Do you feel like a Princess Diaries-style transformation would change your life? Jaume and Sithara read too deeply into 2000s makeover shows, drawing a direct line between them and the warped beauty culture we have today. You can also listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts! Subscribe below to get these in your inbox whenever a new one is out… In this episode, we talk about how makeover shows are probably more influential to our current toxic beauty climate than we give them credit for: You can directly connect the way that beauty and femininity were talked about on 2000s makeover shows to the way that it’s talked about on TikTok right now, and modern discourses around beauty. Things like “you’re not ugly you’re just poor”, and, “I need to get better looking not because I’m vain, but because it’s going to help me in my job” and “pretty privilege.” Sithara talks a lot of shit about BBC show Snog, Marry, Avoid, which she’s seen every single episode of. (It’s crazy that for 5 years, our taxes were spent animating a decuntification robot.) I’ve defined something called the hag to slag spectrum. It refers to the perspective of the external eye in which you are either a counter-cultural hag that does not care about what men think of you, or you’re a slag, and you care too much about how you look and you’re tricking men with all your makeup. The makeover’s goal is to “correct” both ends of the spectrum — the hags and the slags — and to make them “normal.” Sad! Here are a few of the Snog, Marry, Avoid makeovers: We also discuss the Swan: The way it’s framed in these makeover shows is that by improving your appearance, you are going to reveal a truer, better self that’s being trapped inside your hideous, ugly, fat self. If surgery uncovers your real self, then refusing to have surgery is dishonest and like betraying yourself. Here are some transformations from that show: We use this quote from Sophie Gilbert’s 2025 Girl on Girl as a framework for this episode: The mode of the decade was self- improvement. The aesthetic was tanned, toned, homogenized beauty, a plasticized kind of perfection, made all the more desirable because it could be purchased. Anybody’s body — anybody — could be refashioned as a status symbol, an emblem of conspicuous shop-till-you-drop consumption. More than ever before, people’s exteriors were understood to reflect their inner identities, both of which seemed malleable and endlessly unprovable. Cosmetic surgeries were widely touted and understood to be fixes for the imperfect self, with the reality shows in particular hammering home the message that becoming skinny, hot, and sexy would totally change a person’s life Get updated when there’s a new episode! The post is titled in reference to the fantastic There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television. Critical Studies in Media Communication (2010) by Alice Marwick. Further reading: * Marwick, Alice. (2010). There’s a Beautiful Girl Under All of This: Performing Hegemonic Femininity in Reality Television. Critical Studies in Media Communication. 27. 251-266. 10.1080/15295030903583515. * Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves by Sophie Gilbert (2025) * Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life by Micki McGee (2005) * Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity by Brenda R. Weber (2009) * Time for an entirely new face or body? The chequered history of the TV makeover show by Daisy Jones for the Guardian * A Ranking Of Makeover TV Shows, From The Destructive To The Uplifting Makeover TV by Julia Brucculieri for Huffpost lol (link) This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit furtherreadingpod.substack.com
