Henriikka Koivisto
Ling Ling Huang’s satirical horror novel Natural Beauty (2023) tells the story of a young, unnamed narrator who gives up a promising career as a classical pianist after her parents are injured in a car accident. One day, an extraordinarily beautiful woman shows up at the restaurant where the narrator works and offers her a job at a high-end wellness and beauty company called Holistik. What at first seems like a dream job for many young women—with better pay, an endless supply of free skincare products and treatments, and a boost of social status—soon turns dangerous. Huang leads her readers into the deeply disturbing world of invasive and risky beauty procedures, unapologetic cultural appropriation, abuses of power culminating in sexual violence, all behind a façade of wellness and self-care.
Whether it is walking in stilettos, microblading your brows, dermaneedling, getting a bikini wax, or injecting yourself with GLP-1s, many women have been programmed to believe that beauty is pain. And yet, because beauty and wellness have become nearly synonymous, true wellness is always out of reach. Beauty and wellness services and products from face creams and vaginal jade eggs to detox teas and bee venom therapy are often advertised as a method of ‘self-care.’ The suggestion is that the consumer is doing it for herself and her own well-being and happiness, even if the product or treatment is costly, painful, and has no scientifically proven health benefits. Huang’s Natural Beauty critiques this dicey industry that repackages narrow beauty standards and diet culture as self-care, causing us to spend our money on things that are at best ineffective and at worst fatal.
Much like Huang, who is a Grammy-winner, a professional violinist, and a second-generation immigrant with experience working in the beauty industry, the narrator of the novel is a promising musician and a daughter of Chinese immigrants. As Huang explained in an interview with Vogue, classical musical training and beauty culture both contain an emphasis on “aesthetic” and pureness through an endless search for perfection. Through the narrator’s storyline, Huang skillfully challenges these norms.
At the end of Natural Beauty, the narrator survives the horrors she encounters but is left with dramatic changes to her body, including her hands. For many musicians, injuring one’s hands is a nightmare scenario that implies a professional and artistic death, much like a career-ending knee injury for a quarterback. The narrator of Natural Beauty, however, develops a new approach to her instrument and embraces the imperfection of her changed appearance as well as her music. The final chapter reads: “I try to apply what my parents taught me, but my hands are so different that I must develop a new piano technique. . . People want to see the girl who plays with hands like beaks. Since everything about me at the piano is wrong and ugly, I lose all pressure to fit my sound into the conventional beauty of classical music.” (250). I do not wish to argue that abuse victims ought to view their trauma as some sort of a gift or blessing. The narrator’s traumatic experiences no doubt require a great deal of healing off the page, and after surviving Holistik, she is able to let go of shame and start practicing radical self-acceptance.
Huang’s Natural Beauty also engages questions of identity and race; it illustrates how beauty and wellness culture is predominantly centered around whiteness while appropriating other cultures. As Jia Tolentino writes in her New Yorker article “The Age of Instagram Face,” our current beauty ideal is heavily shaped not only by surgery and other procedures, but also by technology, which has resulted in “a single, cyborgian look.” She also notes that this “face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic,” an ideal that mimics features from other ethnicities while adhering to the Eurocentric image of beauty. In Natural Beauty, it is evident that this perfect, “cyborg,” and ethnically ambiguous look, is expected to be the goal for all of Holistik’s employees.
At Holistik, the employees are given new, American names (a practice that erases a part of their identity and distances them from their lives before Holistik), and the company picks and chooses traditional practices from different cultures and then dilutes them into new wellness fads without accurately representing their origins. After spending some time at Holistik, the narrator notices that she is losing her Asian features that remind her of her parents, and instead, she is turning into an eerie copy of the other women she works with. As the narrator thinks to herself, “Holistik has changed everything. Natural beauty doesn’t exist here—it’s created. Why not ethnicity?”
