The Incredible Shrinking Star
thin is in and that's not good
“The camera adds ten pounds.”
Type that into a search engine and you’ll get endless explanations for why that supposedly happens. Many of us—especially those who grew up in the Polaroid era—were convinced it was true. We’d stare in horror at the envelope of photos we’d just picked up from the drugstore—80 percent of them always dreadful—and pray that the camera was, well, wrong. Surely we didn’t actually look that fat.
(I didn’t create the mores of my youth, so please don’t leap all over me for my lack of body positivity.)
Looking at the latest red-carpet photos of our stars, however, I’m starting to hope the camera does add ten pounds. Because if it doesn’t, a distressing number of actresses appear to have left half of themselves at home. These women are no longer merely Hollywood slim. They’re emaciated—and, oddly, increasingly indistinguishable from one another. Stick-thin arms. Cheekbones and clavicles you could hang a coat on. Protuberant lips pressed together in a small, grim smile. Skin that looks uniformly polished everywhere, as if they’d left their pores at home.
Society implies this is what beauty looks like.
It isn’t.
It’s what employability looks like.
Hollywood* is still largely run by men, and the actresses who keep getting cast increasingly appear to have passed the same physical exam. Their bodies get smaller. Their faces get tighter. The message is unmistakable even if no one says it aloud: if you want to keep working, you’d better keep refining the product.
I’m not here to trash these women. I can’t imagine the pressure they feel to remain young and beautiful. What I do want to say is that this current beauty standard is dangerous—physically and culturally. The expectation that a woman worth paying attention to is a woman who, quite literally, occupies as little physical space as possible is deeply retrograde. It is the physical manifestation of the old repressive notion that women, like children, should be seen and not heard.
Yes, thankfully, there are actresses who seem to be resisting the trend. But they are few, and they are rarely the biggest stars. Look through the photos from the 2026 Golden Globes red carpet. Almost to a woman, these actresses are stick-thin. Amal Clooney and Kristen Bell look half the size of their spouses. Emily Blunt’s wrists are as narrow as flamingo legs. Zoë Kravitz’s cheeks look as though a deranged plastic surgeon has placed chocolate éclairs beneath the skin.
None of them, to my eye, look like anything I’d want to resemble—or want my daughter or my sister or my best friend to resemble.
Why am I writing about this? Partly because I once was too thin. In my early twenties I had my heart broken and responded, stupidly, by giving up food for a while. (At my lowest, I weighed almost 30 pounds less than I do now.) I am forever grateful that my friends called me out on it. Enough of them said, Enough of them said, “You look terrible. What you’re doing is unsafe. Stop it.” So I did. I started eating ice cream every day (for a while) and have never again wanted hip bones that entered the room before the rest of me.
It feels important to say that sort of thing now. Not to shame very thin famous women—but to say plainly that this is not a look we want for ourselves or for our daughters to emulate. Body positivity, at its best, was never meant to celebrate extremes.
And while I struggle with how to talk about obesity—it’s not good for anyone’s health either—it’s worth noting that larger women are hardly being celebrated. They’re still mocked with snide regularity. I’m not interested in mocking anyone. But it might be wise for the rest of us to push back against the current glam ideal that GLP drugs, plastic surgery, and the strange distortions of social media have produced.
I’m not entirely sure how we do that collectively.
But individually, we can start by being sane.
What passes today for haute isn’t hot.
It’s hellish.
Just say no.
*There’s some whole other piece about MAGA beauty standards which, interestingly, is rarely about thinness. This is in part, I suspect, because MAGA women are supposed to be fertile and, for many reasons, being super thin isn’t a part of that gestalt.
**The picture is of too thin me in my very cool shades. This is me now.
