The End of Beauty Sleep: How Capitalism Is Commodifying Bedtime
Words: Nooresahar Ahmad
In 2013, art critic Jonathan Crary posited sleep as one of the final frontiers against a capitalist logic which aims to create a never ending cycle of work, consumption and waste. Whilst many of the other necessities of human life have been commodified - from hunger and thirst to desire and friendship - Crary wrote, “Sleep is an uncompromising interruption of the theft of time from us by capitalism.” Sleep may be our last defence against capitalism; the final human experience which cannot be sold, the last hours of the day in which we are not compelled to spend or forced to work. A lot, though, can change in a decade.
The global sleep economy was valued at $432 billion in 2019, and was forecasted to rise to $585 billion within another five years. This economy is built on consumer goods that promise to aid and/or track sleep as well as beauty treatments which can be used at night — the ‘beauty pillowcase’ industry alone, dedicated to selling an item with a name so vague it sounds almost fictitious was worth $937 million in 2023.
An article in April’s issue of Vogue on beauty sleep highlights the best beauty products from a landslide of ‘face tape, mouth tape, collagen sheet masks, nose strips, and more’ worn by Tiktok users eager to indulge in ‘sleepmaxxing’ (have higher quality sleep) or who are partial to a ‘morning shed’ (a process in which layers of moisture-sodden tissue are applied before bed to be unpeeled upon waking, like a lizard shedding an old skin). Even sleep, notes Vogue editor Jessica Diner, has “become a competitive sport in the beauty space”, and using a sleep tracker like an Oura ring is worthwhile because “if you’re going to do all that hard work, you may as well get the insights to prove it.”
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Still, perhaps we should consider ourselves fortunate that sleep has not been eliminated altogether. For decades, the US military has been trying to figure out ways to make sleep a redundant bodily function, so as to create soldiers who are able to fight tirelessly through the day and night. Dextroamphetamine, a drug which increases alertness and reduces the need for sleep, has long been given to soldiers during combat. Last year, it was reported that the US Army is developing a light-activated drug that will be able to keep sleep-deprived military pilots awake and alert. Since, as Crary notes, “war-related innovations are inevitably assimilated into a broader social sphere”, the sleepless soldier would be the precursor to the sleepless worker or consumer, with non-sleep products becoming first a lifestyle option and then increasingly normalised, until they become a necessity. One can imagine the Tiktoks: ‘Spend 24 hours with me without sleeping!’, or ‘Trying out McDonald’s new Wakey Shakey (I haven’t slept all week!!)’.
“Night-time routines — the slathering of serums, the inputting of data into sleep apps, the studious application of pillow mists and diligent digestion of sleep supplements — have become “a friendly imitation of work.”
Such products are not, for the moment, available for a mass market, and the unavoidable hours we spend sleeping remain a loss of business for corporations that would otherwise be making a profit from us. One solution, used with increasing ferocity and shrewdness over the last 15 years, is to instead erode the hours we spend sleeping. Media companies have proved particularly successful at snatching our sleep for themselves.
Tiktok’s carefully constructed and highly addictive algorithms, designed with the priority of user retention and increasing each user’s time spent on the app, inevitably make scrolling in the app an activity that will eat away into the hours of the night. Streaming services have been using the same strategy for years; in 2017, Netflix’s CEO, referring to the common habit of bingeing series before bed, exultantly noted that their biggest competitor is sleep — “and we’re winning!”
Even when we have finally torn our gazes away from the screen long enough to get some shuteye, the pursuit of productivity plagues us. In On Photography, Susan Sontag famously described the act of taking photos on holiday as a kind of nervous tic developed by people living in cultures with a “ruthless work ethic”, to whom the act of taskless relaxation was incomprehensible. Taking photos gave shape to the experience, appeasing “the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation”. Like the tourist’s photograph, night-time routines — the slathering of serums, the inputting of data into sleep apps, the studious application of pillow mists and diligent digestion of sleep supplements — have become “a friendly imitation of work”. Sleep is, after all, one of the most formless and incomprehensible parts of the human experience; how satisfying, then, to give it a task-like shape, to have clear goals of optimisation and beauty, and to achieve them by following a five or ten-step plan.
Our attitude to sleep as yet another opportunity for working and consuming, however, does not seem to be helping us with our slumber. Insufficient sleep and insomnia are growing global health concerns, and around a third of adults in Western countries are reported as experiencing sleep problems at least once a week, with serious consequences on their physical and mental health. Our economy is increasingly organised around sleep-depriving work, no doubt part of the reason why we also drink huge amounts of caffeine and need soothing at bedtime by the bright lights and dopamine hits of our Tiktok feeds. Trends like sleepmaxxing can be interpreted as a desperate attempt to regain some control over an area of life which is gradually being taken out of our hands.
Just as capitalism has alienated us from our sleep, it can do the same with our sleeplessness. As the sleep economy booms so, too, does the insomnia economy, which is projected to reach $6.3 billion by 2030. There is only one thing for it then: throw your phone out the window, quit your job, and get back in bed. You deserve a few more hours sleep.
