A fashion subculture that uses medical imagery – like pills, plasters, syringes and even razorblades – to shatter stigmas and kick off conversations around mental health? It sounds unconventional, but that’s exactly what menhera is all about.

Menhera, or “mental healther” in Japanese, pairs the now-famous pastel-toned kawaii look with still-taboo subjects like self-harm, PTSD and chronic illness. Its fans say the look has prompted an entire community to speak more openly about mental health whilst being able to keep up a cute aesthetic.

The style originated in the Harajuku district of Japan’s capital, Tokyo, which has for years birthed outlandish fashion trends – so much so that “harajuku” or “Harajuku Fashion” has become a byword for a staggering variety of subcultures. It’s perhaps no shock that menhera was spawned in a nation that has a complicated relationship with mental health issues, as well as a famously high suicide rate; a country where suicides from overwork even have their own name: karo jisatsu.

The hashtag #menhera has – to date – accumulated 69.4m posts on TikTok and 131,000 posts on Instagram worldwide; all of that content creating a global gallery of glittery razorblades, silver syringes and noose necklaces. To outsiders, the style is striking and can seen extreme. But people within the community say that it’s helped them talk about their own mental health – and that the world has a lot to learn from it.

Addy Somers (@addyharajuku), 23, is internationally recognised as one of the top UK-based content creators within the Harajuku and menera subcultures. Her fun, bite-sized chunks of content on the subject was what led me to discover menhera. Over seven years, Somers has built a following of 100,000 Instagram followers and more than half a million on Tiktok.

“I personally wear menhera every day. The other day I wore a box cutter as a necklace and beaded candy jewellery which included pills… It tells a subversive story,” Addy says. “It draws people in because it's more digestible for the average person. Yes, it still stands out as it’s slightly ‘weird looking’ but it’s not intimidating… I think it's allowed people to feel like they look cute, whilst also telling a story about the wearer.”

What the wearer chooses within menhera is often highly personal. Your clothing and accessories is a canvas for expression that can change depending on how you feel that day or the topic affecting you. This is effectively a form of what is commonly described as “vent art”, a type of expression where a topic or emotion is “vented” creatively; in this case, using fashion. 

Menhera is, by nature, inclusive and looks to highlight awareness of mental wellbeing as well as invisible disabilities and health conditions. It isn’t just about outward displays like razors or bandages to raise the issue of self-harm, or syringes for HRT injections or addiction; designers selling menhera will also stock a large range of clothing sizes in that particular style and use soft, loose material to make it easy to wear and move around in. Comfort is key: leggings, sweats and baggy jumpers. 

“There’s no expectations,” Somers says. “You are just as valid wearing comfortable clothes as you are wearing a really elaborate outfit with a corset, etc.” She makes it clear that the aim of menhera isn’t the pursuit of sympathy or attention. It’s a statement of empowerment.

“It’s a way of taking something that's inherently negative in your life and making something that you’re proud to wear. I feel like I've really benefited from that process, it’s not a case of getting over your experiences, it's bringing [them] to the foreground in a way that you're in control over. It can be extremely cathartic.” 

Why has the trend has grown so popular beyond Japan? “Despite mental health having better treatment in Western countries… there are still a lot of misconceptions,” she explains. “Mental health is a universal experience that the fashion, art and menhera community can help discuss and bring comfort to!”

Puvithel Rajan (@puvithel). Photo: Courtesy of Rajan, by Mory Laine

Ohio-based clothing and accessories designer Puvithel Rajan (@puvithel) believes expression through fashion can help people and accordingly she often uses mental health themes in her work. The 30-year-old hopes to use her creations to bring attention to health and social issues; she’s currently working on a PTSD-themed menhera line. The top she wears during our interview reads: “I did not hurt myself”.

“The vent with the piece I'm wearing is a collab with another artist,” Rajan tells me. “With PTSD there is a lot of ‘victim blaming’; the designs are used as a message reminding people not to do that – something happened to sufferers to cause this illness and the symptoms.”

“With [the use of medical imagery fashion] in particular, it’s about destigmatising. Pills is one I really like. I’ve struggled personally with the stigma [around using] them. If we take something and make it cute, rather than scary, it can help people stop feeling so bad about it or treating it differently.”

“People have different reasons for wearing menhera,” she adds. “I’ve seen people wearing co-ords with syringe accessories because they’re on HRT and injecting testosterone, for example.” 

Rajan also echoed Somers’ thoughts on empowerment. “Menhera is an activist and political group;' it’s more than just fashion. #menhera is a safe space for people within the community to talk.” 

The nature of menhera clothing and its accessories may seem unnerving to the outside world, but its followers emphasise that they aren’t out to glamourise or trivialise mental health issues. As 23-year-old Rachel Caton (@sunreiireii) puts it: “Menhera is a term that was created by the mental health community for the mental health community… It was never created to be triggering.” 

Caton did, however, acknowledge the potential risks of certain aspects of menhera style: “I can definitely see someone potentially being triggered by it. Unfortunately, people try to emulate trends they see online which can be misconstrued and they overdo it. People end up doing things offensively when they haven’t done enough research.”

