Why I will never do a brand deal: Thoughts from a woman, 100,000 followers in
This is an excerpt from my book Your Perfect Dream Girl: Influencers, AI, and the Future of Desire (Penguin Random House 2026). Get it here.
My name is Sukhnidh, and I want to ask you a question.
Do you think we become who we are, or discover it?
There is a girl inside me who longs to understand who she is and who she could be. Maybe I’m supposed to find her, to fight the world and hunt her down and then cradle her forever. Or maybe I’m supposed to create her, crafting every freckle until she takes her first breath and flies away like songbirds do. I see her, sometimes, when I blink. For a fraction of a second she reaches out to touch me, and I extend my arm. Then somebody cuts our limbs off and the light returns. It happens all the time. I never stop trying to get to her, though, because I think she’s asking to be saved.
I can do it. I can do it. I just need to traverse the universe between her and I.
Standing between us, however, is a little palette of concealer.
Every day, I get an advertisement for concealer. There’s concealer that is sweat-resistant, and concealer that provides minimal creasing, and concealer that acts like microfilm, and concealer that promises to last all day. Every day, a hawk slithers around my neck and says there is some part of me so grotesque that I must conceal it from public view. He shattered my body a long time ago, and his whispers now fall on my jagged shards. To my limbs he says, ‘Stay hidden from the world until burning hot wax drips down your legs and rips out your hair follicles. Put a blade to the skin if you must.’ He gives me shapewear to suffocate the space where my organs sit, and chemical bleach to deform my face. He says none of it is self-mutilation. I was just made all wrong, and the natural state of me is shameful.
Every day, I receive a DM from some or the other influencer agency, asking, ‘Hey, [makeup brand] is asking for your commercials.’ They want me to sell concealer. Sometimes, they want me to sell waxing strips and shapewear, too.
I wonder why they assume I would be happy to convince my fellow women that they are grotesque and need to be fixed. I wonder what my work as a human-computer interaction researcher, or my hobbies as a media producer and engineer, have to do with concealer, or waxing strips, or shapewear.
Then I remember that I am a woman, so I am expected to be useful to a patriarchal technocapitalist internet.
It was in my early twenties that I opted out of the system that sought to commodify my face, talent, body, and girlhood. I made a career out of studying why the way we consume women online is so broken. And it is because I escaped that I would never blame young women today for not doing so. Not when quadrillions of dollars, from beauty and fashion and tech industries, are aimed like weapons right at their faces. Not when most of them are the first women in their lineages to have the right to freely work.
I will never blame a young girl for not knowing who to believe. Before I knew that being consumed does not mean being understood, before the same stage and the audience that had whispered that they loved me had broken me completely, I was like them, too.
The more I scroll through my Instagram feed today, the more I find myself transported to a fairytale kindergarten. Every post is happy, beautiful, and hypnotizing. An influencer tries on a purple-gold, glitter-speckled, holographic lip gloss, capturing dapples of sunlight in a bottle and gliding them onto her lips with a doe-foot applicator. A woman bedazzles a phone case with little mirror rhinestones, gluing plastic circle after plastic circle onto hot pink silicon. Another, having just tried on a highlighter, drops her jaw performing a physical re-enactment of what it might look like to be shook.
Scrolling through it all never quite feels like happiness. In fact, when I enter that familiar state of passive consumption, my spectrum of emotions shrinks drastically. When my eyes are fixated on the way lip oil glides onto the cupid’s bow of a stranger, I am not here. I am there, in that fairytale, sedated. Each post elicits just one thought in my lobotomized mind.
I should buy that.
I should buy that.
I should buy that.
I should buy that.
Do I have the right to a thought other than this one? Does anyone?
It always happens this way. The algorithm has picked up on my preference for shiny things, and offered up a thousand units, almost too quickly and desperately, as if I am a king and it is my jester. Of course, there is no such thing as benevolence, and my jester wants to kill me.
Consumer brands have long used sensory appeal to sell us things. In beauty and fashion, they deploy influencers to do this job for them. Every day users are hooked to this sensory carnival of sights, sounds and colours, because it is soothing and distracting and we are desperate for escapism in a world that is making us distraught with its violence. In turn, corporations become more empowered to disproportionately exploit women’s wallets.
