A friend I bumped into recently at a birthday party explained to me, almost apologetically, why she hadn’t gone away on a summer holiday.

It was not information that required self-admonishment. She had not committed a crime. She had merely stayed home. And yet, her tone carried a faint air of failure, as though her family’s summer break had somehow not been fully lived, as it hadn’t been framed by smiling family photos at airports, exotic locales, and beautiful, lazy sunset meals. One of the oddest pressures of modern life is the need to produce a persuasive and consistent visual record of living well.

It is not just that we live among endless images of people having fun all the time. It is that these images now seem to suggest an increasingly narrow script for what happiness, beauty, motherhood and success are meant to look like. The modern female face, in particular, has been undergoing a curious homogenisation: the same cheekbones, the same lips, the same skin tone, the same studied glow. The range of what is called ‘beautiful’ appears to be shrinking, and in inverse proportion to the available interventions.........

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