“People within the community,” she adds, “have done their research and have a deeper understanding of where it’s coming from… When I discovered menhera, a light bulb went off in my head and I was like, holy shit, this is everything.” 

Caton likes playing with different combinations of styles that all fall under the Harajuku umbrella. “I do struggle with mental health and I use my body like a canvas for representing how I'm feeling that day… It's so euphoric when you can have a space to be like, ‘I feel like shit, but at least I look cute.’”

Designer Charlotte Remington, (@eggliencreations), 29, uses all things menhera within her work. The style, she says, has helped her manage bouts of depression and manic episodes arising from her bipolar disorder.

“I found that when I was manic I really needed an outlet for all the energy that I had, so I experimented with a lot of different crafts and fell in love with epoxy resin,” she says. “I started making and designing clothes, bags and enamel pins, most of which are menhera-themed… As an artist – and maybe being bipolar is a factor too – I am constantly fluctuating between wanting to vent about negative feelings and wanting to cheer other people up with positivity. My shop is filled with things to help with those types of feelings.” 

Menhera isn’t the first example of what you might call “vent art” in the fashion world: Back in 2001, Alexander McQueen famously caused controversy over a show inspired by a psychiatric hospital. But despite the initial shock that might be caused by seeing someone wear razor blades or boxcutters, menhera has the same aim of many a mental health awareness campaign – it lets people declare “it’s okay not to be okay”. It’s just doing it one pastel pill brooch at a time.

@elizabethmccaf

Starting this month—21 years after Microsoft turned off Clippy because people hated it so much—Google is rolling out a new feature called “assistive writing” that butts into your prose to make style and tone notes on word choice, concision, and inclusive language. 

The company’s been talking about this feature for a while; last year, it published documentation guidelines that urge developers to use accessible documentation language, voice and tone. It’s rolling out selectively to enterprise-level users, and is turned on by default. But this feature is showing up for end users in Google Docs, one of the company's most widely-used products, and it’s annoying as hell.

At Motherboard, senior staff writer Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai typed “annoyed” and Google suggested he change it to “angry” or “upset” to “make your writing flow better.” Being annoyed is a completely different emotion than being angry or upset—and “upset” is so amorphous, it could mean a whole spectrum of feelings—but Google is a machine, while Lorenzo’s a writer.

Social editor Emily Lipstein typed “Motherboard” (as in, the name of this website) into a document and Google popped up to tell her she was being insensitive: “Inclusive warning. Some of these words may not be inclusive to all readers. Consider using different words.”  

Journalist Rebecca Baird-Remba tweeted an “inclusive warning” she received on the word “landlord,” which Google suggested she change to “property owner” or “proprietor.” 

Motherboard editor Tim Marchman and I kept testing the limits of this feature with prose from excerpts from famous works and interviews. Google suggested that Martin Luther King Jr. should have talked about “the intense urgency of now” rather than “the fierce urgency of now” in his “I Have a Dream” speech and edited President John F. Kennedy’s use in his inaugural address of the phrase “for all mankind” to say “for all humankind.” A transcribed interview of neo-Nazi and former Klan leader David Duke—in which he uses the N-word and talks about hunting Black people—gets no notes. Radical feminist Valerie Solanas’ SCUM Manifesto gets more edits than Duke’s tirade; she should use “police officers” instead of “policemen,” Google helpfully notes. Even Jesus (or at least the translators responsible for the King James Bible) doesn’t get off easily—rather than talking about God’s “wonderful” works in the Sermon on the Mount, Google’s robot asserts, He should have used the words “great,” “marvelous,” or “lovely.”

Google told Motherboard that this feature is in an “ongoing evolution.”  

“Assisted writing uses language understanding models, which rely on millions of common phrases and sentences to automatically learn how people communicate. This also means they can reflect some human cognitive biases,” a spokesperson for Google said. “Our technology is always improving, and we don't yet (and may never) have a complete solution to identifying and mitigating all unwanted word associations and biases.”

Being more inclusive with our writing is a good goal, and one that’s worth striving toward as we string these sentences together and share them with the world. “Police officers” is more accurate than “policemen.” Cutting phrases like “whitelist/blacklist” and “master/slave” out of our vocabulary not only addresses years of habitual bias in tech terminology, but forces us as writers and researchers to be more creative with the way we describe things. Shifts in our speech like swapping “manned” for “crewed” spaceflight are attempts to correct histories of erasing women and non-binary people from the industries where they work.

But words do mean things; calling landlords “property owners” is almost worse than calling them “landchads,” and half as accurate. It’s catering to people like Howard Schultz who would prefer you not call him a billionaire, but a “person of means.” On a more extreme end, if someone intends to be racist, sexist, or exclusionary in their writing, and wants to draft that up in a Google document, they should be allowed to do that without an algorithm attempting to sanitize their intentions and confuse their readers. This is how we end up with dog whistles.   