We, squealing and gasping good girls, compulsively adorn our bodies with shiny plastic sedatives, convinced that the next purchase—a lip gloss, a sequin, a trinket—will finally make us worthy. All the while, the planet goes on choking, with plastic waste knocking on the doors of landfills that don’t have the space for lipstick tubes and bubble wrap anymore. People we will never talk to labour to make beautiful, glittering things in factories while we sleep. Sedated by the seduction of things, we don’t pay attention to how our conformity to feminine ideals harms ourselves and the world. We must all play the parts of mini-sociopaths, keeping a broken world broken.
There was a time, in the years leading up to COVID-19, when the online conversations on the Indian internet began shifting to social justice. The hypervisible and hyperconsumed women from that era, from every rung of socioeconomic empowerment who attempted to be heard, experienced immense trolling and shaming. I know, because I’ve been researching hyperconsumed women’s experiences for a long time. Then Instagram changed its model to one that allowed many people to become ‘creators,’ influencer agency culture became formalized and streamlined, and inconvenient creators were replaced overwhelmingly with those that were willing to play by the rules: being brand safe, optimizing for engagement, and becoming disciplined by the ideals of platforms and consumer brands. We have long spoken about the merits of democratization, but this is the downside. More people entering a broken system doesn’t make that system unbroken. It makes it more powerful.
I look around the internet now. It’s all things, things, things. I spend my wages on things, and I watch people use things, and my girlfriends and I all talk about things. We are irrelevant, broken things, worshipping at the altar of things. The platform watches me like I am a thing. I begin to think I am a thing. It has all sedated me enough that I can no longer remember the girl inside of me. It doesn’t want me to find her, because once I do, I’ll escape its clutches.
The internet is turning into a sterile, glowing shopping mall. All the good girls are lobotomized. And everything is working according to plan. The lobotomy will go on narrowing our desires to those that sustain consumer capitalism, and the inconvenient symbols of critical thought, craft and humanity will disappear.
I’m trying to break free from the madness, and I want to tell you why.
Today, I see young women online adopting labels: clean girl, soft girl, pilates girl, matcha girl, black cat, white cat, cottage core, dark academia, skinny fat, midsize. These micro-identities are so popular because they give young women access to a sense of self; a way to define who they are in this world.
But to earn their right to claim any micro-identity, young women must adopt its aesthetic. To do that, they must spend money. A clean girl must buy clear lip gloss. A cottagecore girl must buy flowing dresses. It’s pay to play. Then to actualize a chosen identity, young women must perform it online, posting and labouring for platforms and consumer brands, generating data and moving sales. Since a micro-identity is a trend, it has an expiration date, and it gets stripped too fast to ever actually accumulate meaning. Never able to become comfortable in their own identities, always on the edge of being a person, young women can never escape the cycle and do something greater with their lives. The platform benefits, and corporations benefit, and women remain utterly useful. The most useful woman under patriarchal technocapitalism is the Perfect Dream Girl, benefiting patriarchy, corporations, and platforms alike.
I wish I could tell them that I was once in their position. In the years that my male friends played soccer, built computers and dreamt up multi-million-dollar companies, I, like millions of girls, was encouraged to put on a dress, suck in my stomach and shake my ass. Women like me danced for the camera, and we danced for men, and we danced for the trillion-dollar megacorporation that never paid us a penny. The life-force we could have spent building and inventing and dreaming went, instead, into the labour of being looked at.
Instagram staggered notifications to return when our dopamine dipped, ensuring our neurobiological dependence on the thing that was ruining us. Former Meta president Sean Parker noted that this dopamine-driven feedback loop was intentionally designed to exploit vulnerabilities in human psychology. Since unforgiving algorithms lowered our visibility instantly if we did not comply with its demands, we knew we would be punished for taking breaks or not looking desirable enough. Then, the platform convinced us that being disciplined to do what it wants us to do was a good thing.
In her work on algorithmic power, Taina Bucher argues that social media platforms train us to behave in specific ways through a system of curation and ranking-related rewards. We take cues from this system and then orient our self-presentation and online engagement towards algorithmic appeal. For years, we attempted to ‘game’ and ‘hack’ the algorithm.
Around 2021, Instagram’s @creators account began to offer ‘transparency’ to users by giving us tips and tricks to become more visible. By 2025, Mosseri himself became a creator, busting myths and guiding us on how to succeed on the platform. Instagram framed its foray into algorithmic transparency as an attempt to provide more agency to us, but this, too, was a lie. Transparency does not alleviate the disciplining effects of algorithmic power. It only shifts accountability from the platform to the user, and the method of control from covertness to assertion.
