Copyright Slate
The following essay has been adapted and excerpted from The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry, published by W. W. Norton. People at BDYHAX are the first adopters of body technology, the pilot subjects of our speculative futures. The BDYHAX conference is a dayslong event where body hackers, transhumanists, cyborgs, and general nerds all assimilate. It’s one of many conferences of its kind, as the transhumanist movement becomes more mainstream at the behest of Silicon Valley. When I arrived, people in the hotel lobby were gathered around sources of electricity like overgrown moths. Cyborgs compared prosthetics like they would new handbags or tattoos, walking up and down the labyrinth of stairs between floors, waving above and below, charging their legs and arms and iPhones. An interactive sound installation tucked in the corner hummed and bellowed depending on how fast you spun the speakers, and it made mania of the room. Governments spend serious money on the intersection of body hacking and body modification technology that this conference is meant to advertise—a member of the Department of Defense is scheduled to keynote the event. Besides that, the CIA’s venture capital arm provided funding for Skincential Sciences for their skin care products that have patented DNA extraction technology. While their consumer brand Clearista makes “skin resurfacing” products for clearer, younger-looking skin, it’s also a technology that could potentially permit the CIA to collect data about people’s biochemistry via exfoliation. This patented technology removes a thin layer of skin to reveal unique biomarkers that can be used for a variety of diagnostic tests. It is said to be painless and supposedly requires water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin. “Your biomarker profile can reflect a number of things—where you’ve been, what you’ve done, who you are,” explained Russ Lebovitz, CEO of Skincential Sciences, to Fast Company. The House of Beauty: Lessons From the Image Industry By Arabelle Sicardi. W.W. Norton. Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. Thank you for your support. Elite universities are also involved in what the beauty industry calls “cosmeceuticals,” this playground of ingredients that double as medical or militant products. The beauty brand Shiseido bankrolls Massachusetts’ Cutaneous Biology Research Center, where MIT and Harvard researchers work on dermatology, and hosts an annual pitch event off campus in Boston for students to contribute to the company’s skin care portfolio. Many of the conferencegoers in Austin, Texas, met previously at Boston’s International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) Competition. Plenty of competitors at iGEM go on to found companies together. Edgar Andrés Ochoa Cruz, a judge at iGEM, happened to be at both. He was the first self-proclaimed biohacker in South America and opened a string of biohacking spaces throughout Latin America. Biohacking is a more permanent approach to body hacking, focused not only on augmentation of the body but modification of your chromosomes and genetic composition. If your body is a genetic procession of AGCT, the four DNA bases that make up genes, in an individual sequence, biohacking is the revision process of those letters for specific and tailored ends. In layman’s terms, genetic editing is akin to revising a body’s capacities and health conditions through a scientist’s word processor. (Due apologies to all genetic engineers for the simplicity of the metaphor.) After helping found SyntechBio, Cruz founded OneSkin, a company dedicated solely to solving aging. For the past few years, he’d been setting up public bioengineering labs for the community and sharing his knowledge with everyone who wants it. He’s teaching new recruits to the biohacking scene in South America the procedures of his anti-aging work in an effort to maximize the variations of molecular markers that can be tested. Cruz has billionaire competition in his product category: Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk have all invested considerable amounts of money into transhumanist ventures. Google has a very secretive company called Calico that focuses on the biology of aging in mice, worms, and human cells and tissues. Both Bezos and Thiel invested in Unity Biotechnology, a startup to develop medicines that “slow, halt, or reverse age-associated diseases, while restoring human health.” Thiel alone has a few anti-aging ventures in his portfolio, including Unity. Beauty companies also visit the more commercial sister events like this because they know that customers are willing to pay thousands every year for skin care and services that make their skin look younger and smoother while the world burns around us. They send envoys to scope out anti-aging or bioprinting technology that they can buy out or sign usage for exclusively. Bioprinting and focus on the skin microbiome have shaped the research behind now-bestselling products. L’Oréal’s Dermatological Beauty Division is made up of precisely