Ozempic and beauty

on the freedom to choose beauty, the daughter I want to raise, aesthetics in America, and more.

Ballet (1876) by French impressionist Edgar Degas who knew a thing or two about beauty. Image from Wikimedia Commons

I was twelve or thirteen and I had just polished off a plate of blueberry pancakes at a diner. I would not remember this story had the next few seconds not broken my heart. I stood in the parking lot swinging my arms around, thinking about the last few bites where the pancake had absorbed the maple syrup and salted butter. I smiled to myself, swirling my purple polka dot raincoat around. And then someone walked up to me, who shall remain unnamed, pinched the upper side of my ample thigh and said you need to lose this.

Today my husband pinches that same area, as if to wake me from domestic bliss.

the freedom to choose beauty

I was a chubby and misshapen child, stiff teenager, and quite ungraceful in my early twenties. What I will never know is who I might have become if I was not convinced of my physical inadequacies. The common narrative is, You were given the chance to focus on other qualities. It is positive that you were not fixated on your looks.

There is high likelihood this is true, but there is another possibility. Because I did not feel beautiful until my late twenties, it is possible that I missed out on aspects of the human experience that I would have enjoyed.

You see, I think that people feel varying degrees of agency over their lives based on their circumstances. Women and girls are robbed of this agency, from a polka dot raincoat wearing-age, when we tell them who they are, as opposed to letting them discover it for themselves. The problem with this attitude is it views us as clay, free for others to shape. The others are not necessarily men, as grown women, be they mothers, grandmothers, or aunts, also feel entitled to tell young girls who they are and should become. We are told that our sum total is beauty and then everything else. The everything else we are free to choose, but if we have an abundance of beauty, there is less room for the rest. It is possible that young boys experience this too but instead of beauty, strength is the singular quality against which all other qualities are measured.

So, how do we determine the difference between a beauty that is freeing versus oppressive? I think of it like a relationship. A relationship is life-giving if you choose to stay in relation, as opposed to being forced, and a weight loss drug like Ozempic denies women the freedom to choose beauty.

the daughter I want to raise

There is a novel I can write about an Indian-American woman and her relationship with her body, but for now a few paragraphs will have to suffice. To start, how do you raise a young girl to have a healthy relationship with her body, which is to say, with herself (too often we divorce the mental from the physical)?

How do you show her that her existence is an inexplainable miracle, and she, which includes her body, is a remarkable creature capable of infinite movement and stillness? Like the ocean, like a flower, like mountains, she was born perfect and human culture has never known how to honor this truth so instead we make a mess of it. How do you raise a young girl to hold herself in such high regard that someday soon she teaches her own mother the meaning of womanhood, as opposed to what her mother has been living— an apology. How do you teach a young girl that it is not beauty, giving birth, or softness that makes you a woman— it is the act of being a self amid the violence of others’ projections.

I do not have daughters yet but I am readying myself for when the time, and the herculean task, comes. It is from this mindset that I approach the topic of Ozempic. I am not interested in discussing it as a drug to treaty obesity. The questions I find more interesting are, what does it mean for each woman to define beauty on her own terms? For beauty to be shown in variation and not homogenization? For beauty to be about understanding our bodies better, as opposed to further estrangement? For beauty to be an exhale, a release— not a tightening, rigid sucking in of our bellies?

aesthetics in America

We have been in a cultural upheaval of whiteness for the last two decades, and this includes ideas of beauty. Our embrace of more skin colors, hair types, and facial features will likely continue, and in a few more decades beauty will be less Eurocentric than ever. This is positive and the right direction to move in because we move towards truth. No people, be it an ethnic group, class, or gender, have a monopoly on beauty.

But have we made any progress in terms of body shape and size, which are also varied across ethnicities and cultures, not mention body chemistries and lifestyles? Despite the rise of highly visible and mostly celebrated plus-sized women like Adele, Lizzo, Ashley Graham, Rebel Wilson, and Barbie Ferreira, I am not convinced that American society accepts varied bodies. I am also not convinced that these women view themselves as beautiful, as many have utilized their resources to lose and keep off the weight.

And then along comes Ozempic, a quick and easy way to make ourselves smaller and less threatening to the norm.

what is beauty

The few faces I have seen in real life with modifications were frightening, so I do not have an extensive library I can reference of women who are both modified and beautiful. The women I do know, who I consider beautiful, have faces and features of so many variations.

Aparna and Aradhya radiate. Their smiles and heart-shaped faces a golden blend of their North Indian mother and father. Sowmya and Meenal have rosy Konkani cheeks and sparkling eyes that memorialize their mother and grandmother. Tiara and Usha are long and willowy, like both parents, and resemble Gujurati royalty both in stillness while sitting and in motion, while dancing.

