Dazed Beauty #0
Dazed Beauty launches into the magazine world with a concept that they have been teasing for a while on Instagram, ‘A Manifesto for the Future of Beauty’.
Multiple futuristic and highly edited looks are transformed into multiple magazine covers: glowing 3D-rendered faces, Kate Moss and Travis Scott as armoured centaurs, Kylie Jenner’s face falling off. Only Genesis P-Orridge appears unaltered, having pushed the boundaries of body modification in real life.
This latest addition to the Dazed family asks you to critique the concept of beauty even as it laughs the term off. With the technology we have at our disposal it is possible to transform our bodies beyond all recognition, but extreme forms of biohacking are currently confined to the margins of society. What we more often experience is a trend toward ‘visual homogenisation’, with the ability to photoshop our faces: erasing lines and plumping pouts for social media. Dazed Beauty posits a future where our creativity is used to express our individuality, whether it’s by creating entirely new bodies and faces as virtual reality avatars, or to think of our skin as just another digital interface to design.
It’s not the first magazine to challenge prevailing beauty standards: Beauty Papers has disrupted the beauty industry’s idea of conformity with its way of zooming in on the raw reality of human appearance. But Dazed Beauty isn’t interested in the real; its techno disruption pushes into the post-human.
Whether you take it as a bit of fun to flick through or as a serious prediction of our dystopian future, you have to ask yourself: with the unrealistic beauty standards the mainstream media have been peddling for so long, is this really such a stretch of the imagination?
Editor in chief: Bunny Kinney
Creative director: Isamaya Ffrench
Art director: Ben Ditto