When Beauty Isn’t Real: Vogue’s AI Model and the Danger to Eating Disorder Recovery and Body Trust

Vogue’s AI Model: A New Benchmark That Isn’t Human

In August 2025, Vogue published a fashion campaign with a flawless, AI-generated model: blonde, blue-eyed, white-toothed, and toned. The only clue was a tiny disclaimer in the corner of the page.

The internet lit up with concern. On TikTok, one user wrote: “So first normal women are comparing themselves to edited models… Now we have to compare ourselves to women that don’t even exist???”

This isn’t just about fashion. It’s about the messages we take into our bodies: messages about worth, desirability, and what it means to be enough.

Perfectionism on Steroids

Social media has already trained us to edit, smooth, and filter ourselves for approval. What started as playful dog-ear filters turned into apps that reshape bone structure and erase every line.

AI takes this one step further. Now, the comparison isn’t between your body and a retouched photo — it’s between your body and a fantasy that doesn’t exist.

For anyone healing from an eating disorder, this is particularly dangerous. Eating disorders often root in perfectionism and comparison. If the standard of beauty is now AI-generated, our human attempts will never measure up. That endless striving is exactly what fuels disconnection and dissastifaction from the body.

Losing Touch With Human Beauty

Over the past decade, fashion has inched toward inclusivity, featuring more body types, ages, ethnicities, abilities, and genders. AI risks erasing that hard-won progress.

When trained on biased datasets, AI tends to replicate outdated ideals: thin, white, young, symmetrical. These “perfect” bodies promote the same unattainable standards that eating disorder recovery works so hard to dismantle.

Slowly, if we are not careful, we’ll forget what raw, unedited, natural human beauty looks and feels like. And when we lose touch with that, we lose touch with ourselves. Beauty always comes from the inside-out.

Embodiment as Resistance

Embodiment is the antidote to AI perfectionism. When we come back into our bodies through feeling hunger and fullness cues, breathing, moving with pleasure, we begin to loosen the grip of comparison. By inward, we turn away from outward competing.

Recovery asks us to honour the aliveness of our bodies, not their likeness to a machine-generated image. It invites us to trust that beauty is found in wisdom of wrinkles, scars, stretch marks, and softness — in the stories our bodies carry.

Choosing embodiment over AI perfection isn’t just personal healing; it’s cultural resistance. It says: I will not erase myself for your standards.

What We Risk Losing

This isn’t just about models. AI campaigns displace photographers, makeup artists, stylists, and other creatives whose artistry celebrates human expression. And most of all, they erase the lived experience of people in real bodies.

The danger isn’t simply that we’ll compare ourselves to images that don’t exist. It’s that we’ll forget the profound worth of our own bodies, exactly as they are.

Coming Home to Ourselves

AI-generated beauty will always be flawless. But flawless is lifeless and soulless.

Eating disorder recovery and embodiment remind us that the cracks, the textures, softness, and lines are what makes us alive. Our raw, lived experience and the beautiful wisdom gained from moving through it all is what makes us human.

In a world rushing toward synthetic beauty, the most radical act is to reclaim our body as it is. To remember that no algorithm can touch the wisdom, resilience, and depth of a living, breathing human being.

👉 What do you think? Does AI beauty fuel your perfectionism, or can it be a reminder to return to the body you’re already in?