Ozempicore: we have entered a new aesthetic of the body?

Ozempicore. The term does not yet exist in any glossary, academic research, or trend report. Yet it describes something that is already everywhere: in our feeds, on the runways, in the hollowed faces of celebrities openly discussed or silently observed, post after post, cover after cover. Ozempicore is a possible name for a cultural condition that has not yet found its word.

Its raw material is pharmacological. Semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic and Wegovy, was developed as a treatment for type 2 diabetes but is also used for weight loss. It slows digestion, suppresses appetite, and produces in a few weeks the kind of weight loss that once required months or years. But the clinical fact is only the trigger. What matters — and what concerns design, space, and material culture — is the speed at which a drug has turned into a diffuse aesthetic, and then into a perceptual paradigm.

“Ozempic face,” a term coined by New York dermatologist Paul Jarrod Frank, describes the hollowing of the face after rapid weight loss: sunken cheeks, protruding cheekbones, sagging skin. The body thins; the face collapses. A paradox that has generated an entire corrective industry of fillers, lifts, biostimulators, and, consequently, a vertically expanding aesthetic market.

On social media, especially Instagram and TikTok, the discourse is already layered. On one side, personal diaries (content shared under #myozempicjourney), whispered “this is just what works for me” confessions in front of mirrors, dietary routines that never name the drug but presuppose it. On the other, forensic videos: slow edits, frame-by-frame montages, timelines of sudden celebrity weight loss, facial proportion analyses with graphic overlays. The algorithm works by accumulation: it repeats, refines, normalizes.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the discourse around body image revolved around traditional media. Now anyone who posts a photo becomes a node in the system. The field extends into fashion with the return of ultra-thin silhouettes on the runway, Y2K nostalgia — low-rise jeans and midriff-baring tops — and a renewed “heroin chic” aesthetic. But Ozempicore exceeds the perimeter of the fashion system. What emerges is a broader reconfiguration of the relationship between bodily discipline and the production of space. There is an implicit architecture within Ozempicore. The idea that the body is a project to be optimized — silently, technologically, without visible effort — produces environments consistent with that premise.

The black market for GLP-1 drugs is thriving. Many off-label injectables are purchased in China, where pens cost fifteen times less than in the United States. Those without access to GLP-1s are turning to “budget Ozempic,” a trendy term for the use of laxatives, which has contributed to shortages of Miralax in the U.S.

The Ozempicore, like all deep conditions, is about how a society negotiates the relationship between visibility and value, showing how what appears desirable is what is recognized as legitimate.