Seven weeks after my daughter Bella was born, I left her for four hours to get my hair highlighted.
It was April of 2021, shortly after the COVID vaccine was released, which felt momentous at the time. I was leaking milk through my shirt, checking my phone every few minutes, and trying to cosplay as a normal person. I remember exactly what I was wearing: black compression leggings, a striped T-shirt, an oversized denim jacket from HATCH. It took me 20 minutes to land on that forgiving combination.
I spent the entire appointment low-grade panicking that Bella wouldn’t take a bottle and that I was a terrible mother for leaving for so long. I have a LOT of hair. It takes forever. The thing is, I also desperately needed to be there. Not just for the highlights, but for the brief, bizarre luxury of being a body without a baby attached to it.
READ: I Suffered From Anorexia Before & After Becoming a Mom
I’ve been listening to Rich Girl Nation by Katie Gatti Tassin. She has a concept called the “Hot Girl Hamster Wheel”—the never-ending cycle of spending time and money to maintain a basic level of attractiveness. Nails, hair, skincare, fitness, injectables, wardrobe. She describes her beauty habits as fossilized in her self-esteem, requiring her to chip away at far more than dollars and cents to understand her own financial choices.
Reading it, I had two immediate thoughts:
Wow, I wish Katie existed when I was a financially idiotic 22-year-old.
This doesn’t end when you have kids. It mutates.
Enter: The Hot Mom Hamster Wheel.
The mutation works like this: postpartum, beauty routines feel medicinal. You’ve been through something enormous—physically, emotionally, existentially—and re-entering your body and your routines feels less like vanity and more like recovery. A good haircut. Highlights. A manicure you can look down at and feel like yourself.
But the baseline shifts. What started as restoration calcifies into obligation. The treat becomes the floor. And suddenly you’re not doing these things to feel good. You’re doing them to avoid feeling bad.
READ: The End of an Era, the Start of ‘Just’ Me: My Postpartum Glow-Up After Our Last Baby
My personal hamster wheel, as a 40-year-old working mom of two:
- Powder dip manicures, which damage my natural nails, tethering me to these manicures indefinitely—a closed loop of capitalism and low-grade self-destruction
- Highlights every few months
- Blowouts before anything that matters
- Quarterly Botox, microneedling, dermaplaning and hydrafacials
- Quarterly massages, acupuncture and/or reiki
- A boutique fitness membership
- A full skincare and supplement routine, including a red light mask, SAD lamp and sauna blanket
This isn’t $80 here or there. It’s hundreds (sometimes thousands) of dollars a month on “maintenance.” Money that could be compounding somewhere, but very much isn’t.
READ: My Identity Crisis Postpartum Is the Best Thing That Ever Happened to Me
When Beauty Maintenance Starts to Feel Mandatory
Of course, the pressure to maintain an appearance isn’t equally distributed. For many women—particularly women of color—conforming to workplace beauty standards isn’t a lifestyle choice; it’s a professional survival strategy with real consequences.
My situation is more cushioned. I work primarily from home, collaborating via Zoom with other creative-minded people. No dress code, no fluorescent-lit conference rooms, no one visibly clocking whether my roots are showing. And yet the pressure holds.
It’s walking into a restaurant and feeling like someone who exists outside the four walls of my house. It’s school drop-off—suddenly among other adults, scattered but aware. It’s seeing friends, family, clients. Being seen at all.
There’s a version of me I recognize easily when I’ve done all the things. And a version I feel estranged from when I haven’t. When my nails are chipped and wiry gray hairs are showing, I find myself reflexively apologizing. I reach for hats and sunglasses like they’re load-bearing accessories. I have optimized the entire system within an inch of its life: laptop open at the nail salon, podcasts during facials, every appointment booked during childcare hours so it doesn’t eat into family time. Efficient, maybe. But a wheel all the same.
And, of course, the wheel isn’t operating in a vacuum. Every scroll offers up a new improvement plan: smoother skin, tighter jawline, brighter under-eyes. Before-and-afters, perimenopause hacks, discount codes, “one quick treatment” promises.
It’s hard to tell where my own preferences end and the algorithm begins.
Here’s where it gets complicated. I don’t think getting Botox or highlights makes me a bad feminist. I’m an adult woman making choices about my own body. But I do wonder where my own preferences end and years of conditioning begin. At this point, is there even a meaningful difference?
And then there’s the part we don’t always say out loud: it works. People are, broadly speaking, nicer to you when you look a certain way. Quicker to assume competence, warmth and success. I’ve experienced this firsthand. When I lost weight in college, the shift in how I was treated, by both men and women, was immediate and undeniable.
Optimization, to some degree, pays off. Which makes the whole thing harder to untangle. The pressure isn’t only internal. It’s reinforced, constantly, by the world around you. You’re not imagining it.
What Our Daughters See
But the part that bothers me most is my daughter.
When I apologize for being “undone”—the chipped nails, the eye hollows, the wrinkles—what is she absorbing? I would never look at her and suggest her natural face needed correcting. I would never imply that her body, as it is, requires management. And yet, if I’m not careful, she’ll watch me perform this low-grade dissatisfaction with my own, over and over again.
There’s a particular guilt that lives at the intersection of motherhood and self-image: the awareness that you are, whether you intend to or not, modeling a relationship with your body.
And I’m not sure mine is the one I want to pass down. I don’t want Bella to grow up thinking the natural state of a woman’s body is a problem to be solved. And I’m not sure I can teach her otherwise if I haven’t figured it out myself.
But how do you opt out of a system that, in very real ways, still rewards participation?
To be clear: I don’t think the answer is to opt out entirely, and Katie herself agrees. But she makes a point I keep returning to: “I just hope that you’re doing it because you want to, not because you feel like you can’t stop.”
Maybe growth looks like pausing before booking the CoolPeel I’ve been contemplating. Maybe it means getting this manicure removed and living a bare-nail life for a few months, just to see what I find underneath. Maybe it’s just letting things stretch a little longer. Not rushing to fix every perceived flaw. Talking to myself the way I’d talk to my sister, or a beloved friend, or my daughter: You’re beautiful. You’re enough. I love you just as you are.
I’ll still go back to the salon. Fresh highlights and a good haircut are genuinely transformative, postpartum or not. I just don’t want that feeling to become something I have to keep buying back. Because at some point, self-love has to be an inside job.
FAQ
Q: Why do mothers feel pressure to look good after having kids?
A: Many mothers feel pressure to look good after having kids because beauty standards, social media, workplace expectations and cultural ideas about “getting yourself back” can make normal postpartum changes feel like problems to fix.
Q: How can beauty routines affect postpartum self-image?
A: Beauty routines can help mothers feel more like themselves after birth, but they can also become a source of pressure when self-care starts to feel like another obligation or standard to maintain.
Q: How can mothers model healthier body image for their daughters?
A: Mothers can model healthier body image by avoiding negative comments about their own appearance, talking about beauty routines as care rather than correction, and reminding children that bodies do not need to be fixed to be worthy.