As the story proceeds, it becomes even clearer that Holistik is more of a cult than a company. Holistik’s treatments have a strange, vaguely spiritual element to them, and the employees and customers alike perform beauty with religious fervor. Victor, the company’s mysterious and charismatic owner, holds immense power over his employees, who are expected to dedicate their lives to the company and ignore the scientists who warn consumers about Holistik’s unconventional products and treatments. Holistik reminded me, as a reader, of the scandal surrounding OneTaste, a San Francisco wellness company whose founder and head of sales were found guilty of labor exploitation in 2025. According to the post-trial press release, the company not only exploited young women financially and emotionally, but specifically targeted women with “past sexual trauma” and coerced them to “perform demeaning sexual acts.” With real stories like this, the existence of a place like Natural Beauty‘s Holistik does not seem at all farfetched.
The story takes its most horrifying turn when the pieces come together: the narrator discovers that she did not end up at Holistik by coincidence. Instead, she has been Victor’s target since she was a child studying at the conservatory. Her parents are suspiciously killed by kuru, a rare neurological disease resulting from the consumption of human flesh after taking Holistik supplements that included human flesh and bone. Meanwhile the narrator gets involved in “organic, all-natural sex work” (191) at another company owned by Victor and later finds paperwork she does not remember signing but that appears to state that she has “volunteered” to participate in experimental treatments, including forced insemination, that can result in everything from “homicidal tendencies” to “spontaneous zygote multiplication” (191). The last third of Natural Beauty moves from satire to body horror territory full of disturbing descriptions of strange medical procedures, sexual violence, and abuse. These scenes in the novel are not for mere shock value; they serve a purpose as they drive home a warning about how a seemingly harmless wellness movement can turn dangerous if you do not watch your back.
Huang’s novel fits in with many other recent horror films and books that examine the dark aspects of beauty and wellness culture such as Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance (2024), Emilie Blichfeldt’s The Ugly Stepsister (2025), Ryan Murphy and Matthew Hodgson’s FX series The Beauty (2026), and Mona Awad’s novel Rouge (2019). With the recent rise in the popularity of GLP-1 drugs used for weight loss, the rapidly growing black market of beauty products and illegal fillers, and disturbing social media trends like looksmaxxing, we can anticipate the subgenre of wellness and beauty horror to grow in the coming years. For instance, Natalie Erika James’ body horror movie Saccharine tells the story of a young woman who becomes possessed after consuming an experimental weight loss substance that includes human ashes, which feels a lot like a cautionary tale about unapproved GLP-1s. While there is no release date yet, a television series based on Natural Beauty is also currently in production. As horror fans and scholars know, horror has a tendency to reflect the fears and anxieties of a specific moment back at us like a horrifying funhouse mirror, and our current obsession with our bodies and appearance offers abundant material for horror authors and filmmakers to work with.
For readers curious about how to navigate wellness culture and perhaps get closer to a place where we can support our wellbeing and health without spending senseless amounts of time and money on an industry that could not care less if we live or die, I recommend former fashion director and editor Amy Larocca’s book How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic One Dubious Cure at a Time (2025). Larocca’s book is not designed to be a self-help guide, but rather an exploration of the different corners of wellness culture combined with thoughtful cultural analysis and personal reflection. Fully escaping our consumerist and beauty-obsessed culture may not be possible, but Larocca’s writing has made me feel more optimistic and reminded me that wellness should not be a performance.
Related: You can find our podcast on Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance here; our review of Gore Verbinski’s A Cure for Wellness (2016) here; and a list of eight medical films to watch here.
Henriikka Koivisto is a PhD candidate in English at University of North Carolina-Greensboro. She received her BA from Tampere University in Finland in 2019 and her MA from Montana State University in 2021. Her work focuses on horror and gothic studies and feminist theory, and her dissertation examines the politics of flesh and corporeal consumption in horror fiction. In addition to her research, she teaches writing and literature courses and mentors undergraduate students in UNCG’s Humanities at Work program.
