A blonde with a nosebleed – treacly, dark drops trailing over red lipstick, almost complementing it – appears in Mahsa Merc’s A Gay with a Nosebleed (2020). Overlapping layers of oil on canvas give the work a texture that makes it difficult to tell whether the bleed comes from a broken nose. What strikes me most is the subject’s stare: stark and defiant, almost wilful, intensified by layers of eyeliner. They make no effort to wipe away the blood, wearing it instead with a kind of effortless grit. I recently came across a photograph of a writer’s nosebleed on Instagram – her lips stained with dried blood, just one image in an unrelated carousel. What explains our impulse to document our injuries, especially on social media, and our search for beauty within them?
Last month, the visual artist Gab Bois posted a photograph of a red-flushed ear, pierced with staple pins in place of actual piercings: office core gone wrong. Bois’s grunge-fuelled corporate beauty is painful, much like working in such competitive office environments typically is. We lap up her work now, but when Steven Meisel shot his infamous ‘Makeover Madness’ editorial about intrusive procedures for a 2005 issue of Vogue Italia with a bandaged, post-op Linda Evangelista, nobody could take it. Though blood-soaked cotton and bleeding faces weren’t exactly palatable for a mainstream publication back then, that aesthetic was pure fodder for the first generation of internet kids on grunge Tumblr, among them Parisian designer Ilona. “Bruises and bloody noses were trendy back in 2012,” she said, referring back to the days when Allison Harvard still ran her Tumblr account and said in her ANTM interview that nosebleeds were pretty. “It was ‘aesthetic’ photos of pain, basically,” explained Ilona, “We are experiencing it resurfacing.”
Much like Gab Bois, who also got her start on Tumblr, scrolling through SFX makeup and visual artist Alona Sobolevska’s feed feels like viewing an alternate reality, where the grotesque mingles with the cute to form an eerily seamless slice-of-life. It’s unsettling yet oddly delicious. Last Valentine’s Day, she posted the heel of a foot, skin scraped off by the rough sandal strap in the form of a bloody heart. The next succession of images reveals gauze being applied to the wound, the heart-shaped blood imprint on it, and the gauze falling off – a bleeding heart refusing to heal. Over the past few years, beauty has become inextricably tied to the needle and medical language – terms like lobotomy chic, dissociation, and Ozempic have slipped into everyday conversations about aesthetics. Once I agreed to bypass Instagram’s ‘sensitive content’ warning on Alona’s post, the image immediately reminded me of something many of us did as children: emulating running stitch patterns with needles on our skin, never going deep, just grazing the surface layer. A comment beneath the post read, “Disgusting. I love it.”
“I think there’s always been an urge to combine the creepy with the cute,” said writer Izzy Capulong. “We never really see blood in ways that are completely ugly. For people who weren’t growing up watching snuff films on YouTube, most of the blood they saw was from films and TV shows where they had to consider ratings and the aesthetics of production. Seeing Megan Fox still be hot while covered in blood in Jennifer’s Body definitely did something.” Blood and violence are ever-present in our lives since childhood – we already know about how gory fairy tales and cartoons are. Our attention has, for a long time, been held captive by the extreme, and now, on social media, surprise and shock are what make us stop scrolling. As we were once cushioned by comedy – Tom the cartoon cat vicariously springing back from otherwise certain death to our gleeful pleasure – perhaps it is a kind of beauty which makes us forget the pain this time.
Instead of picking at our wounds alone, we post about them – “promoting the self as an image,” as Sontag put it in Illness as Metaphor. Ilona photographed her injuries because she thought they looked cool, and it helped her track how her healing progressed. She said her use of the nosebleed filter came partly from medical trauma, and partly from a love of horror makeup and the aesthetic of blood. Whether on Tumblr or Instagram, we curate our feeds and mould ourselves around fleeting trends. “Everyone was posting their bruised and scraped knees with the little American Apparel knee-high socks,” Izzy reminisced about noughties Tumblr.
These days, Instagram is no different. I think about one of creative director Alizée Gamberini’s posts, where she appeared with a bruised lip and a cut on her nose, captioned: my only makeup inspiration for the fashion world. There’s likely more beneath the surface of that post, but the aestheticisation – and therefore eroticisation – of wounds is nothing new. Sontag mentioned how the pale tuberculosis-affected were considered beautiful and well-bred. Beyond nosebleeds skirting censorship to suggest sexual arousal in anime, the most enduring example might be the vampire bite, supposed to trigger desire. Mostly recently seen in Nosferatu, the erotic energy of that puncture is undeniable. As an aside to our conversation, Izzy recalled liking the taste of blood as a child and watching old YouTube video tutorials on how to become a vampire.
Leslie Jamison wrote in her ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ that a boyfriend once called her a “wound-dweller” because she couldn’t stop talking about her injuries. She concluded that she spoke about it simply because it happened. In Nan One Month After Being Battered (1984), Nan Goldin’s lipstick is blood red. It stands out starkly on her flushed pink face, in an uncanny visual symbiosis with the two brownish-orange bruises beneath her eyes. Their hue mingles with the brunette of her curls, turning the whole image into a portrait of unconcentrated injury. All the while, Nan stares back at us unflinchingly. “I realised I took the picture,” she would later write, “so that I wouldn’t go back to the man who beat me up.” Taking a photograph was how Nan comprehended her reality. More than that, she hadn’t left her lips bare. Nan’s pain and injury were real, yes, but her direct gaze and choice to apply a bright red lipstick – so near to the tint of blood, but also to the colour ascribed to seduction and power – implied resilience.
From that, to Doechii singing “I look good from the nosebleeds” last month, there is the other aspect of injury – once that has moved beyond the bruised-knuckle realm of Fight Club masculinity. The performer takes agency from the bursting of blood vessels. In 1999, The Face added a nosebleed on Robbie Williams for their cover, supposedly to endear him to alternative music fans. “It’s saying: I’m hard,” Williams said later.
A decade ago, roller derby athlete and artist Riikka Hyvönen noticed how women in sport compared bruises like badges of honour. She began painting them: large, bright works on short-clad behinds, where the bruises became “love bites” from derby, signs of survival and affection. Izzy echoed that too, telling me, “I like the idea of me looking like I endured something. I’m not big and I’m not that strong, so realistically I’d get my shit kicked in by most people, but I like to think I’m scrappy and tough enough not die. Maybe a nosebleed was just me cosplaying a version of myself that fought everyone who ever wronged me.”
Throughout much of May 2023, Arca posted pictures from her facial feminisation surgery, bruises blooming around her eyes, a bandaged head, being kissed. In one post, Arca carefully peeled away the yellow, ointment-stained bandages from her chin – an intimate gesture of transformation. This kind of visual documentation is not uncommon among those undergoing transition. Many choose to share their scars, not as symbols of pain, but as declarations of truth. Artist Collier Schorr, for her upcoming project The AutoBody Book, has been posting photographs of trans people in their homes and studios – scars visible and unapologetically present. Veer, a model who underwent top surgery just weeks ago, the act that documenting his healing became a way to feel more connected to himself. “My scars are part of my identity now,” he said, reflecting the sentiment beneath one of Schorr’s own self-portraits, captioned: Whatever I look, I am.
Written by Upasana Das
