than ever before.
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A patient of Bettray’s: 45 minutes of pain.
Foto: Marvin Ruppert / DER SPIEGEL
While one used to be able to spend a day without looking at one’s own face for longer than a few seconds while washing hands in the bathroom, today we look at ourselves for minutes, sometimes hours. Since the coronavirus pandemic, conferences, meetings, and conversations take place via video chat, with one thing always present: your own face. Unflatteringly lit, distorted by cameras. Who hasn’t caught themselves thinking they could do without one wrinkle or another on their forehead? Or perhaps the bump on the bridge of their nose?Heüveldop photographs his patient with his phone and opens the app Facetune, with which he can morph—model—her face. He alters Demir’s nose and chin on the screen as if painting a picture. As if he were an artist.
Heüveldop: “This is what it would look like if we lifted the nasal tip a little. A nuance, but it would make the
