Darkness, desire and dewy skin: Debut novel skewers beauty culture
Now, as a lifestyle writer who often reports on beauty and wellness, I know first-hand how the media operates as a cog in this glossy machine – the same one that made Kylie Jenner a billionaire and turned Gwyneth Paltrow from actor into a bona fide wellness guru.
Their founders preach self-love and empowerment, while in the same breath pushing expensive potions intended to 'enhance' the real you. They're not just selling products; they are selling a lifestyle.
It might be a cliché to describe these brands as having a cult following, but the term fits –given their larger-than-life founders, year-long product waitlists, and legions of devoted fans.
But what if a beauty brand was literally a cult?
This is the premise of Rytual, the debut novel by Chloe Elisabeth Wilson – a deliciously dark exploration of 21st-century beauty and wellness culture, told through the lens of an erotic thriller. Published last week, the novel was hotly contested in a fierce bidding war, the rights of which have already been sold for a TV adaptation.
Marnie Sellers, the novel's protagonist, is a 20-something screenwriter stuck in a cycle of partying by night and manning the reception of a fitness studio by day. Still reeling from her mother's death and the fallout of an affair with a married older writer, Marnie is adrift until she finds herself under the spell of Rytual – a fictional beauty brand with a rabid female following for its 'no make-up, make-up' products.
Wilson appears on Zoom from her light-filled Melbourne apartment, flanked by a bookshelf bursting with indoor plants and the colourful spines of novels. She holds up her The Substance water bottle – a fitting accessory, given the body horror film's take-down of a culture obsessed with youth.
For the past year, she's worked as a researcher for Shameless Media, the hugely successful youth media company founded by Michelle Andrews and Zara McDonald.
But it was her colourful employment history – including a brief stint as a Pilates instructor and time at Emeis Cosmetics, a L'Oréal-owned company that makes products for Australian luxury skincare brand Aesop – that partly inspired the book.
'I was working for an Australian beauty brand with a reputation for being a bit of a cult for a while, and I wanted to write something about that environment,' Wilson, 32, says.
'I just wanted to pluck out the very theatrical things about my real job and push them out to the complete extremities of what a reader might believe. There's so much comedy in just how serious the whole thing was.'
For reasons that will become clear as you read the book, it's important to point out that Rytual is very much a work of fiction.
But the broad strokes of Millennial beauty culture will be instantly recognisable to anyone who has so much as wandered into one of these stores. Wilson says brands such as Glossier, Rare Beauty and Westmann Atelier all served as inspiration.
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In Rytual, they're echoed in the soft pink packaging of lip oils bearing names like 'She' and 'Lust' written in sans serif fonts and the fairy floss painted walls of the company's headquarters.
The female-founded start-up Rytual leans heavily on feminist rhetoric, with conference rooms named after women deemed to have been persecuted in the public eye (Britney Spears, Billie Holiday), and weekly sessions where employees are encouraged to lay bare their bad experiences with the male species.
The brand is inseparable from its charismatic founder Luna Peters, a petite, green-eyed brunette who Marnie's housemate describes as a 'hot Jim Jones in designer clothes'.
Luna, too, is an approximation of women Wilson has come across before – only with a penchant for murder and little regard for personal boundaries.
'There were a couple of women who worked in that office [at Emeis] that I was really drawn to, and I should say they were gorgeous people that I adore, but there was something so charismatic about them and they had so much power within that context that I was probably more interested in my reaction to them,' she says.
Marnie has some similarities with Wilson – they're the same age, have a background in screenwriting and live in inner Melbourne (Rytual is filled with tongue-in-cheek quips about the city's hipster culture). Emotionally, Wilson understands how a character like Marnie could be so easily sucked into the vortex of a woman like Luna.
'I was at a point in my life where I didn't feel like I had a lot going on for me, and I had this job that at times was really frustrating, and it had really high expectations, but also it wasn't paying me very much. So I found myself lapping up the law of the org chart and looking at these women as like, 'they know what to do'.'
'I then just built out this idea of this person who, you know, maybe my younger self or maybe a person who didn't have much going for them, like what would it take?'
'What kind of person would it take for them to just keep inching towards doing bad things under the spell of this person?'
A fan of erotic thrillers, Wilson says the genre, historically dominated by male voices, was ripe for reimagining.
She cites classics, including Susanna Moore's 1995 novel In the Cut, as well as films Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, as inspiration.
'A lot of those texts from the 80s and 90s, the punchline is always, 'and the woman was crazy and evil, so she had to be punished',' Wilson says. 'I just wish the endings weren't ruined by scared little men.'
Another key influence was Dead Ringers, the 2023 gender-flipped television remake of the 1988 psychological thriller, starring Rachel Weisz as twin gynaecologists.
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Sex, then, or rather the twisted attraction between the two main characters, serves as the novel's engine (does Marnie want to be Luna, sleep with her, or escape her?)
'The things from the erotic thriller I took were this sense of arousal and danger being on this knife edge and maybe doing things that you knew you shouldn't because you were like following your desire and then having to deal with the consequences,' she says.
With echoes of the female-led revenge fantasy, like that of Emerald Fennell's Promising Young Woman, Wilson's characters tiptoe an increasingly grey moral area as the novel progresses. It makes readers ask: What does justice look like when the odds are so often stacked against young women like Marnie? Where is the line between feminism and misandry? And what does it mean to perpetuate a cycle of violence in the name of women's empowerment?
Having written Rytual, how does Wilson now feel about the beauty industry?
'I put on a Glossier lip liner this morning and I love their products,' she laughs. 'I love beauty, I love make-up and I think it's more just examining when it tips over into merging with your identity or believing that these brands and founders can tell you how to live your entire life rather than just how to put on some mascara.'
Chloe Elisabeth Wilson will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival (May 8–11) and the Sydney Writers' Festival (May 19–27).
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