Speaker 1: Friends. Before we start the episode, just a quick update.
Speaker 1: There will be no new episode on the fourteenth of May,
Speaker 1: as I'll be away on that date, but there will
Speaker 1: be a brand new episode on the twenty first. All right,
Speaker 1: let's get into the episode. I want to start this
Speaker 1: episode with something a lot of people have already experienced,
Speaker 1: the moment where nothing about you changed except how you looked,
Speaker 1: and suddenly everyone treated you better. Strangers smiled at you,
Speaker 1: people listen when you spoke. You got more opportunities, more patience,
Speaker 1: more forgiveness, more interest. But it's the same personality, same intelligence,
Speaker 1: same humor, same you, different treatment, And for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, that moment isn't hypothetical. It's what happens after
Speaker 1: a glow up. And the reason that experience feels so
Speaker 1: disorienting is because it exposes something we're not really supposed
Speaker 1: to say out loud. People don't just respond to who
Speaker 1: you are, they respond to how you look. And once
Speaker 1: you see that shift happen in real time, you can't
Speaker 1: unsee it because suddenly every compliment feels a little different,
Speaker 1: every opportunity feels a little suspect. You've seen the difference,
Speaker 1: You've lived the before and you're living the after, and
Speaker 1: that changes you. So today we're talking about glow ups,
Speaker 1: pretty privilege, and the psychological whiplash of being treated like
Speaker 1: you matter only after you fit the standard. Because this
Speaker 1: is not just about beauty. This is about perception, bias,
Speaker 1: power and what it does to your identity when the
Speaker 1: world suddenly decides you're worth more than it did before.
Speaker 1: Welcome to a brand new episode of Beauty Unlocked, the podcast.
Speaker 1: If you're new to Beauty Unlocked, I'm Carissa, host of
Speaker 1: this circus. Welcome friends. If you've been a long time listener,
Speaker 1: you know all about the shenanigans and utter fuckery that
Speaker 1: is Beauty Unlocked.
Speaker 2: Or would.
Speaker 1: There's a very specific kind of story that keeps coming up,
Speaker 1: not because people love telling it, but because once you
Speaker 1: see it, you can't unsee it. Someone loses weight or
Speaker 1: clears their skin, changes their style or gets cosmetic work done,
Speaker 1: and suddenly their life changes more attention, more validation, more
Speaker 1: romantic interest, more professional opportunities. And people notice that shift.
Speaker 1: They talk about it, They compare the before and after,
Speaker 1: they try to make sense of what changed, because it
Speaker 1: doesn't just feel like transformation, it's exposure, the realization that
Speaker 1: nothing about who you are changed, and yet the way
Speaker 1: people treat you did. Because if the world starts treating
Speaker 1: you better without you becoming a better person, then what
Speaker 1: exactly is being rewarded, and more importantly, what was being
Speaker 1: withheld before? So before we go any further, I feel
Speaker 1: like I need to say this. This is not about
Speaker 1: blaming people for wanting to look better. This is not
Speaker 1: about pretending appearance doesn't matter. And this is definitely not
Speaker 1: about shaming anyone for participating in beauty culture, because we
Speaker 1: all participate in it one way or another. That's not
Speaker 1: the point. The point is the system those changes exist
Speaker 1: inside of, because there is a difference between changing how
Speaker 1: you look and realizing that how you looked was quietly
Speaker 1: shaping how you were treated the entire time. And once
Speaker 1: people experience that shift, it doesn't just feel validating. For
Speaker 1: a lot of people, it feels unsettling. So let's get
Speaker 1: into it. If we want to understand why glow ups
Speaker 1: feel so powerful, we have to start with one of
Speaker 1: the most well documented biases in psychology, the halo effect.
Speaker 1: I've spoken about this before, but we're going to talk
Speaker 1: about it again. First studied by psychologist Edward Thorndyke in
Speaker 1: the early twentieth century. The halo effect describes our tendency
Speaker 1: to assume that if someone has one positive trait, they
Speaker 1: must have others. So if someone is attractive, we are
Speaker 1: more likely to assume they are intelligent, kind, competent, trustworthy, capable,
Speaker 1: even when we have zero evidence for any of those things.
Speaker 1: Decades of research in social psychology have confirmed this bias
Speaker 1: across contexts, education, hiring, dating, even criminal sentencing. Attractive people
Speaker 1: are consistently rated more favorably even when their actual performance
Speaker 1: is identical to others. And this is where things start
Speaker 1: getting uncomfortable, because it means that when someone has a
Speaker 1: glow up, people don't just see them as more attractive,
Speaker 1: They start seeing them as better, smarter, more capable, more
Speaker 1: worthy of attention, which leads to a very uncomfortable realization.
Speaker 1: The opportunities weren't created by the glow up. They were
Speaker 1: already there. You were just locked out of them before.
