Keeping up with everybody else? Celebrity and visual comparability in social media beauty cultures

Young people growing up in digitally mediated environments are increasingly ‘savvy’, literate and critical of the manufactured nature of celebrity beauty. Yet, beauty standards exemplified by celebrity are increasingly impossible to dismiss when such ideals have become sedimented into everyday social media practice. Drawing on a qualitative research project with 88 young social media users in Australia, this article argues that lateral, continuous, everyday comparison and comparability with acquaintances and peers have become significant modalities through which appearance pressures are experienced by young people. Importantly, this direct comparison with peers who can achieve a celebrity look does not replace, but becomes a principal means of reinforcing increasingly ‘higher standards’ set by celebrity. We explore the highly individualised, sometimes difficult and painful ways unfavourable comparison could register, while also looking at how these feelings were themselves shameful and had to be disavowed, kept secret or managed alone. Further, we also consider the experiences of those who felt ‘on the edge’ of comparability – somehow not straightforward participants in the competitive comparison culture by dint of particular racialised identities – exploring the paradoxical ways in which this could mark an intensification of comparison, or, by contrast, a space to operate outside it.