What do biohackers have to do with your skin care routine? More than you know.

The following essay has been adapted and excerpted from The House of Beauty: Lessons from the Image Industry , published by W. W. Norton .

People at BDYHAX are the first adopters of body technology, the pilot subjects of our speculative futures. The BDYHAX conference is a dayslong event where body hackers, transhumanists, cyborgs, and general nerds all assimilate. It’s one of many conferences of its kind, as the transhumanist movement becomes more mainstream at the behest of Silicon Valley. When I arrived, people in the hotel lobby were gathered around sources of electricity like overgrown moths. Cyborgs compared prosthetics like they would new handbags or tattoos, walking up and down the labyrinth of stairs between floors, waving above and below, charging their legs and arms and iP