Speaker 1: We tend to talk about pretty privilege. It's just a
Speaker 1: social media concept, but it's not. It's measurable. Research in labor,
Speaker 1: economics and social psychology has been showing this for decades.
Speaker 1: Economist Daniel Hammermish, who literally wrote the book Beauty Pays,
Speaker 1: found that more attractive people tend to earn more money
Speaker 1: over time. He calls it the beauty premium, and it's
Speaker 1: not small. Some estimates suggest that attractive individuals can earn
Speaker 1: thousands more per year than they're less attractive counterparts, simply
Speaker 1: because of how they're perceived. And on the flip side,
Speaker 1: there's also a penalty, sometimes called the ugliness penalty. Lower wages,
Speaker 1: fewer promotions, less opportunity, and it's not just about money.
Speaker 1: Classic studies in social psychology, like the what is Beautiful
Speaker 1: is Good research by Karen Dion and her colleagues found
Speaker 1: that people consistently assume attractive individuals are more intelligent, more competent,
Speaker 1: and even more morally good before they've said a single word.
Speaker 1: Think about that we are assigning character based on appearance,
Speaker 1: and that bias doesn't stay in theory. It shows up
Speaker 1: everywhere in classrooms where teachers give more attention to certain students,
Speaker 1: in hospitals where some patients are taken more seriously than others,
Speaker 1: in workplaces where competence gets filtered through appearance. There's even
Speaker 1: research showing that attractive defendants in court are more likely
Speaker 1: to receive lighter sentences than less attractive ones. Same behavior,
Speaker 1: different outcome. So when someone experiences a glow up and
Speaker 1: suddenly feels like the world opened up, they're not imagining it,
Speaker 1: they're not being dramatic. They're stepping into a different category,
Speaker 1: a different set of assumptions, a different level of access,
Speaker 1: because what changed wasn't just how they looked, it's how
Speaker 1: they were being read, and perception is everything. Now here's
Speaker 1: where this gets psychologically messy, because glow ups don't just
Speaker 1: change how people see you. They change how you see yourself,
Speaker 1: and not always in a clean, empowering way. Psychologists have
Speaker 1: a term for what happens when your internal sense of
Speaker 1: self no longer matches how the world is responding to you,
Speaker 1: cognitive dissonance, first introduced by psychologist Leon Festinger. Cognitive dissonance
Speaker 1: describes the mental tension that occurs when two realities don't
Speaker 1: line up, and that's exactly what a glow up can create.
Speaker 1: Because your identity was formed in one social reality, and
Speaker 1: now you're being treated as if you belong to another
Speaker 1: same person, different response, and your brain has to reconcile
Speaker 1: with that. There's also something called self discrepancy theory, developed
Speaker 1: by E. Tory Higgins, which explains how distress happens when
Speaker 1: there's a gap between how you see yourself and how
Speaker 1: you believe others see you. And after a glow up,
Speaker 1: that gap can get very wide, very fast, because internally
Speaker 1: you still feel like your before self, but externally you're
Speaker 1: being treated like someone else entirely more desirable, more valuable,
Speaker 1: more worthy of attention, and that disconnect it creates tension, suspicion,
Speaker 1: sometimes even grief. And this isn't just anecdotal. Clinical research
Speaker 1: on people who experience significant weight loss has found that
Speaker 1: even after major physical changes, many individuals continue to identify
Speaker 1: with their former bodies and report a lag in self
Speaker 1: perception where their internal identity hasn't caught up to how
Speaker 1: others now see them. Some studies also describe a sense
Speaker 1: of disorientation in social interactions, where people struggle to reconcile
Speaker 1: new attention, new treatment, and a new social position with
Speaker 1: an older sense of self. So when people say I
Speaker 1: still feel like the same person, they mean that literally,
Speaker 1: but the world doesn't respond to them like they're the
Speaker 1: same person anymore, and that's where things start to fracture
Speaker 1: because you're forced to confront something uncomfortable. If people are kinder, now,
Speaker 1: were they always capable of that kindness? And if they were,
Speaker 1: why didn't you get it before? This is where the
Speaker 1: glow up narrative starts to crack, because it's not just
Speaker 1: a story of gain. It's also a story of loss,
Speaker 1: a loss of innocence, loss of trust, loss of the
Speaker 1: belief that people see you for who you are. Sociologist
Speaker 1: Irving Goffman wrote about how identity is shaped through social interaction,
Speaker 1: how we come to understand who we are partly through
Speaker 1: how others respond to us. So when those responses change,
Speaker 1: suddenly your sense of self doesn't just evolve, it destabilizes
Speaker 1: because you're left trying to make sense of something that
Speaker 1: doesn't fully add up. You haven't changed, but the way
Speaker 1: people respond to you has. There's another part of pretty
Speaker 1: privilege that doesn't get talked about enough, and that's the cost.
