Dermorexia: Is our obsession with skincare becoming a disorder?

While interviewing young women for her book Pixel Flesh, author Ellen Atlanta began to notice that many of them were displaying signs of an obsessive fixation with their skincare. She met women who timed the application of their products to the millisecond, who wouldn’t go outside during sunlight hours, who taped up their parents’ car windows to avoid UV rays. These young women would become distressed by the idea of not having access to their skincare regimen. “The more I spoke to women the more I realised that the preoccupations and obsessions that we are used to pathologising with food and exercise are now applied to the world of beauty,” says Atlanta.

While beauty has always been prized, recently it seems like culture has become more visual, shallow and individualistic. Today we are seeing our own faces more than ever before. This, combined with increasingly advanced and accessible technology (digital and surgical) and a heightened fear of ageing, has created an environment where people have developed an obsessive preoccupation with “glowing up” and the elaborate skincare routines that promise to achieve it. But as 13-year-old girls start seeking Botox and people are going into debt to afford their treatments, is this preoccupation veering into disordered territory?  

Jessica DeFino, beauty researcher, writer, and critic of The Review of Beauty, believes so. Last year, she coined a new term to describe the obsessive behaviours that we are starting to see around skincare regimens: “dermorexia”. As she defines it, dermorexia is a fixation on skincare and reaching an aesthetic goal that becomes harmful, negatively affecting the health of our skin as well as our mental health.

The beauty industry has always sold us the idea that the aesthetic of our skin is synonymous with skin health, with “clear”, poreless, glassy skin being seen as good, rather than skin that functions effectively. “Skin serves a huge purpose beyond aesthetic purposes,” DeFino tells Dazed. “The aesthetic goal of perpetually youthful, poreless skin with no texture or pigmentation is not a health goal.” 

Trying to reach that goal is often detrimental, as it can impair the skin barrier and disrupt the skin microbiome. Excessive product use and harsh ingredients can cause inflammatory conditions like acne, psoriasis, rosacea, eczema and dermatitis. As the immune system’s first line of defence, our skin is vital. “There really are full body and brain consequences to impairing it day after day with excessive skincare and harsh ingredients, particularly on younger vulnerable skin,” says DeFino. 

It’s unsurprising that so many of us are vulnerable to developing an unhealthy relationship with our appearance, as we are being bombarded with these messages and pressures from all directions. One source of these pressures, says LA-based licensed aesthetician Chandra Johnson, is the “huge wave of celebrities undergoing cosmetic procedures to turn back the clock”. While people want to match what celebrities look like, most do not have the finances and resources to achieve the idealised look through surgery or tweakments. “Skincare comes into play for those of us who don’t have the same lifestyle as celebrities,” says Johnson. “We’re throwing too much into the mix because we are consuming content at an exorbitant rate and there are just so many products and tools out there that it overwhelms the system and, in turn, can become an obsession.”

In a world obsessed with image, where our faces are our greatest commodities, it’s not hard to see how unhealthy relationships [with our bodies] can extend to skincare rituals – Ellen Atlanta

The rapid pace of new beauty product launches has created a cycle of inventing flaws and marketing solutions, from butt masks to underarm lotions. This trend has even extended to ‘luxury’ deodorants, with high-end brands like Givenchy, Dior and Necessaire entering the market.

Our mass consumption of these products is likely being driven by our collective anxiety and trauma from the last few years. “During the pandemic, we saw a rise in eating disorders in young people as they felt a loss of control of their surroundings and external lives, combined with an increase in video calls causing more focus on physical appearance,” says Atlanta. “In a world obsessed with image, where our faces are our greatest commodities, it’s not hard to see how these unhealthy relationships can extend to skincare rituals.”

Global crises like the pandemic, climate change, economic hardships and political upheavals have all contributed to a sense of collective helplessness. In response, skincare – which is increasingly marketed to us as self-care – offers a seemingly controllable way to relax and regain a sense of agency over one’s body and appearance. “When power and security are politically inaccessible, people attempt to find security and power through beauty,” says DeFino. Psychologist Dr Emily Green Beyond concurs: “Like other compulsive disorders, there may be a component of the urge for control.” According to her, a structured, rigid beauty routine – think the morning shed that blew up this year – can be a form of coping and an illusion of control. 

So what can be done to combat these harmful fixations? Dr Green recommends combating harmful beauty fixations by teaching media literacy to young people and educating consumers to be savvy, helping them understand influencers’ motivations and encouraging critical thinking about brand promotions before buying into proposed solutions.

To improve skincare practices, consumers should seek advice from credible medical professionals rather than influencers. This approach helps people understand which skin conditions can be legitimately treated and which are natural variations to accept, discouraging the pursuit of unnecessary or ineffective products. However, when it comes to protecting young people, much of the onus really falls on parents. “So much responsibility and focus has been put on the young girls who are doing these elaborate skincare routines,” says DeFino. “What we really need to recognise is that they are just playing with the world that we, the adults, have created for them.”