Hot girl summers give way to sick girl winters; COVID-19 is back in the news again. I open a long read about “succubus chic”, a beauty trend and twenty-first century twist on a nineteenth-century aesthetic. Tuberculosis was the disease of the 1800s, gifting the patient a thinned body, radiant skin, and a slow death lingering pleasingly close to God. I have the time to read all about it while breathing in and out, in and out, of my nebulizer. This is a daily routine for the lung condition that has never granted me, at least, virtuous beauty. I don’t glow from living a little closer to death; people just tell me I look tired.
I have been reflecting on 2021: the year I realized my chronic illness isolates me. The community spirit of 2020 masked many differences; I was literally and emotionally shielded—but in 2021, my slower (and still incomplete?) return to everyday life exposed them.
Those differences were hammered home during three sunny September days, when my workplace held their annual gathering. The 2021 event was freighted with extra anticipation because 2020’s was, of course, canceled. A couple of dozen people traveled from around the UK to the outskirts of a small Berkshire town, bringing baked goods, a longing for connection, and regional variations of the new school year’s germs. We were not unprepared. I had conversations with team leaders about how to be safe, how to be included. I heard that others were concerned, wanted precautions, too. A colored wristband system was introduced to signal everyone’s preferences. Red for social distancing and no physical contact. Amber for no physical contact. Green for…. anything goes? I am not sure. I was so far from a green wristband at that time.
I was the only person wearing red.
People wanted to be together. I did, too. After a year and a half of screens, I couldn’t blame them the hugs. And people were kind, considerate. But that didn’t change my experience sitting apart, staying outside, not being able to take my turn at the washing-up station in a windowless kitchen. These small differences stacked up over three days to reveal what three decades of living with my symptoms had not: how different my body is from theirs.
I cried the full length of the hour drive home.
Consumption, the wasting disease, the white plague, for the paleness of its sufferers: a suite of names for the nineteenth-century disease of choice. Artists popularized it. Byron said he’d like to die by it. Keats actually did, at the admirably young age of 25. Physicians promoted the idea that the “good die young” of tuberculosis. If death was coming for everyone, it should arrive on a delicately blighted handkerchief.
There is a painful ableism in choosing to look sick for a beauty trend. In the 1800s, wealthy women would lighten their skin, sometimes with toxic arsenic, to create the consumptive appearance. The use of corsets peaked in the middle of the century, an effort to achieve the slimness of this wasting disease at the expense of your internal organs—body-altering steps by women for the marriage market. Debutante. Bride. Corpse.
Succubus chic, I read, invites cosmetic intervention. It isn’t enough to dye your hair and pluck your eyebrows. Knife-sharp cheek bones can rarely be achieved by contouring alone. The face must be excavated, bone arches exaggerated. The wellness movement is done; “clean girl” vibes have given way to the gothic. A succubus isn’t wholesome, she’s a demon. Another name for the look is “dark bimbo.” She is not a woman. She is a vampire, and then she is vacant—a vessel to be filled.
And a pocket to be drained. Beyond the moral judgements of beauty trends lies the money. You can lean into “hot girl summer,” a term that has become short-hand for a confident kind of woman leading a carefree kind of life. 2023’s variety had a tomato-red, Mediterranean bent, with manifold articles curating the essential top shopping picks. Succubus chic masquerades as rebellion while it follows in a long line of female conformity, with a price tag attached. Tuberculosis killed one in seven people in Europe and the US in the 1800s—and where death led, the money followed. This disease drove its own lucrative sub-sectors, like sanatorium treatments in choice locations. Being wealthy afforded the romance of the disease. Meanwhile, the actual rates of illness amongst low-income communities were high—and physicians and politicians alike laid the blame on people living in poverty. While the appearance of illness was sought, the contraction of it was judged.
Unlike tuberculosis, my lung condition actually is coded into my genes. Estimates suggest one in thirty thousand people carry it, rare enough that registering at a new local doctors’ surgery involves the awkward “expert patient” conversation as I outline its name, its symptoms, its treatment. Its prognosis. Not terrible. The clinic that diagnosed me over a decade ago and has cared for me ever since is encouraging that they expect me to be well. And when I’m not, they swiftly mobilize. Tests. Physio. Antibiotics. I must be a net drain on my country’s free national health service, and I am deeply grateful because each lung infection risks chipping a little off my life quality and expectancy.
I have learned to do illness well. Consumptive women in the nineteenth century were a picture of feminine ideals, delicate and vulnerable as they draped across a couch. My variation is less photogenic, but I am comfortable with the healing properties of the daily routine of inhalers and nasal sprays, and the emergency intervention of medication and huddling with an electric blanket and a decent crime drama.
Then the pandemic, the startling threat of a more abrupt ending. In those early days, I was not afraid that it would kill me. I stayed home to avoid using precious resources that could save someone else and because the law—eventually—told me to. I think a little differently now. I count masks, sanitizer sprays, tests. I wonder how much I should tuck myself away until spring.
On 24 March 1882, German physician Robert Koch announced the source of tuberculosis: a single-celled organism named “tubercule bacillus.” Then, the public health campaigns started. Clean hands. Outdoor exercise. We’re all in this together. “Human lives are sacred,” read a banner during a parade on Disease Prevention Day, 12 October 1914. “Your kiss of affection, the germ of infection,” a poster warned parents of schoolchildren. If we touch, one of us might die.
World Tuberculosis Day is marked every 24 March. The disease still kills 1.5 million people every year, but it most affects communities in lower-income countries. Treatments are available, unequally. “It’s time to end TB!,” was the theme for March 2020. It was the first day of the legally-enforced lockdown in the UK. Tuberculosis was not the disease on everyone’s lips.
With growing knowledge of this tubercule bacillus as an airborne contagion came increasing prejudice. Tuberculosis sufferers were often quarantined, sometimes against their will. The clinic where I receive treatment started, in fact, as a TB hospital. When I was first diagnosed, I would travel miles to a village with limited phone signal and a bus timetable, remnants of that isolation. This is the side of consumption that wasn’t painted on rich women’s faces.
I finally understood something else during the pandemic, too: many people are not used to being sick. And the notion of living with actual illness is anathema to our self-directed, time-prizing society. But there is no hack for chronic illness. A daily physio routine is boring. There is no joyful curation in collecting the same medication, year in and year out. My consultation appointments are a success if there is nothing new to talk about. This is not a scene worth capturing, celebrating, venerating.
In an ongoing inquiry into the UK’s COVID-19 response in 2020, the then-Prime Minister is reported to have questioned whether measures were worth it “for people who will die anyway.”
But we are all going to die anyway.
This is the deception of choice. Whether we wear wellness or rebellion, paint in arsenic or cut in surgical cosmetics, death is coming for everyone. This is the reality that no beauty trend can mask. This is the insult of “succubus chic,” of being well yet choosing the veneer of sickness for fashion.
If you met me, you might ask if I have a cold. I might say “yes,” a coping strategy born of years of kind questions. If we’re friends, you might say I look tired. If we’re close, I’d tell you that I am daunted by preparing for winter.
Julia Kendal is a writer and social justice advocate. She is a policy advisor on environmental sustainability and international development, a published poet and essayist. She has worked for and with NGOs, universities, faith and grassroots groups to engage people locally, nationally and internationally with social and environmental justice. She lives in Hampshire, England, and writes about sustainable living, justice and beauty. Connect at https://juliakendal.com/.