Thinking and writing outside of binary terms like “mother” and “father” can be useful, but some people are mothers, and the person writing about them should know that. Some websites (and computer parts) are just called Motherboard. Trying to shoehorn self-awareness, sensitivity, and careful editing into people’s writing using machine learning algorithms—already deeply flawed, frequently unintelligent pieces of technology—is misguided. Especially when it’s coming from a company that’s grappling with its own internal reckoning in inclusivity, diversity, and mistreatment of workers who stand up for better ethics in AI. 

These suggestions will likely improve as Google Docs users respond to them, putting an untold amount of unpaid labor into training the algorithms like we already train its autocorrect, predictive text, and search suggestion features. Until then, we’ll have to keep telling it that no, we really do mean Motherboard.

I Worked My Ass Off for the Kardashian-Jenner Apps. I Couldn’t Afford Gas.

There were 19 miles to empty in my gas tank, 15 miles between my apartment and my office, and $5 and change in my bank account. I pulled my 10-year-old Ford Mustang—banged up and bright yellow—into the Arco station at Western and Melrose, popped open the fuel filler, inserted the nozzle, and pumped, the price ticker jumping 20 or 30 cents with each trigger-pull of my finger. I stopped when it hit $4—a little over a gallon at the place and time: Los Angeles, California. Summer 2015.

When I started up the ’Stang, though, the range indicator barely moved. It was not enough to get me from East Hollywood to Santa Monica and back in weekday traffic (a one- to two-hour commute each way). I panicked, slapped at the steering wheel, and screamed. And then I cried through my carefully applied contour. 

I was an assistant editor on the Kardashian Jenner Official Apps, and I didn’t make enough money to make it to work.

It was a Thursday, I think. I called out “sick.” Direct deposit would hit my bank account the next morning and I’d put $20 in the tank then—never more than $20 at once, just in case of emergency. What if I got a flat tire or my cat needed to go to the vet, and my precious funds were tied up in fuel that wasn’t needed at that exact moment?

These are the kinds of calculations I learned to make after accepting a position at Whalerock Industries, the digital media company the Kardashian-Jenner family hired to create their apps, in May 2015. As an assistant editor, my yearly salary was $35,000—low and laughable in LA, especially considering my experience. (I wrote and produced celebrity features for outlets like Harper’s Bazaar Arabia and ELLE Mexico in my previous role at an editorial agency, but the jobs weren’t steady.) This is what it takes to work with the most famous women in the world, I thought. I repeated hustle culture catchphrases in my head like affirmations, like prayers from the prosperity gospel: You have to pay your dues. It will all be worth it someday. Hard work pays off. 

During my time at Whalerock, it did not.

I took home a little more than $600 per week, after taxes. Nearly half my income went to renting my run-down studio. The other half was spread across utilities (heat, electric, internet), transportation (car insurance, gas), health care (co-pays, birth control), and food. Then, of course, there were things like tampons and toothpaste. Oil changes and overdraft fees. Concealer to cover my anxiety acne. I sold my clothes to consignment shops to earn extra cash. I looked into selling my plasma, my eggs.

I wanted to get my fucking ass up, I wanted to be in that room, I wanted to climb the corporate ladder, whatever. I wanted to work. I just couldn’t afford to get there.

When the now-defunct apps launched in September 2015, featuring content I’d created over the previous five months, the Hollywood Reporter wrote that 600,000 people subscribed to Kylie Jenner’s app alone in the first two days. Insider estimated the apps would generate $32,000,000 from the $3 monthly subscriptions in a single year. I was shopping for groceries at the 99 Cents Only Store.

Kim Kardashian—a billionaire, born to a millionaire, who rose to internet-breaking fame on the E! reality show Keeping Up With The Kardashians—recently told Variety she had “the best advice” for women in business. “Get your fucking ass up and work,” she said. “It seems like nobody wants to work these days.”

Khloé Kardashian chimed in with her own wisdom for working women: “If you're the smartest person in that room, you’ve gotta go to another room. A lot of people get intimidated to be in a room full of smart thinkers, wealthy people, whatever it is—I wanna be in that room. I’m like, I gotta hustle.” 

Kim Kardashian later told Good Morning America that her attitude in the Variety interview was affected by an earlier question about being famous only for being famous. “It wasn’t a blanket statement towards women,” she said. “It was taken out of context, but I’m really sorry if it was received that way.” (A Variety editor responded that the context was Kardashian being asked for “her best advice to women in business.”) 

When I read Kardashian’s original quote about women not working hard, I thought of the labor I put into launching the Kardashian Jenner Official Apps—days, nights, holidays, weekends, whenever and wherever I was needed. I wasn’t alone. I spoke to two former employees who worked on the apps and two former employees of KKW Beauty, Kim Kardashian’s cosmetics line, all of whom described an environment of overwork at the expense of their mental and sometimes physical health, as well as their career advancement. (A publicist for the Kardashian-Jenners and KKW Beauty initially replied to VICE’s request for comment on the claims in this story, saying they would respond soon, but never provided a comment, despite multiple requests to do so. Whalerock Industries did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) 

I thought of the extra labor I put into stretching my salary. I thought of crying in my car because I wanted to get my fucking ass up, I wanted to be in that room, I wanted to climb the corporate ladder, whatever. I wanted to work. I just couldn’t afford to get there.

