By Jessie Tu
FICTION
Rytuał
Chloe Elisabeth Wilson
Penguin, $34.99
Despite our best efforts, the pursuit of beauty for women feels like an inescapable project of distraction. Case in point: we’re not entirely sure if the overpriced lash serum will deliver on its promise of longer, lusher lashes, but we hand over money anyway because, well, we want to be beautiful.
We crave the power that beauty holds. We’re comfortably deluded in contributing to the global industry that’s worth $650 billion a year.
Being beautiful is a reliable religion. Or rather, wanting to be included in the exclusive club of Beautiful Women can feel like an ungovernable lust. In Chloe Elisabeth Wilson’s debut novel, Rytuał, a dark, suspenseful yet funny book traces the obsessions and pitfalls of a group of young, listless Melburnian women vying for power under a beguiling boss.
Our heroine, Marnie, is a white woman in her late 20s. . She finds herself compromising her ethics and values to become a Beautiful Woman.
Her idol, Luna Peters, is the founder and CEO of Rytuał, a cosmetics brand with 10 simple products that generate more than $200 million in profit and has successfully cracked the international market.
When Marnie is randomly recruited to work for the company, she discovers a workplace run by aggressively aspirational women; women who own silk suits, have their curtain bangs trimmed every six weeks and make their own natural wine in their chic inner-city apartments and whose laughs (like their personalities) are rigidly “neat and contained”.
The company is a McDonald’s assortment of white “girlboss” feminism circa 2008. The meeting rooms are named after women who have been “unfairly treated in the public eye” – Billie [Holiday], Jean [Seberg], Amy [Winehouse], Britney [Spears].
“We come together to push out masculine norms and welcome in the divine feminine,” Luna espouses. “We conspire together to overthrow destructive patriarchal standards.”
Actually, they’re just profiting off insecure women who believe they need that $179 eye cream to feel accepted by the world, but the company’s marketing team promises something else: “Our products don’t change the way you look, they pull your natural beauty into focus. We’re all about women. We’re disrupting the way the beauty industry does business.”
Rytual is Chloe Elisabeth Wilson’s debut novel.Credit: Giulia Giannini McGauran
Of course, it doesn’t take long to realise the company is simply a (very handsome) wolf in (very handsome) sheep’s clothing; its female leader, a cult figurehead. In fact, the entire enterprise is an exemplar of a classic cult: we have a charismatic leader who exploits her underlings and demands inappropriate loyalty. Her followers are promoted up the ranks by recruiting fresh blood.
Before long, Marnie becomes Luna’s personal assistant. Then, suddenly, she’s committing petty crimes. Then, possible homicide. “I was the most alive I’d ever felt,” she explains. “Luna was a powerful drug … I want to bury myself in one of her armpits.”
At the company, Friday Night Drinks isn’t just a trip to the bar. It’s something far more sinister; a dungeon-affair that brutalises men who have mistreated these women. But are men the sole problem?
Rytuał is a clever workplace thriller that satirises our collective obsession with beauty and women’s need to always be optimising. Wilson isn’t interested in judging these women – she’s trying to point the finger at the very real and dangerous affectation of beauty and its power.
Can we escape it? Wilson doesn’t think so. But so what? As long as one is “influencing” others with their trim feminine-coded bodies fitted into structured brown suit pants, a woman can still determine her own destiny. Never mind that her form of feminism is entirely self-serving; her motivations a series of unchecked pathological desires to become someone who yields power from other people’s weaknesses. Never mind that at the end of the day, the pursuit can leave us hollowed out, dispirited.
Ah, the tribulations of being a young woman in 2025. As throughout history, we’ve become a problem to be solved. We don’t necessarily want our only power to be that based on our physical appeal. And yet, what are the alternatives?
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