this research, and it results in products from La Roche-Posay, Vichy, CeraVe, SkinCeuticals, and Décleor; all brands I have in my vanity as I type this, products currently on my face right now. In 2023 L’Oréal spent over 1.2 billion euros on research, and they regularly host global summits showcasing their technological discoveries. In 2016, L’Oréal announced a partnership with Poietis, a health tech company in the business of printing human hair follicles. Poietis uses a 3D laser-assisted printer and robotics to print biological tissue in multiple, customizable layers, and then L’Oréal uses that for tests. They’re working toward creating a functional follicle capable of producing hair. In 2015 and 2017 Poietis also announced partnerships with the company BASF for printing skin for cosmetic testing. Printing viable hair takes three weeks; skin takes just two. The faster the technology for printing skin and hair evolves, the faster animal testing and (whole) human testing regulations can be changed. Plenty of people boycott brands that do animal testing at all. If testing on bioprinted human tissue becomes cheap and scalable enough for smaller brands to adopt, the global market changes. And when—not if—it does, it will eventually eliminate low-paying jobs for humans who get paid to be test subjects for soon-to-market skin care products. The streamlined production cycle is a capitalist’s dream, and it happens to coincide with a cyborg one. Poietis excites Cruz, who already seems like a freight train you can’t stop. With access to made-to-order skin samples, OneSkin would be able to perform testing that much faster, with fewer regulatory hoops to jump through. It’s a matter of finding the right collaborator in the crowd who’s working on adjacent technology. If that happens and his work leads to a true discovery, he can patent and protect his molecule and end up a very wealthy man, with L’Oréal and pharmaceutical manufacturers knocking on his door. Whenever I saw him for the rest of the conference, he was in the front and center of the audience, questioning every speaker about their work to find out how they could collaborate on processes. He set up a now-defunct $10,000 grant to entice synthetic bioengineers to work with his company for a younger, ageless future. He straddles the line between opportunist and idealist with sincerity and charm. The last thing he said to me that weekend is also on his website, evidently well-rehearsed: “When you feel that you should have been born in the future, the only option is to build the future, so you can finally get to where you belong.” On the last day of the convention I met a cyborg named Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow, who had been sued by an Australian company for implanting his transportation card chip into his hand. He’d done so because he wanted to reduce the number of things he had to carry around to get through his day. They’d tried to deactivate the card associated with his name, only to realize he’d been using an anonymous transit-card chip instead—so they got the authorities to cut it out of him. He responded with the perfect question when bringing them to court: “If you don’t own your body and what’s inside it, then what the hell do you own?” What do you want the world to see about you, and what part of you would you be willing to owe in return? Tech solutionism, the idea that tech can solve social, cultural, and structural problems, has never allowed real agency for the people who suffer most under the problems at hand. But I do think more focus and support ought to be devoted to the people who tech and the beauty industry often don’t see, or forget about, who are considered broken or too stupid to participate at all. The invisible and visibly disabled, like my father, and my friends, the queer artists who are both fetishized and reviled for who they love. The femmes and the depressed and the tired who work themselves to the bone trying to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table by juggling three different app-based jobs and still just scrape by, who go into debt in service of strangers and Silicon Valley empires. The people who cannot afford a $15,000 titanium leg or a $200 insulin shot or a $40 manicure. The people who get left behind in fantasies of future health and wealth and beauty. The people who do not get excited at the idea of genetic editing, because it would allow their family or themselves to be edited out of who they are. Those people make up everyone I know and love. BDYHAX presented the arguments most people have about technology and obligation succinctly on one of the last panels of the weekend. On the whiteboard beside the panelists, the following eventually emerged in a frantic scrawl: “With enough technology we can make people equal,” versus “We can create a society where we treat each other equally without it.” I rewrote it in my journal to the following: “Everyone is beautiful in an equal and good society,” versus “We can create a society where beauty doesn’t factor into how we treat each other after all.”