I started at Whalerock Industries when the company was in the early stages of content development for all five Kardashian-Jenner apps, one for each sister (in age order: Kourtney, Kim, and Khloé Kardashian; Kendall and Kylie Jenner). I joined two other assistant editors, or “juniors,” on the editorial team, although the title was almost irrelevant—there were no senior editors yet.

The apps were supposed to act as digital hubs for exclusive, subscriber-only content tailored to the sisters’ individual interests, from fashion (Kendall) to fitness (Khloé). For months, the juniors brainstormed the apps’ content categories, wrote the apps’ launch articles, and collaborated with the tech and design teams to develop a custom content management system. We were given assignments ostensibly outside of Whalerock’s scope, too, like crafting the sisters’ promotional tweets for Keeping Up and DASH, their now-closed clothing boutique. 

Was the company strategically leveraging the cheap labor of young, eager-to-please editors before bringing on more experienced, expensive leaders? At the time, I didn’t question it or care. The work was creative, and I was excited to do it. I embraced any and all extra responsibilities that came my way, even training my own supervisors when they were eventually hired.

The gap between my work and my wages widened in late July, when it was announced that the editorial team would be separated by sister. Each app would have one senior editor and one assistant editor. Since there weren’t enough assistant-level employees to go around, I was assigned to both Khloé’s and Kendall’s apps and reported to two separate senior editors—I was the only member of the team expected to churn out the work of two people for the price of one.

My frustration was matched only by my determination. I threw myself into the work to show my supervisors that I deserved more—a raise, a title change, anything. I suppose you could say my effort was recognized: I was soon voted Employee of the Week. I still have my colleagues’ nominations, scribbled anonymously on scraps of notebook paper.

“My vote is for Jessica! She is an outstanding assistant editor who is extremely organized, dedicated, and passionate about the content she creates. I love working with her and am so impressed by her work ethic and positive demeanor on a daily basis,” one read.

“Jessica—you’ve done an impeccable job working on two girls but not just working on them… rocking them to perfection,” said another.

I was awarded a free sample of Crème de la Mer. If only I could pay my landlord in luxury skincare.

When the apps’ anticipated launch date neared, working hours increased. “It was 24/7,” said Jennifer Chan, who joined the Kardashian-Jenner apps as a senior editor in July 2015. “I have many memories of working weekends, giving up holidays and evenings, missing birthday parties. I remember [when] we were still in launch mode, we got the afternoon off on a holiday, and [I was] like, I don’t have any plans because everyone I know assumes I’m unavailable.” 

Four of the five Kardashian-Jenner apps went live in the Apple App Store on September 14, 2015, at 3 a.m., and the team uploaded and edited content almost up to the minute. “We had to sleep overnight [in the office] to make sure,” Chan remembered. “I think it was a Sunday, too. We just spent the night.” 

Pre-launch, the Kardashian-Jenner family hadn’t been particularly involved in the editorial aspect of day-to-day operations. (I was once dispatched to the premiere for the movie Paper Towns to get original quotes from Kendall and Kylie—for use in their own apps—and had to spar for sound bites with members of the general media.) Post-launch, the apps were updated with fresh content daily, which often required the sisters’ immediate input or approval, and most of them ramped up their involvement, primarily over email. 

“It was very much ‘their schedule is your schedule,’” Chan said. “One Christmas, Kanye had just given [Kim], like, a million gifts, and she wanted me to post all the gifts on Christmas Day. I had to get [an internet] hotspot. It was my Christmas also, but I was posting all day to her app.” Chan later moved to Kourtney’s app and experienced much of the same. Answering holiday emails “was an expectation set by Whalerock,” according to Chan. “I don’t know if it was explicitly said, but it was pretty clear we couldn’t keep [the sisters] waiting.”

For members of the executive elite, wealth increases with the productivity of every undercompensated worker beneath them.

Lina, another former app editor who asked that her name be changed for fear of retaliation, said that Whalerock managers did not ask her to make herself available at all hours outright, but she also felt pressure to overperform. “If anything, it was [the sister] being a demanding boss, but I bought into it,” she said.“I would be on a date with my partner and I’d be on my phone, and this was every night,” she said. “He’d be like, ‘Can you please put your phone down?’ and I’d be like, ‘No, I can’t, this is [a] Kardashian!’ I wanted to make myself available at crazy hours and on the weekend because of who she was. I literally would be up at 2 a.m. answering [her] emails.”

Editors were also asked to check the apps before coming into the office every day to screen new content for potential typos or technical glitches as early as possible. “It was the first thing I did,” Chan said. “I would roll out of bed, wash my face, and make sure everything was looking good. I was checking [the apps] on my phone, driving into the office in traffic. It was pretty stressful.”

“It never entered my mind to think about how much I was actually making hourly,” Lina said. “It would be impossible to calculate, because I worked all the time. I honestly don’t even want to know.”

