Vanity’s Bonfire
“He had the gaunt and haunted athletic look of those who stare daily down the bony gullet of the great god Aerobics.”
- Tom Wolfe (The Bonfire of the Vanities, 1987)
How often do you feel the irresistible urge to check yourself out in a mirror? Are you surprised how often others check themselves out too?
Perhaps one of the worst kept secrets in society is how vain we are. We often pretend not to care what other people think but evolution and culture have made us perpetual comparison machines.
Is social media making us more vain?
Social media, in particular the services focused on images and videos, amplify our ability to make comparisons. First, users see a greatest hits reel of meticulously crafted, edited, and filtered content from friends and acquaintances that sets the quality bar impossibly high. Second, the ability to quickly and endlessly scroll through people’s posts make the raw quantity of content and comparisons more abundant. Third, the convenient smartphone app enables any boring moment to be transformed.
Perhaps people have always been this vain but modern culture enables (forces?) us to more outwardly display it.
As Jonathan Haidt outlines in The Anxious Generation (2024), social media hijacks our brain’s systems and has uniquely negative effects for young women and young men. While Haidt limits his scope to children and young adults, what happens to these young women and men as they age?
When and what was The Great Rewiring?
Haidt defines the Anxious Generation as those born after 1996. The older members of this generation were hitting puberty during the 2010 to 2015 period, which Haidt calls The Great Rewiring. This pivotal period included the iPhone / smartphone adoption explosion, Instagram becoming a cultural phenomenon in 2011, and Facebook’s purchase of the image-based platform for $1 billion a year later.
While good parenting has always included limiting TV time and content, the double whammy of the iPhone launch in 2007 and Instagram in 2011 was uniquely challenging for parents since the content was not from glamorized Hollywood sets but a child’s peer network. The desire for acceptance (read: likes & followers) was turbocharged and cyber attention-seeking / bullying became commonplace.
How does the Anxious Generation approach vanity in their late 20s and 30s?
The older members of this Anxious Generation are now approaching their late 20s and early 30s. Is it any surprise that elective dermatological procedures and plastic surgery have seen particularly rapid growth?
For example, the annual amount of soft-tissue fillers / lip augmentation in 2024 was 142% higher than the amount in 2019, as reported by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.1
As an investor, I do not make moral judgements on broad cultural trends. My goal is to observe and understand what is happening in an attempt to predict the future.
I believe that people, particularly those who grew up during and after The Great Rewiring, are more likely to take significant action to alter their appearance as image/video-based social media increases social comparison.
Where is the line between longevity and vanity?
In some ways, any action to improve one’s health can be interpreted as vain – a selfish attempt to live longer, look better, and enjoy life. However, for many, a focus on longevity is driven by a simple desire to spend more healthy years with loved ones.
I believe there is a spectrum of reasons why consumers choose various interventions in the health & wellness world. One extreme might involve taking various medications that are unlikely to have any noticeable outward effect on appearance (~100% longevity / ~0% vanity). The other extreme might be elective plastic surgery (~0% longevity / ~100% vanity).
In the middle of the spectrum, there are numerous products and services that address both longevity and vanity, in varying degrees. This is particularly true for personal care products.
For example, I increasingly have more gray hair. Would I ever consider dye? No, I don’t care enough about the grays to risk looking silly or to put potentially toxic chemicals on my scalp. If someone created a product that 1) was good for my scalp and 2) gradually turned some of my gray hair back to its original color, then I would absolutely consider it.
I believe there are major opportunities at the intersection of longevity and vanity that are yet to be explored.
Another example is the success of Starface. The company’s hydrocolloidal pimple patches have become an acceptable fashion statement for teenagers while also more actively healing face blemishes.
In the food space, the controversy and recent success of the David protein bar is an example where many consumers, to the confusion of many wellness influencers, prioritize a protein-to-calorie ratio (read: more muscle, less fat) at the expense of eating a heavily processed snack.
Vanity’s Bonfire
In 1987, the late Tom Wolfe wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities, describing 1980s New York City. Key themes are the fragility of status and how information / media / truth could be warped. I’m still searching for a more recent exposé that captures similar themes in 2026 – please send any suggestions!