Adorned and Autonomous: Queer Approaches to Beauty

The mainstream beauty industry has spent decades teaching queer and trans people to doubt themselves by telling us we are too masc, too femme, too much of this, not enough of that, wrong body, face, everything, and, finally, telling us we are wrong exist at all.

With my store Cherry Bomb, I tried to start from a different premise. Beauty and aesthetics aren’t about fixing what’s wrong, they’re about uncovering what’s already there.

When I walk into (almost) any salon, drugstore, or tattoo shop and I experience a typically meant harmlessly, yet anything but attack. It starts off sounding like “this will flatter your body,” and ends withs a tattooer steering me toward a design that aligns with the gender they’ve decided I am.

The key word here is flattering.

But flattering to whom? According to what standards?

The implication is always that there exists a correct way to be looked at. We can always be more pleasing to a straight gaze, but why do we want to be? In these situations, when someone says, “That’s not flattering to your features,” they’re really saying, “That doesn’t help me read you correctly.”

Maybe the goal isn’t legibility to a greater audience. My goal, at least, is to appear as I feel, not as I’m expected to. My idea of queer beauty rejects the idea of flattery altogether. This isn’t about correction, it’s about longevity and feeling like your true self.

Body modification is sometimes dismissed as a fad or rebellion, but for many queer people it’s closer self creation, it’s about birthing an identity and being seen. It can appear trivial from the outside, but piercing your eyebrow, tattooing a phrase on your arm, or getting a tooth gem is to take ownership of your body, of something that’s been historically claimed by others. And that’s not an exaggeration. LGBTQIA+ folks have lived through medical gatekeeping, legal regulation, and cultural policing that insist our bodies should be a certain way. And within that context, adorning yourself on your own terms is quietly radical.

Vanity has long been weaponized against anyone who doesn’t fit comfortably within beauty norms, particularly femmes and trans people. If you care too much, and you’re image obsessed. When our culture tells you that you and your body are wrong, finding it beautiful almost becomes an act of resistance. Some may call that vanity, I’d call it just trying to survive.

The point isn’t to create a new set of rules, it’s to live without them. Queer aesthetics resist one definition and defy the binary. It seems to me queer beauty is allergic to uniformity and there is no right way to look queer.

For some, it’s gender maximalism, bodies as collages and layered jewelry. For others, the opposite. They are happy choosing one precise piercing or a single small tattoo. And for many others, it’s just experimenting with what feels right, their looks shifting with mood, hormone levels, or just the weather.

True inclusivity in beauty isn’t just about who’s in the marketing photos, It’s about what happens once you walk into that space. It means asking, not assuming and understanding that not everyone wants to look more masc/femme. Beauty and gender euphoria sometimes overlap and sometimes don’t, but that pain doesn’t disqualify you from wanting to look good, it just changes what safety looks like in these spaces.

At Cherry Bomb, this translates to practical things like using needles instead of piercing guns, asking before touching, listening more than talking. It’s small, deliberate acts of respect that add up to a kind of care mainstream aesthetics rarely offers.

We treat every piercing, tattoo, and gem as part of your story, not always profound part, but always personal. For queer people, these stories aren’t about changing a body that is wrong. They’re about making a body that feels true. Maybe your beauty looks like flash tattoos and enough metal to alert TSA. Maybe it’s a single lobe piercing. Maybe it changes tomorrow. And that’s the point.

Mainstream beauty thrives on a “lack of something”. It tells us we are almost, but not quite, acceptable and that a product or a procedure will fix everything.

Queer beauty culture offers a different perspective. One in which there is nothing to fix. You are not a “before.” You are already the main event.

Queer beauty isn’t about becoming palatable. It’s about becoming unmistakably yourself. Whether its messy, shifting, loud, quiet, it is 100% you.