This disparity between worker output and income is in line with a nationwide trend. Between 1979 and 2019, worker productivity grew 59.7 percent, but wages increased only 15.8 percent. Instead of going towards worker paychecks, the value of their increased productivity flowed up the corporate ladder to executive salaries, stock options, and bonuses. In 1978, according to the Economic Policy Institute, the ratio of CEO-to-worker wages was 31-to-1; as of 2020, it’s 351-to-1. That’s a 1,322 percent increase for CEO pay in 42 years.

“If you put in the work, you will see results,” Kim Kardashian, who was crowned a billionaire in June 2021, said in her Variety interview. “It’s that simple.” And for Kardashian, perhaps it really is that simple: For members of the executive elite, wealth increases with the productivity of every undercompensated worker beneath them.

Whalerock Industries is not owned or operated by the Kardashian-Jenner family; the sisters were likely unaware of what the people behind their apps were paid. However, according to two former employees of Kim Kardashian’s cosmetics brand KKW Beauty, which is currently closed in anticipation of a relaunch, the labor issues at the apps paralleled those at the Kardashian-owned operation. (Global beauty conglomerate Coty purchased a 20 percent stake in KKW Beauty in 2020.)

“It felt very exploitative,” said Ellen, who requested that her name be changed out of fear of retaliation, in a phone interview. She pointed out that both Kim Kardashian and Kylie Jenner, who heads her own beauty brand called Kylie Cosmetics, have spoken to the press about employing lean teams.

In 2018, Forbes reported that Kylie Jenner’s “near-billion-dollar empire consists of just seven full-time and five part-time employees,” noting that for the “ultralight” startup, “operation is essentially air.” In a 2020 interview with Grazia US, Kardashian revealed that “KKW Beauty and KKW Fragrance has a team of seven people… coming up with every campaign, our model shoots, our socials, our everything.”

“Being in that, you realize how many roles you had to actually do,” Ellen said. “From the second we woke up, basically, we always had texts [waiting]. When we went to bed we would still be texting.” 

“There was a general expectation that people were so lucky to be working for them that they knew that they could treat people like crap.”

“There was no such thing as work-life balance,” said Theresa, who also requested that her name be changed due to fears of retaliation  “It was like a 24/7 thing. There was just no such thing as a schedule.” 

Employees were also expected to absorb responsibilities outside of their scope, the women said, without the requisite salary. Both Ellen and Theresa said that KKW Beauty relied on the labor of two unpaid interns as well.

“Here’s this millionaire—she wasn’t a billionaire yet—who flaunts her excessive wealth, but she only wants [a few] people on the team because she’s cheap,” Ellen observed. Unlike some startups, where early employees accept lower salaries but earn shares through sweat equity, Ellen says she didn’t get any equity for her contributions to the brand.

Theresa said that it seemed like the Kardashian-Jenners viewed themselves as “the royal family of America” and thought that employees would “take any pay” to work with them. Ellen concurred: “There was a general expectation that people were so lucky to be working for them that they knew that they could treat people like crap,” said Ellen. “That was very obvious.”

That the prestige of working on the Kardashian-Jenner apps was somehow worth more than money or time or personal pleasure was an idea that permeated Whalerock, as well. But I still needed actual, literal money. 

So I side-hustled. I didn’t have the Kardashian money to launch a cosmetics line or a shapewear company (SKIMS), but I did what I could. To make ends meet, I freelanced for the entertainment site Ranker, compiling clickbait-y lists like “Fun Facts You Didn't Know About Lady Gaga” and “Which Delayed Albums Were Actually Worth The Wait?” at $20 to $50 apiece. 

When Whalerock caught wind of it, I was called into a manager’s office and reprimanded. Freelancing apparently violated a company rule restricting the outside writing projects employees could pursue. (Hustling your way to greater success, it seemed, was for the already rich, not those who worked for them.​​) While Whalerock allowed me to continue writing lists for Ranker, future freelance assignments would require their approval, they said. I stopped pursuing new freelance clients.

I set my sights on a raise. I walked into my one-year employee review clutching freshly printed pages of statistics and charts quantifying my accomplishments, along with analytics of the national median salary for my job title and experience level. I asked for a yearly salary of $50,000. I was told, “No one in the industry is making that much. Don’t get your hopes up.” 

“I became physically unwell. My hair was falling out. I was dealing with digestive issues I had never had before. I wasn’t taking care of my body because I was prioritizing this job above literally everything in life.”

I continued to advocate for myself and was eventually granted a pay increase—$42,000 a year, from what I remember—but it was too little money for too many hours and too much stress, so I applied to a few job openings. Soon after, I was called into a manager’s office yet again. One of her former colleagues had received my resumé and alerted the company to my application.

“My friend saw your name pop up and said, ‘I thought Jessica was your girl,’” she told me. “Well, I thought so, too. What’s going on?” 

I was shocked to the point of silence. I think I apologized for applying elsewhere. The company seemed to be surveilling all possible paths to a liveable income, from freelancing to finding a new job. I felt manipulated and monitored, paranoid and trapped. 