Such a tricky game.
Beauty has always had functional utility. When women did not have the ability to own bank accounts or make money, it helped us secure better marriages. When the printing press came about, it became one of the many valuable commodities scaled and distributed for profit. Magazines created new, impossible standards, and women spent massive amounts of money on reaching them. Seeing a new market opportunity, businesses manufactured more insecurities, fragmenting our bodies into many exploitable parts. A darkened elbow. A hairy upper lip. The cracked heel of a foot. Then the internet arrived, and websites hosted women’s images in searchable inventories, making us infinitely reproducible and storable, raising the standards even higher. Beauty brands found their way online, creating one of the fastest-growing industries in the world.
The scam was so successful that when social media came about, businesses knew exactly the question to ask: What if we further optimize the supply chain of beauty by making women do the work of distributing their own images, and tricking them into bearing their own cost of distribution? Impossibly, yet so predictably, it worked. They told girls like me that to be commodified was empowering.
They told us that to be valuable under a system is to be useful to it. And millions of us believed them.
I know for a fact that if I had let the algorithm dictate my life, I would have remained a good girl, making matcha, healing my gut, trying on beautiful dresses, selling lipstick, living slow, being soft, being self-aware, being grateful, being kind. But I want a different kind of greatness that cannot afford this distraction. And I want more women to aspire to that greatness. Because if inconvenient people from pre-COVID-19 had been allowed to go on existing online, the world would look very different today. But we didn’t let them, and we’re facing the consequences.
Today, I think back to why I, at thirteen, went online.
In my earliest memory, I am sitting on the cold tiles of a preschool and playing with a pair of resin dice. All of the other children are huddled in a corner, and I don’t know why I’m crying. My parents send me to a speech therapist. Then I am perched on a yellow-painted wooden chair in my third-grade classroom. A wasp enters through the window, and my classmates scream and run and collapse into a pile of giggles. I sit still and watch them. Then I am in college, and the professor is drawing gammas and thetas on a sprawling green chalkboard, and tears are welling in my eyes because no one wants to sit with me.
In sticky Bombay summers, I play the piano with no fan on, tasting sweat for hours until a thirty-second riff feels right. On weekends I take hundreds of selfies, tilting my head by one-degree angles until I look the way I do in my head. I draw hundreds of pictures of the same woman until I develop carpal tunnel and produce hundreds of songs in the same genre until someone taps a foot. I write about the same thing for years until it becomes the shape of all I know. I don’t eat or sleep, and I faint on my bathroom floor, and I never miss a day. My mama tells me that I always take things too far.
When you never feel like you belong, you start creating fervently in the hope that someday, those songs and pictures and videos and poems will weave themselves together into a world where you do. There, you will never feel like an outsider again. I lived my life in repetitive movements because I was consumed by a need to build this world precisely. It was all a fantasy that someday, somebody would understand me. This fantasy became three thousand posts offered on the altar of Instagram, and people and algorithms turned my willingness to bleed into a virtue. That is how I became one of India’s first social media influencers.
I know, now, that for a woman under patriarchal technocapitalism, being seen does not mean being understood. In fact, there is no safe way for a woman to be visible on the internet. I am trying to pour all of this greatness I have found in the empty spaces where no concealers sit into doing something about this.
John Gillespie Magee Jr wrote in the 1940s,
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew—
And, while with silent lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
Magee started the sonnet High Flight in 1941 during World War II at a posting in Wales. Its imagery was shaped by the high-altitude training runs he flew with his squadron.
In the archives of my mid-twenties, I find a poem. Juxtaposed with Gillespie’s, it reveals to me why I’ll never touch the face of God.
‘I’m all neon panther claws and prima donna lashes.
I craft with gluey resin rhinestones on a phone.
I detonate a diamond bomb to watch powder refractions
fall out softly like asbestos snow.
Tinkling-jingling windchime with rose-quartz in my pocket
If I paint it, was it anything but pink?
Shiny plastic sedatives for this baby in a bonnet . . .
They put a price now on all sorts of things.’
I want to fly too, you know? I want easy grace.
I don’t think I’m going to find it in the wire transfer for a branded post.
Oh I’m so ready for this book