The horror between “before” and “after”

There is nothing wrong with wanting a beautiful home or body. To surround ourselves with pleasing surfaces, to see our reflection with some pride, these are ordinary human desires. But the famed before-and-after image takes those desires and turns them into a demand — one that’s only growing more insistent: over the past decade, online search interest in the artifact has been steadily climbing, and billions of posts on it have been logged across platforms.

Horror lives here: not in the “before,” but in the ever-more convincing lie that a set of pictures is the whole story. Two still points are posed as evidence, while the middle — the swelling, the dust, the debt — is erased. 

Life requires us to hold good and bad together. The before-and-after — capitalism’s favorite little stop-motion horror film — denies this ambivalence. Proof of life is recast as grotesque and shameful, time as an enemy to vanquish with productivity and polish, and the messy middle a secret to bear in silence. 

It is no accident that faces and interiors are the surfaces most obsessively redone. These feminine-coded zones are expected to be endlessly productive but never permitted to look as though they have worked. The kitchen must gleam but never show use. The bathroom must sparkle, as if it’s not made for mess. And the face? Its greatest sin is not ugliness but matronliness. To look matronly — like an old woman — is to betray time, and that betrayal is treated as abject. So we’re told to rip out, sand down, inject, smooth. To erase use.

Plastic surgery has perfected the mandate. The “before” sags or slumps; the “after” gleams with light and vitality. The bruises, the gauze, the weeks of wondering if it was worth it vanish from view. What remains is a body presented as if it had never bled.

Home renovation imagery obeys the same grammar. The “before” kitchen is often dim and cluttered. The “after” shines with marble counters and recessed lighting. Function rarely enters the picture. After all, the old kitchen worked. The faucets turned on. The stove lit. But the logic of before-and-after insists on total demolition. The home that once furnished meals and showers and arguments is rendered a showroom. 

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That fantasy of the “after” has grown so strong it no longer waits for reality. Plastic surgery consultations begin with algorithmic mock-ups of the “after,” spectral promises of smoothness set against the patient’s real face. Home shows do the same, floating renderings of dream kitchens before a single wall is knocked down. What was once slow and relational is now conjured instantly, a phantom assurance: this is you perfected.

Every smooth surface, every tightened line, is a mask stretched over the same truth: to stay alive is to change, to lose, to carry marks that fade (or don’t) with time. The task, then, is not to let the “before” be obliterated, but to hold it alongside the “after,” to bear ambivalence, wear, and loss like a patina. Because to erase time is not to conquer it, but to live surrounded by blank, gleaming surfaces that refuse to remember you.