For much of the last century, culture waged a war on the merely pretty, instead favouring difficult, provocative art and architecture. But today, beauty is fighting back and winning. From government commissions mandating classical architecture to the algorithmic obsession with facial symmetry, a global return to beauty defined by order and tradition is underway. But at what cost? 90% of young women routinely alter their faces online, constructing a reality so perfect that actual faces feel like flaws. While in physics, some claim the hunger for elegant, "beautiful" theories has stalled progress, as researchers chase mathematical symmetry rather than inconvenient empirical facts. The result: an aesthetic built not on reality, but its avoidance.

Should we reject the new obsession with beauty as flight from the real rather than cultural progress? If we filter out every flaw and complication, do we risk a society so committed to aesthetics that it can no longer face the world as it is? Or is beauty embedded in reality and nature, and as a consequence both true and desirable?

Philosopher of beauty Heather Widdows, Succession star and cultural provocateur Dasha Nekrasova, and continental philosopher Babette Babich debate beauty and reality.