Body, beauty, enrichment: How the growing cosmetic industry justifies and valorizes aesthetically modified bodies

This article enquires into the cosmetic procedures industry, a growing economic field which offers individuals a variety of professional services to aesthetically enhance their bodies. Expanding the work of Boltanski and Esquerre, we theorize the rise of the cosmetic procedures industry as part of a broader shift toward enrichment economies, within which markets focus less on producing new entities and more on capitalizing on existing ones. Crucially, this development hinges on cultural processes in the sense that economic actions must be justified, and an entity’s value is not determined by inherent properties, nor simply labor, but hinges on classificatory and narrative processes. Through this cultural lens, we investigate how the cosmetic procedures industry justifies and promotes its services, while simultaneously valorizing specific body aesthetics and ideals. Methodologically, our study conducts a large-scale discursive thematic analysis of textual and visual representations from UK and Dutch cosmetic clinics’ internet homepages and social media channels (n = 847 documents). Empirically, we identify three central schemas structuring the analyzed discourse: (1) authenticity through modification; (2) normalizing bodily interventions; and (3) constructing the body as a site for investments.