Quotation Study: Natural Beauty, Ling Ling Huang
On privilege, consumption, and the performance of purity...
This is not necessarily a review—I just love analysing and unpacking quotes, sometimes even individual words within them. However, as a general rule, if I underline lots of quotes, it’s usually a highly rated book!
These are studies of quotes within certain novels—either unpacking larger themes or simply exploring how each quote makes me feel on its own. I like applying quotes to my life, using them to articulate feelings I’ve never known how to describe. So, welcome to Quotation Studies.
There’s no rhyme or reason here. Just thoughts sprawled out onto a page. It’s me enjoying language as a former literature student who misses the act of unpacking words.
This week: Natural Beauty, Ling Ling Huang
This novel was an easy five stars for me. Its unflinching critique of capitalism felt both urgent and refreshing — especially in how it centred the experiences of the working class without romanticising or reducing them. What struck me most was the nuanced way it moved across class brackets, showing how economic disparity shapes not just opportunity but also desire, identity, and the very language of self-worth. It's rare to find a novel so committed to deconstructing systemic inequality while still telling a deeply human, propulsive story.
There’s a particular kind of loneliness in being surrounded by everything you thought you wanted. The beautiful apartment. The minimalist skincare routine. The clean lines of “conscious” consumerism. The vitamins you can’t pronounce but are told to trust. In Natural Beauty, Huang dismantles this aesthetic of aspiration. Her unnamed narrator becomes a body through which our obsessions, with beauty, wellness, and success, are filtered, stretched, and ultimately disfigured.
This novel was an easy 5 stars for me, the capitalists deconstruction and focus on the lower class was refreshing, whilst also exploring other class brackets.
“Astonishingly intelligent and talented, but held back by life’s demands on them.”
The novel begins with the narrator’s shift from music prodigy to beauty store assistant. A descent only by capitalist metrics. She’s someone brilliant and full of quiet fire, but the world doesn’t know what to do with brilliance that doesn’t generate capital. In her silence, we see the pressure of survival. This line stung. Because isn’t that the quiet tragedy of our generation? So many people I know are held back not by lack of drive but by the sheer cost of being alive. The system doesn't reward beauty unless it’s packaged, sterilised, and monetised.
“It took a long time for me to understand that only people who have had nothing feel the need to keep everything.”
What Natural Beauty does so well is trace the psychology of scarcity. The hoarding, the clinging — they’re not aesthetic choices. They’re trauma-responses dressed in Glossier pink. This quote reminded me of growing up in a house where my dad used to wash plastic straws so we could use them again. I used to feel shame about that. Now I see it as ancestral wisdom disguised as frugality. What Huang captures so well is how consumerism lures us with the idea of control — as if owning things, perfecting our faces, tracking our sleep can soften the world’s violence.
“His whole business model privileges the already privileged.”
There’s a cold violence in the way clean beauty operates — as if wellness is merely about choosing better. The novel lays bare how so much of the “new luxury” industries revolve around keeping certain people out. The healthy food, the clean products, the classes on inner peace. They’re all gatekept by disposable income and inherited time. Purity, here, is just class war with prettier branding. My partner and I try to eat only natural and healthy food, both on near enough minimum wage, and our grocery expenses keep going up and up but my pay does not. At what point do we give up on trying to make a better life for ourselves?
“Buying stuff is supposed to make us happy. It’s a Band-Aid slapped on top of structural issues that actually need to be addressed.”
This quote could’ve been pulled from any one of my writing sessions. We are sold the lie that we can shop our way out of grief, out of generational pain, out of our own bodies. But there is no serum for loneliness. No wellness subscription for systemic inequality. Huang doesn’t just critique this — she shows how insidious it is. How it masks itself as care. How capitalism performs intimacy, promises transcendence, and then quietly asks for your data, your face, your soul.
“He thinks divorcing products from the labor they require is integral to increasing demand.”
What we don’t see is where our products come from. Who made them. Who packed them. Who cannot afford them. The illusion of the sleek, clean shelf requires erasure. I think often about this when I buy anything — who carried this? Whose hands touched it before mine? Capitalism thrives on our disconnection. And Natural Beauty dares to reconnect those threads — even when the picture is terrifying.
This novel is dystopic in the most believable way — not far-future but next month. Today even. It reminded me why I’m drawn to speculative fiction that interrogates capitalism. Because it shows us what’s already here. Just turned up a notch.
Like all good novels, Natural Beauty doesn’t just make you think. It makes you feel seen, and then unsettled by the seeing. It asks us to look again.
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