Beauty Sick

We live in a beauty-sick world that teaches women to believe beauty matters most. Let’s change that.

Today’s girls and women embody a bewildering set of contradictions. They don’t want to be Barbie dolls, but, like generations before them, feel pressure to look like them. They’re angry about the media’s treatment of women, but often consume the very outlets that belittle them. They mock our culture’s absurd beauty ideals and make videos exposing Photoshopping tricks, but emulate the same images they reject. They critique social media for presenting a false reality, but still download apps to airbrush their selfies. Simply put, a beauty-sick culture leaves too many of today’s women at risk.

Yet many of these same women are eager for a way to step away from the mirror eager for a way forward. In Beauty Sick, Renee Engeln, PhD, provides invaluable motivation and workable solutions for women to embrace their whole selves, claim the futures they deserve, and, ultimately, change the very world that made them beauty sick in the first place.

Beauty Sick reveals the shocking consequences of our culture’s obsession with appearance on girls’ and women’s emotional and physical health, their wallets, and their ambitions. Those consequences include depression, eating disorders, disruptions in cognitive processing, and wasted time and money. Engeln also addresses how media campaigns that champion the “everyone is beautiful in their own way” mentality can be surprisingly damaging. Beauty Sick sparks an overdue conversation among women of all ages living in today’s appearance-obsessed world.

Weaving in scientific studies with real women’s stories and experiences, Engeln shares how small changes in how we think and talk about ourselves and other women can pave a pathway out of beauty sickness and leave women even more ready to fight the battles our world needs them to fight.

About the Author

Renee Engeln, PhD, is an award-winning professor of psychology at Northwestern University. Her work has appeared in numerous academic journals and at academic conferences, and she speaks to groups across the country. She is regularly interviewed by the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Today.com, the Huffington Post, Think Progress, and other national media, as well as local outlets and college student publications. Her TEDx talk at the University of Connecticut has more than 250,000 views on YouTube. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.