Lina described the Kardashian Jenner Official Apps as a “toxic work environment,” explaining, “I worked all the time. I did not sleep enough. I was drinking alcohol—way too much alcohol—to deal with the stress. I became physically unwell. My hair was falling out. I was dealing with digestive issues I had never had before. I wasn’t taking care of my body because I was prioritizing this job above literally everything in life.” 

Chan said she eventually left the company after a cop pulled her over for responding to urgent emails from Kourtney while driving. It was a Sunday. “I started crying as soon as the cop came up to my car and I just said, ‘I have a really stressful job, I’m so sorry,’” she remembered. “It was actually the cop who told me, ‘You need to quit your job.’ That’s what really hit home for me.” 

Chan added, “If he only knew that I’m not saving the world or finding a cure for cancer.”

As someone involved in the image-making process, I knew that the apps sold a beauty ideal that was unrealistic and unattainable, even for the Kardashian-Jenners themselves. Kylie’s app often promoted her $29 Kylie Cosmetics Lip Kits. (Kylie’s lips are famously the product of injectables.) Khloé’s app shared how to use contouring makeup to “get a nose job every single day.” (Khloé has since admitted to having an actual, surgical nose job.) Kim’s app published articles like “How To Facetune Your Face With Makeup.” (During my time there, Whalerock Industries employed a Photoshop artist to airbrush images for the apps.)

The Kardashian-Jenners’ shaping of beauty norms and ideals in the U.S. and beyond is singular. With a 20-season run of Keeping Up with the Kardashians and a new Hulu show called The Kardashians, the family has been productizing their personal lives since 2007. The social followings they amassed as a result—as of April 2022, 325 million Instagram followers for Kylie, 298 million for Kim, and so on—dwarf those of other major brands and celebrities. (Chanel, Tom Brady, and Reese Witherspoon have, respectively, 49.7 million, 11.8 million, and 27.5 million Instagram followers.) Add to that a rotating cast of famous partners—all choreographed into their television shows and social feeds—and the family has become a ubiquitous presence in Page Six, the pages of Vogue, and the front row at Fashion Week, all of which double as ad space for the sisters’ entrepreneurial projects. 

Over the course of their careers, the Kardashian-Jenners have leveraged their financial capital to accumulate beauty capital, and vice versa. They’ve extracted features and techniques from marginalized communities—plump lips, big butts, long acrylics, contoured faces—and grafted them onto their own cis white bodies for profit, while those same communities are cut out of the deal. They’ve Frankensteined an unreal standard of beauty and pushed their audience to “keep up” with them.

This isn’t exactly a novel concept. Beauty standards have long served as tools for advancing capitalist values. Just look at the illogical ideals we chase: hairless bodies, wrinkle-free skin, sunless tans. All require full rejection of the human body via constant product intervention. And beauty standards have always been physical manifestations of systems of oppression. “Beauty isn’t actually what you look like,” writes sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom in Thick: And Other Essays. “Beauty is the preferences that reproduce the existing social order.”

Much like the Kardashian-Jenners’ business standards demand outsized labor from their workers, their beauty standards require outsized aesthetic labor from their followers. Fans who adopt their aesthetic, purchase products from their beauty and clothing lines, and post to their own social media pages act as an army of (unpaid) marketers. The launch for Kylie’s $29 Lip Kit of 15,000 units sold out in minutes. 

Beyond makeup, actual body modification is on the rise. The use of cosmetic injectables, like filler and Botox, has grown to record rates over the past decade, with patients regularly referencing images of the Kardashian-Jenner sisters as inspiration. Anthony Youn, a Michigan-based plastic surgeon, noted “a Kardashianization of the younger people, who are especially looking to make similar changes as to what the Kardashians have had done” to the Daily Beast. Kim Kardashian’s infamous ass helped popularize the Brazilian butt lift, or BBL, a controversial procedure that one 2017 study found to have a mortality rate of one in 3,000. 

Beauty didn’t feel like self-expression anymore; it felt like a sickness. It felt like a second job—another one I couldn’t afford to keep.

The normalization of cosmetic surgery, illusory makeup, and altered photos raises the baseline standard of beauty for all—a form of aesthetic inflation, if you will. It makes it harder for women and girls to opt out of spending their time, money, and energy on aesthetic labor without facing financial and social consequences.

This work, like all traditional women’s labor—housework and childcare, for example; work that a capitalist society both demands and demeans—is so integrated into the take up of womanhood that it’s hardly thought of as “work.” It’s further divorced from the concept of labor through popular content like the Kardashian-Jenners’, which recategorizes it as fun, self-care, health, or empowerment. And performing beauty can feelempowering, since acquiring beauty capital confers literal power. 

But in the same way “girlbossing” empowers the individual “girlboss” but perpetuates the patriarchal values of hustle culture for everyone underneath her—see: the working conditions at the Kardashian-Jenner apps and KKW Beauty—performing beauty to gain power within a culture that rewards women for their looks further perpetuates those patriarchal values. 

