Barbie Ferreira Is Over the Body Conversation—But She’ll Have It One More Time

Barbie Ferreira has been a reference point for body image since she was a teenager. At 18, she did a shoot in a string bikini and it went viral simply because of what she looked like. She didn’t have the language for it then, but now, she does: “I look at those pictures now and in the context of society now, like no one would ever even bat an eyelash.”

She’s existed in multiple spaces—modeling, then Euphoria, then red carpets—and people made her body the story. The Oscars dress this year that stopped the internet, the Paris Fashion Week look; both generated headlines, and not just about the clothes. “I’m like, we’re still doing this,” she said onNot Skinny But Not Fat with Amanda Hirsch. “I find it boring.”

But by talking about it she’s not really asking for a pat on the back. She’s diagnosing something.

The hypocrisy of the glow up

Let’s talk the “glow up—aka the internet’s favorite way to celebrate a transformation without saying what it actually is. “The glow up is like a weight loss journey,” she says. “Say it.” She pointed to a specific example of a reality TV personality who lost weight during Dancing with the Stars and watched the internet celebrate her “glow up.” The same internet that would drag someone for commenting on another woman’s weight loss directly.

It’s been playing out her entire career. The body positivity movement spent years building a case for radical acceptance, and then somewhere along the way, the algorithm swallowed it. “You went 10 years screaming about it and then we go kind of back in time as if it didn’t happen,” Hirsch points out. “Where are we living? What are we doing?”

Rage bait has a body count

Ferreira thinks it’s all about how the internet is engineered right now. “The internet right now is about inflammatory stuff. It’s all rage bait. So if you can find something to rage bait about, it’s so much more effective in the algorithm than like someone did something nice,” she points out.

It’s true; outrage drives engagement, engagement drives reach, and a woman’s body, whether it’s too big, too small, changed, unchanged, has always been reliable fuel. It’s the volume and the velocity that’s changed. It’s not just tabloids, it’s women’s health websites and mainstream outlets treating her body like a news story every time she walks out the door.

“Almost every actress right now is just being put under a microscope of either being too skinny or too big,” she says. Men are in it now too—she mentioned “looksmaxing” as a growing obsession—but the scrutiny women face still remains its own category.

Where she stands

Ferreira gravitates toward body neutrality, but even that feels too tidy for what she’s actually describing. What she wants, more than some grand movement, is for bodies to just be unremarkable. European cinema gets a shoutout for this. She loves watching films where people simply look like people. “We in America are so allergic to people who have features that aren’t, you know, maybe the most conventionally attractive,” she says.

All Ferreira wants is for the topic to actually be considered boring the same way she finds it boring. “If people are just obsessed with that right now…it’s not good for the psyche for anyone,” she says. That applies to the person being talked about, and the person doing the talking.

To hear Barbie Ferreira’s full conversation, listen to Not Skinny but Not Fat wherever you get your podcasts.

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