Speaker 1: Because what people don't tell you about a glow up
Speaker 1: is that it can feel like trading one kind of
Speaker 1: invisibility for another. Before you're overlooked, dismissed, not taken seriously,
Speaker 1: passed over, and then after you're scene but not necessarily understood,
Speaker 1: not necessarily respected. Now you're visible, but flattened, reduced to
Speaker 1: how you look. Psychologists have studied this through something called
Speaker 1: objectification theory, developed by Barbara Fredericksen and Tomey Anne Roberts.
Speaker 1: Their work shows that women in particular are often treated
Speaker 1: less as full people and more as bodies to be evaluated,
Speaker 1: to be looked at, judged, consumed, and the more attractive
Speaker 1: you're perceived to be, the more intense that can become.
Speaker 1: So instead of being ignored, you're watched. Instead of being dismissed,
Speaker 1: you're scrutinized. Instead of being underestimated, you're mischaracterized. Suddenly you're objectified, sexualized, envied, judged,
Speaker 1: and in many cases, not taken seriously. There's research showing
Speaker 1: that highly attractive women can actually be penal in professional settings,
Speaker 1: especially in roles that require authority or competence, because in
Speaker 1: those contexts, beauty gets read as a contradiction. You can
Speaker 1: be attractive or you can be taken seriously, but often
Speaker 1: not both. So the same system that rewards beauty also
Speaker 1: limits you through it, you're not just seen as a
Speaker 1: person anymore. You're seen as an image, a symbol. Something
Speaker 1: to look at, not necessarily someone to listen to, and
Speaker 1: that creates a different kind of pressure, because now you're
Speaker 1: not just navigating being unseen, you're navigating being seen in
Speaker 1: a way that doesn't reflect who you actually are, and
Speaker 1: that can feel just as distorting, just as limiting, just
Speaker 1: in a different way. The reason glow ups hit people
Speaker 1: so hard emotionally is because they don't just reveal something new.
Speaker 1: They confirm something you already knew, even if you couldn't
Speaker 1: fully name it at the time, because we are all,
Speaker 1: in one way or another, taught the same message that
Speaker 1: how you look affects how you're treated, that fitting the
Speaker 1: standard gets rewarded, and not fitting it comes with consequences,
Speaker 1: sometimes subtle, sometimes obvious, but always there. So when a
Speaker 1: glow up changes how people respond to you, it doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like a random shift. It feels like proof proof
Speaker 1: that the kindness, the attention, the opportunities were never unconditional.
Speaker 1: They were contingent on presentation, on esthetics, on how closely
Speaker 1: you matched what society rewards, and psychologically that lands differently
Speaker 1: because it doesn't just change how you see others, it
Speaker 1: changes how you interpret your entire past. Rejection starts to
Speaker 1: look different. Missed opportunities take on a new meaning, and
Speaker 1: suddenly your life story gets rewritten through a different lens.
Speaker 1: Not I wasn't good enough, but I wasn't seen as
Speaker 1: good enough, And those are not the same thing. Here's
Speaker 1: the part where people usually want a clean resolution, a takeaway,
Speaker 1: a way to fix it. But this isn't one of
Speaker 1: those topics that wraps up neatly. Because you can't unlearn
Speaker 1: the fact that appearance affects perception and you can't fully
Speaker 1: control how you're perceived. What you can do is become
Speaker 1: aware of the system, aware of the bias, aware of
Speaker 1: the ways you might be participating in it, even unintentionally,
Speaker 1: because the halo effect doesn't just affect how others see you,
Speaker 1: It affects how you see them, who you trust, who
Speaker 1: you listen to, who you give the benefit of the doubt.
Speaker 1: And once you see that clearly, you start making different choices,
Speaker 1: more conscious ones. So the next time you see a
Speaker 1: glow up story or experience one yourself, pause before you
Speaker 1: immediately label it as self improvement, because what changed wasn't
Speaker 1: just you, It was how people treated you, and those
Speaker 1: are not the same thing, and that difference says a
Speaker 1: lot about how the world works. Beauty does open doors.
Speaker 1: That part is real, but it doesn't create value. It
Speaker 1: changes who is recognized as having it, and that should
Speaker 1: make you rethink everything you were taught about worth. I
Speaker 1: hope you enjoyed the episode and that it gave you
Speaker 1: something to sit with. My loves until next time, my
Speaker 1: love buckets, take care of yourselves and each other, and
Speaker 1: stay curious always. I'll be back with a brand new
Speaker 1: episode on the twenty first of May. Mm Bye, my goodness.
Speaker 1: That was a That was a juicy kiss.
Speaker 3: Link clap cla lin kia lin kick clap cla clap clap.
Speaker 2: Clate, kick clack cl Please kick them, please kick them,
Speaker 2: please geck them