At first, being on Ozempic was viewed as a controversial luxury. It was expensive, inaccessible, and almost exclusively seen as a celebrity product (specifically the American kind). Now, as GLP-1s have injected themselves across the pond and become an over-the-counter aesthetic obsession, they are starting to affect more than the weight of their users. Style has taken a hit.
Looking back on eras gone by, it’s clear that fashion has long been a cultural barometer. Way back in Elizabethan times, it was fashionable to have rotten – or even missing – teeth. This signalled the ability to afford sugar, a commodity so expensive it was referred to as ‘white gold’ (FOODRISE). Similarly, the Tudors prized a complexion that would not be considered sickly: pale skin implied an exemption from outdoor labour. In both cases, visible body deficiency operated as a status symbol (Royal Museums Greenwich). Missing teeth and pale skin were not seen as neglectful, as they may be seen now, but an indication of access.
A contemporary comparison comes from the never-ending war between skinny and wide-leg jeans. Around a decade ago, the ‘BBL body’ was made the beauty standard: the Kardashians were ruling the social sphere, each week a new track about bubble butts was released, and GracefitUK had launched her booty bands. The necessary next step was to popularise a pair of trousers that could show this off and naturally, skinny jeans (especially high waisted ones to accentuate the curves) were the go-to. However, society is fickle, and BBLs became cheugy in the same short amount of time as it took them to be desirable: heroin chic has reportedly made a comeback. ED twitter is on the rise, Kate Moss’s famous quote is making Instagram captions, and Liv Schmidt is TikTok’s new it-girl. So, in an attempt to obscure their curves, people are drowning themselves in extra-wide jeans. It’s a tale as old as time – literally.
Nowadays, missing teeth and pale skin would indicate the exact opposite of wealth and splendour – at least in the west. But the seemingly outrageous beauty notions of the Elizabethans and the Tudors are not so far off what we are experiencing in the 21st century. Make-up artists for the world’s biggest fashion brands are paring back their once striking looks, instead choosing to leave faces deliberately unfinished. In Miu Miu’s SS26, for example, models graced the catwalk with bare lashes and brushed down brows. A styling choice (paired with their tradwife-esque aprons – a story for another day) deriving from a studied depletion: eyes that look tired past the typical model-stoicism, skin that resists glow.
Miu Miu SS26
It’s not just the big fashion houses that are changing their faces like this; celebrity makeup artists are embracing it too. Bleached brows and grey contour are a common occurrence on the red carpet – there is even a TikTok sector featuring tutorials to achieve the ‘tired girl’ look with prominent eye bags.
To look pale, tired, or faintly unwell and still be read as beautiful requires a specific kind of social insulation. It assumes youth, thinness, financial security and proximity to taste, and creates spaces where exhaustion is aestheticised rather than pathologised. It is proof that one can afford to look ill without consequence – a luxury not many of us have.
This aesthetic dovetails neatly with the pharmacological flattening promised by GLP-1s. Appetite is depleted, curves soften or vanish – with them, the visual representation of access. Even beauty, once the site of exaggeration and fantasy (think back to the extravagant looks people were pulling off during lockdown) is asked to behave.
This is not to say that GLP-1s are inherently dangerous, nor are they solely aesthetic tools. For many, they offer legitimate medical benefits: managing diabetes, addressing metabolic disorders, or alleviating conditions that make weight loss clinically necessary. The issue isn’t the products themselves, or the several iterations of it, but the adoption of medical intervention into cultural logic and fashion imagery. This is where it toes a harmful line. Its effects are rebranded from health outcomes into stylistic cues.
It is in this context that ill-looking beauty becomes a status symbol precisely because it is unsustainable for most. For those without the buffers of economic, medical, or cultural security, illness is dangerous, not chic. Fashion’s current visual language risks colluding structural exhaustion with elegance and bodily scarcity with taste.