Modification to enhance beauty is an ancient practice, I won’t pretend otherwise, and for each person the line is drawn somewhere. I thread my eyebrows and upper lip, cut and highlight my hair, apply makeup, and I am open to dental work. I have two aunts in India who do neither and look down on such beauty upkeep. The meaning of ‘natural’ changes from them, to me, to the Kardashians. Each woman is free to find her meaning. I draw the line at what I consider severe modification; surgery, botox, and Ozempic. Any procedure that is invasive or changes my body chemistry is too much an alteration and a dependency.

My grandmother, who was always plain-faced, wore lotus-shaped diamond earrings, a red bottu, and a sari, would suck her teeth while watching me apply kajal. One practice leads to another she would say. I found this to be true, to an extent. I enjoy makeup but I do not need makeup. My fairly minimal enjoyment of it has not led me to consider more invasive changes.

life on our terms

A less considered point I want to share is, modifications like Ozempic or botox become part of a person’s ritual. They require repeated use. The average American woman spends almost 4 hours a day on enhancing her beauty and 4 hours a day on her phone. If she is awake for sixteen hours, she is spending half of her waking time on these two activities.

My hope for human society is human flourishing. As fabulous and fun as beauty enhancement can be, as giggle-inducing and educational as one’s phone can be, experiencing half of our consciousness in a state of semi-consciousness is a waste. A waste of our intellect, creativity, and capacity for connectedness.

People have a right to make choices about their body, their health, and how they spend their time. And there should be no stigma or shame associated with personal decisions; a common turn of phrase in liberal circles, but we all know that there is a place for guilt and shame in human society. So here I am applying just a little bit of it.

You can shame someone into good behavior— although it is contestable how effective this is as a long-term strategy—and someone who is shameless is, in a sense, not gelling with the rest of us. They don’t care enough what we think. Ah that is the conundrum isn’t it? People who care too much or too little are plenty, people who care just the right amount are scarce.

Shame can be effective when wielded against the powerful. We can shame the rich and the greedy. Brutes and bullies. The cruel and the apathetic. I am not saying the, mostly wealthy, women who choose to take Ozempic should be shamed; I am saying each and every one of us who upholds the narrative that thin is superior or that feminine beauty is a requirement, should be.

Ozempic as technology

I am a beginner in understanding the global pharmaceutical industry but I am aware of their disgressions. This makes me all the more weary of Novo Nordisk, the manufacturer of Ozempic and Wegovy. It is marketed and sold as a drug to treat obesity and diabtes. The dark irony that the market is selling a product to combat issues created by other products is not lost on me. The CEO of Novo Nordisk makes $78 million a year, as compared to the average Dane who earns $46,972 pre-tax. The capitalism surrounding Ozempic aside, the question to consider is, why do we need this drug?

beauty is culture

As an Indian I would never say that beauty is vain or unnecessary. There is beauty in, for example, fashion and fashion is culture. When I tie on the pants of a salvaar kameez, that is a feeling of being Indian. When I part my hair down the middle and rub coconut oil into my ends, that is an Indian feeling. When I hear the sound of bangles or anklets, that is an Indian sound.

I have my materal grandfather’s legs and my maternal grandmother’s arms. I have the forehead of my paternal grandmother and my own mother’s nose. My hips are almost uniquely mine but also possibly my father’s. If I change my body I am changing my relation to this lineage. What kind of society will we be if we no longer resemble or remember our ancestry?

from the past to the future

I have lately found myself contemplating the future. I live in Silicon Valley, a place that claims to have a monopoly on futurism, but this is not true. If you plant an avocado tree in your backyard you are creating the future. Palestinians come to mind, as a group fighting to exist in the future. The more agency, however little or vast, everyday people feel in creating their futures, the more just our world.

Designers like myself are given a mandate to shape the future of user experience and technology, but it would be a lie to say that we alone create products. We create the future with the labor and data of our users so, in a sense, we are co-creating without always naming it as such. Similarly, markets are co-creating with consumers. Individually and collectively, we choose what we do and do not want.

Ozempic is not the answer to beauty. It is also not the answer to our future. The body is meant to change. As it ages, expands or contracts, balloons or droops, I think the female body and self is not modified into confidence. We fall into confidence, like one falls in love.

At some point it will be too late, and we will forget what it was to fall into ourselves. So tell me this. Is our future about more information, more data, and more uniformity? Or will it be a fractal future of more knowledge and more wisdom?