Studies show that, besides the possible physical harms of surgeries, injectables, and even topical products, the mental health consequences of beauty culture parallel those of capitalism, which can alienate workers from communities and beset them with financial and emotional instability. It contributes to anxiety, depression, and low self-esteem, as well as body dysmorphia and disordered eating. Still, we buy into the beauty myth—the idea that embodying an aesthetic ideal will bring success and happiness—for the same reason we buy into the myth of meritocracy: Hope for transformation obscures the reality of harm. 

Reality caught up to me after I was diagnosed with dermatitis, a stress-related skin condition that manifested as rough, red skin around my eyes and mouth, in 2015. My self-esteem plummeted. I didn’t think I deserved to be seen. I developed a skin-damaging obsession with skincare and slipped into a deep depression. I couldn’t help but compare myself to the edited images I was uploading to the apps. Knowing the Kardashian-Jenner ideal was physically impossible didn’t stop me from internalizing it. 

I eventually left the company because I couldn’t stomach being part of that cycle. Beauty didn’t feel like self-expression anymore; it felt like a sickness. It felt like a second job—another one I couldn’t afford to keep.

Kim Kardashian told Variety that “nobody wants to work these days,” but seven years after stepping away from the apps, I see evidence of work all around me. I see the hours that every over-tanned, overfiltered, Kardashian-inspired influencer funnels into their appearance in the hopes of striking it rich on Instagram. I see the money my own best friends invest into their filler-enhanced lips in the hopes of finally feeling beautiful. 

In an aesthetic analog of the American dream, it’s those who are already in power that profit. The rest of us keep running on empty.

Jessica DeFino is a freelance beauty reporter whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Vogue, Allure, and more. She writes the beauty-critical newsletter The Unpublishable.

Cassandra Jenkins, an experimental songwriter from New York, estimates that she’s about 90 percent recovered from her case of COVID-19. The illness felt like the worst flu of her life, but she’s steadily worked her way back to feeling close to normal. Her goal now, she said on a phone call, is to recover financially. Jenkins tested positive for the virus while touring her latest kaleidoscopic, poetic record, 2021’s An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Now she’s in debt because of the costs of healing and hiding: the hotel room she bunkered in, the flights she canceled, and the money she didn’t earn because she couldn’t perform. Her first thought when she got the test result in Marchwas that she needed to take care of herself as much as possible — to shorten the amount of time she would spend laid up with the virus so that she could get back to performing. 

Now it’s possible, as Jenkins mused on Twitter, that she will get COVID again on her next round of shows. Infection seems inevitable. “It’s that joke about how so much of touring is for the exposure,” she said. “That sadly works both ways: The amount of exposure I get from playing a show is much less than the COVID exposure.” 

As COVID restrictions loosen across the country even while cases continue to tick up, driven by the contagious Omicron BA.2 variant, musicians are torn between protecting their lives and their livelihoods. They volley between thrill and terror, delighted to be back on stage but scared for their health. Five acts spoke to VICE about how they’re navigating this phase of the pandemic and the toll of constantly calculating COVID risks. 

Before she contracted the virus, Jenkins had not been cavalier about the dangers of performing. When Delta cases surged last summer, she said that she “painfully opted to pull out shows.” The cancellations weighed on her. “I missed it so much,” she said. “I’ve felt spiritually bankrupt by the inability to do the thing I’ve spent most of my life doing.” 

This spring, though, Jenkins was boosted. She wanted to play. During her tour, she was sleeping on a cramped tour bus with around 10 other people, which she called “the most hazardous conditions you could be in with an active case of COVID.” She woke up in a daze at 2:00pm one day, weary and fatigued, her voice starting to fade. Jenkins immediately put on a mask and headed to a hotel to quarantine. She ended up stranded by herself in a hotel room for five days in Aurora, Illinois, shivering and mired in brain fog as she tried to coordinate canceling her band members’ flights and cover expenses. 

“It’s an extreme struggle just to break even on tour,” Jenkins said. “At this point, a goal of mine is just to work myself back from putting myself into a lot of debt.” She lost nearly $1,000 to the hotel costs, and thousands more on canceling flights for her bandmates.

Jenkins considers her COVID experience to be a best-case scenario for a touring musician. She is immunocompromised, but her doctor was able to help her navigate finding the anti-viral Paxlovid at a nearby pharmacy. Friends ordered takeout to her hotel. She’s grateful she didn’t test positive in the fall, when she played a slate of shows across Europe in a five-week tour alongside six other people. She literally begged her audience to put on masks as they swayed and swarmed in small venues; she tried to translate her pleas to promoters in spite of the language barrier. “There were days when I was getting off of stages and feeling pure panic because I was certain we were all going to get sick,” she said.

There’s a fundamental tension in making these kinds of demands, Jenkins said, even when she feels they’re necessary to protect her. “I want to cultivate an atmosphere of freedom at my shows,” she said. “And I’m there scared for my survival every day.” 

