A few weeks ago, I walked past a new store in my neighbourhood with a sign announcing it was a beauty salon “powered by AI.” I had never heard the phrase before, so I looked up what it meant. What I found was a rabbit hole that started with skincare apps and ended somewhere far more troubling, with fashion magazines quietly replacing real women with AI-generated ones, in tiny print, in plain sight.
What “AI-powered beauty” means
On the surface, AI in beauty is fairly benign. It refers to tools that scan your skin and recommend a routine, apps that let you virtually “try on” a lipstick shade or hair colour before you buy it, and algorithms that help you preview how a cosmetic procedure might change your face before you commit to it. Brands like No7 have used AI skincare advisers to guide product recommendations, and generative AI is increasingly used behind the scenes for everything from personalised formulations to marketing content.
It is also big business. The global AI-in-beauty market is projected to reach somewhere in the vicinity of $9.4 billion by 2029, and analysts at McKinsey estimate generative AI alone could add $9–10 billion in value to the beauty sector in the coming years. Roughly a quarter of US shoppers say they would pay more for AI-personalised beauty products. On paper, it sounds like smarter recommendations, less product waste and more convenience.
Then I found the AI models
The deeper I dug, the more the story changed. In August 2025, Vogue’s US edition ran a Guess advertisement featuring what looked like a typical glossy campaign image: a blonde woman in a striped dress, flawless skin, symmetrical features, not a pore out of place. Only a tiny disclaimer in the corner revealed she was not a person at all. She was generated entirely by an AI studio called Seraphinne Vallora.
The backlash was immediate. Viral TikToks accused Vogue of quietly ushering in “fake women,” while critics argued the ad was cutting real models out of paid work altogether. Vogue clarified the image was paid advertising rather than an editorial choice, and that AI models had not appeared in its own fashion spreads, but the damage to trust was done. It was not an isolated incident either, as AI-generated “models” have since turned up in other campaigns and on social platforms, some racking up millions of views before anyone realised the woman on screen did not exist.
Why this matters for women and girls
This is not just a story about marketing gimmicks or industry disruption. It’s a story about what happens when the beauty standard itself is no longer human.
Traditional airbrushing and filters already did enormous damage to how women see themselves. Decades of research link idealised media imagery to body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression and disordered eating, with adolescent girls consistently the most vulnerable group. But AI-generated beauty introduces something new. These are not even real women edited to look better; rather, they are synthetic composites built with no biological limits at all. They have no wrinkles, no asymmetry, no cellulite and no bad skin or hair days, because there was never a real person there to begin with. Clinical psychologists have described this as a new threshold of distortion. It is a standard that is not just unrealistic, but genuinely unattainable, because it was never achievable by a human body in the first place.
It is also getting harder to tell the difference. Researchers at the University of Waterloo found that nearly 40 per cent of people cannot reliably distinguish AI-generated faces from real photographs. And a recent Dove survey found that 39 per cent of women feel pressure to alter their appearance because of what they see online, even when they know, intellectually, that it is fake or AI-generated. Knowing it is not real doesn’t seem to protect us from comparing ourselves to it.
There is a workforce impact too. As brands quietly swap real models, photographers and stylists for AI-generated imagery, it is women’s jobs and women’s faces, hard-won careers and creative labour, being replaced by a machine trained to render an idealised version of them.
None of this means AI in beauty is inherently bad, as the skincare diagnostics and virtual try-on tools genuinely help people make better decisions. But we should be honest about the fact that the same technology being sold to us as empowering is, in its more unchecked forms, manufacturing a fantasy woman and quietly asking real women to measure up to her. That is not progress. It is the same old pressure, just rendered in higher resolution.