How to Disappear: The Cult of Perfect Pretty
· Vice
This article is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
“Now that our brains accept distorted versions of people as real, the genuinely distorted, fabricated people just slot right into the reality we’ve created”
Visit likesport.biz for more information.
This was the week that I officially stopped being able to differentiate AI-generated photos and videos from “real” photos and videos. It feels significant, but also, weirdly good. I feel sort of like, ‘OK well, can’t worry about that anymore. Moving on.’ I’m not talking so much about the videos of a woman getting into a fries bed with a ketchup duvet, or the exhausted cat baker who gets caught in a storm on his bicycle. Those ones, for now, I can tell apart. But I’ve been lurking on r/soraAI and when it comes to what AI was really invented for—jiggling women—trust me, it’s getting very, very good.
Reddit has recently surpassed YouTube as my most-used platform. It’s phenomenal how honest people are willing to be on there. On r/soraAI there are endless threads of people berating one another for not adequately sharing the prompts they’ve used to generate “beautiful woman in denim shorts clinging to a bouncing bed” or “beautiful woman in sheer dress climbing out of laptop screen during earthquake.” It’s genuinely charming to watch as these men race to be the first person on Earth to outwit Sora’s content rules and generate a labial outline. And to be fair to them, a lot of what they’re producing is absolutely impossible to tell apart from a real person. I realize, looking through the imaginary women, it’s not necessarily that the generated images look completely real, it’s more that over the last five years we have completely normalized edited and filtered photos. Now that our brains accept distorted versions of people as real, the genuinely distorted, fabricated people just slot right into the reality we’ve created.
“I often feel so overwhelmed by the prospect of being seen, not seen, judged, not judged, that I want to disappear”
Speaking of which, there’s been a lot of plastic surgery discourse on the timeline over the last couple of weeks. I have been ruminating over whether or not to even discuss it. The answer is essentially: no, I do not have a take on plastic surgery. (I say, with the uncanny feeling of a gun to my head.) At this point, it feels the same as having a take on tattoos, or gel acrylics, or insane fitness plans. Sort of pointless, obvious. But it is notable that I feel sort of OK about those kinds of things, and much much less OK about face lifts for 30-year-olds, or the rash of injectables studios popping up across London and endlessly on my Instagram ads. Is that my internalized sexism speaking? Is it actually kind of conservative to have a problem with body modification? I’ll say it again for the FBI agent in the back, I DO NOT HAVE A TAKE.
But. If all my female friends started getting exactly the same face tattoos, I would be justifiably concerned. It would be unusual, at the very least. Cult-like, surely. And I think it has to be OK to acknowledge that if the social group you identify with—women are united in struggle, remember—all start doing something that makes you feel… a type of way, it’s important to sit with it. What is the feeling? I think if I’m really, excruciatingly honest, I feel a bit betrayed. I feel afraid. I feel envious. Betrayal, fear, envy. Bad feelings, shameful feelings. Is there an aspect of rivalry to it? Probably. Is there a fear of annihilation? Certainly. Curiosity? Of course. What would I look like, perfected? What would I look like, if all the lines were in the right place, if everything fit. What would it feel like to be the most beautiful woman in the room, in every room I stepped into. I suppose I do have a take. My take is, if you start thinking this way, if you enter into this conversation, it is very difficult to leave it. As a woman online, I feel I am being forced to have this conversation constantly. How beautiful am I? How beautiful might I be? What is that worth? How much pain, how much money? Infinite…? Maybe. And then, when we’re beautiful, what can we say that’s more impressive than what we look like? And if we’re not, how do we measure our successes, what do we even want?
After all, isn’t being beautiful the easiest thing to want? That’s kind of what we’ve been taught to want forever. Being beautiful, staying within the lines, existing behind a face that has been crafted to be attractive. I don’t know if it’s particularly healthy to live inside a body that’s been specifically modified to please other people. But then again, isn’t that what being a woman is?
“As a culture we are using artificial intelligence to bring about the total degradation of reality”
Like I said, I have spent three days avoiding having a take. This isn’t a take. As a culture we are using artificial intelligence to bring about the total degradation of reality. And as a consumer class, we are experiencing the erasure of female individuality, of our skin texture, our unique characteristics. All things begin to look the same. That isn’t a take, it isn’t necessarily a judgment, but that doesn’t make it neutral. This is a really personal and pressing issue for me, I care a lot about it, I think a lot about it. I often feel so overwhelmed by the prospect of being seen, not seen, judged, not judged, that I want to disappear. And I think altering your physical appearance is probably the easiest way to disappear in plain sight. To wake up as a new person, to present the world with a new face. A new body to replace the old one. A new face and body that doesn’t just hide the old one, it reverses it, it promises to completely erase any memory of it.
But that doesn’t seem to work for me either. I understand the wanting to disappear, but I want it without being eradicated. Maybe surgery just isn’t for me, or, the right options aren’t available yet. I think I’d like to take a non-corporeal form, but just for a while. Just for a while, until I feel like myself again. Just for a while, maybe I would like to move around the world as a vapor, or a stream of sunlight, or a butterfly.
When everything is totally perfect, when real is not real is real, what happens then? I don’t know. I think the answer might be nothing to do with the question at all. Nothing to do with beauty at all. I think the answer might be sunlight, and vapor, and the butterfly.
Bertie Brandes’ Substack is disorganised attachment style
This article is from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
The post How to Disappear: The Cult of Perfect Pretty appeared first on VICE.