Ivy Sole, a rapper and R&B singer from Charlotte who makes lush, sparse songs about romance and redemption, was originally slated to open for Cautious Clay in February. But after a string of cities she was supposed to play in dropped their mask mandates, she pulled out of the shows. Sole is immunocompromised, with moderate asthma, and she’s worried about the long-term health consequences of contracting the virus. Particularly as a Black woman, she said on a phone call, she wasn’t sure she would be able to receive adequate treatment for the virus. 

“It’s really difficult when the decision is whether or not you’re going to be paid or whether you’re going to risk your life,” she said. The standard rate for an opening act is $250 a show, she said. She didn’t think the amount of money she’d make on tour was substantial enough to cancel out the fear of getting sick.

That doesn’t mean Sole has stayed off the stage entirely. She’s played a few shows at college campuses that require their students to be vaccinated and tend to have a more compliant culture of mask-wearing. “It’s a very specific subset of the population that I’m performing for,” she said. She hopes that, by the fall, she’ll be able to expand her tour, but she’s waiting to see how cases ebb and flow and if any new variants circulate. “It’s just shitty to have to choose between possibly contracting the virus and what I feel like is the best way to connect with the audience through live performance,” she said. 

Sole feels the strain of those choices in her day-to-day life, too. “I think a lot of people have moved past the pandemic in their personal lives and started to engage with the world as if the pandemic were not a present thing, but I have not been able to do that,” she said. “It just sucks because everybody wants to be outside, everybody wants a sense of normalcy. But that’s not an accessible thing.”

When Mattiel, an Atlanta-based duo who make gentle, crooning rock, took the stage for their set at South by Southwest this March, they were thrilled to see fewer people in the audience than they expected. The band was playing at around 30 percent capacity, due to COVID restrictions. “It was less people, less bullshit,” said Atina Mattiel Brown, the group’s lead singer. “It was how South By used to be.”

Brown and her producer and bandmate, Jonah Swilley, played their first shows since the pandemic in November. They knew there were inherent risks in performing for a crowd, but they had missed live shows so much that the tradeoff seemed worth it. Besides, they said, the venues they played largely had vaccination requirements and mask mandates. Still, they weren’t prepared for just how jarring it would be to play a pandemic-era show. The masks were a comfort, but the group felt disoriented as they peered at the crowd, unable to tell who was singing along or gauge whether the audience was actually enjoying the show. “You just feel really disconnected from people that way,” Swilley said on a call. The symbiotic relationship between artists and fans seems murkier now, the band added.

As venues have eased up on pandemic precautions, Mattiel is forging ahead. They just played a sold-out show in New York. “A year ago, we would have been like, ‘Oh my god, what are we doing,’” Swilley said. “But it’s a calculated risk for everyone there.” Their excitement overshadows most of their fear, but sometimes they feel disappointed that performing isn’t like it was back in, say, 2019. The band is trickling back to cities they used to tour at before the pandemic, with mixed reactions from the audiences. Some venues are packed, and others have a pared-down crowd.

“You try not to think of it as: You’re not selling tickets,” Swilley said. “You think of it as: The city isn’t ready to go to shows.”

For the indie pop singer Rafaella, who contracted COVID in November and now feels less scared about the potential of reinfection, the most nerve-wracking part of a show comes after she steps off stage. She likes to stay by the merchandise booth to be able to intimately interact with her fans. Rafaella blew up when one of her early songs, “Sorocide,” landed on Spotify’s Viral Top 50 playlist in 2017, and she feels indebted to her listeners for growing her career. That guilt can take a toll, though. Sometimes fans will ask her to yank down her mask for photos. “Sometimes I am like, fuck it. These people are so nice, they deserve a smile,” she said on a call. “And then two minutes later, I’m like, ‘Why did I just do that?’”

It’s not just musicians who might feel rusty about playing shows again, she said. Audiences are out of practice. Rafaella has noticed more people passing out at her concerts, fainting from dehydration, not used to jostling against each other. “We’re just not well-versed in this group dynamic anymore,” she said. But there are different, diverging levels of risk for concertgoers and musicians themselves, she added. “There’s this cognitive dissonance where it’s like, everyone’s acting totally normal,” she said. “As an artist, you can’t fall into that trap. The people who go to a concert, if they get sick, they can just go home and get better, whereas we have to keep going.”

The risk calculus that comes with touring also seeps into some artists’ everyday lives. Mike Haldeman, a member of the New York-based rock band altopalo, has to weigh the risk of attending shows as a spectator before he heads out to Australia to tour in June. “Any exposure is a professional risk,” he said. “You can potentially lose thousands of dollars of income by exposing yourself at a casual hangout.” 

There’s an element of fear baked into the shows he does perform now, Haldeman said. “I’m looking out at a crowd of unmasked people and thinking, like, they’re all having a great time,” he said. “But if I get one shred of this virus in me and I get sick, that’s a week of touring and thousands of dollars out the window. It’s really scary, honestly.” 

His level of concern varies depending on where he plays shows. “Doing a show in Florida is totally different from doing a show in New York,” he said. The band played a show recently in Brooklyn, and he felt relieved seeing the amount of masks across the crowd. “That’s the stuff I’m really grateful for as a performer: to look out at an audience, and know all our heads are in the same place.”