The global beauty industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars a year. I used to hear a number like that and think it just proved how much we all love beauty.
I don't think that anymore — I think it proves something closer to a business model, one that only works if the gap between who you are and who you're supposed to be never actually closes.
Before my Jesus Revolution, I never would have used a word like system to describe why I always felt one step behind on how I looked. I just thought it was me — not disciplined enough, not put-together enough, not quite there yet. It never occurred to me to ask who benefits from me feeling that way.
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Think about what a satisfied customer actually does. She stops buying. She stops searching. She stops scrolling past the ad because it no longer has anything left to offer her. An entire industry cannot survive on satisfied customers, so — whether anyone designed it this deliberately or not — the system runs on the opposite. On a gap. On a "not yet."
And the moment you finally reach whatever you were chasing, the target quietly moves. The body shape that was celebrated a decade ago is out. The skincare step that felt essential last year has already been replaced by something new. It isn't that we changed overnight. It's that the standard moved — right on schedule, right before it would have had to admit you'd met it.
A closed gap is a satisfied customer, and a satisfied customer stops spending. So the gap does not close. It was never designed to.
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I don't think this is neutral, and I don't think it's new. Long before algorithms and filtered feeds, a woman in a garden looked at something and it registered as good for the body, pleasing to the eyes, and desirable for becoming more than she currently was (Genesis 3:6). Good for the body. Pleasing to the eyes. Desirable for more. Those are not three random impulses.
The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life — none of it comes from the Father. 1 John 2:15–17
Same three pressure points. Different delivery system. The tactic hasn't changed in thousands of years because it still works.
Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Caring how you look is not the problem — God made a world full of color and craftsmanship and beauty worth enjoying, and there is nothing wrong with participating in it. The issue is quieter than that. It is building your sense of worth on top of a system that requires your dissatisfaction to survive, without ever stopping long enough to notice that's what you're doing.
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So here's the question underneath the ad, the app, the routine: is what I'm taking in building something true in me, or is it just widening a gap that was never going to close on its own? Scripture doesn't tell us to disengage from the world — it tells us not to be conformed to its pattern, but transformed by the renewing of the mind instead of quietly formed by whatever is loudest (Romans 12:2).
The system depends on you not noticing it is a system. The moment you see the gap for what it actually is, it starts to lose its grip — and here is the word I have come to believe is the last one on all of it:
"The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world." 1 John 4:4
Greater. Not evenly matched. Not in a close contest.
So the next time the mirror, the feed, or the ad tells you the gap is yours to close — it's worth asking whose business model that belief is actually serving. And whose voice you're going to let be louder instead.