Read aloud, the first five lines of "Artificial" sound like a receipt, or like a make-up bag tipped out onto a bathroom counter. Heels, fillers, foundation, hair extensions, nails: the speaker has done everything the beauty routine asks. Then the final line undercuts all of it. After every purchase and appointment, the speaker still feels like "the ugly, short and skinny me." The central idea is that appearance can be changed far more easily than self-image. You can alter the surface a dozen ways and leave the person underneath exactly where they started.
The construction is simple, and the simplicity does the work. The opening lines contain no verbs and no "I", and they have no punctuation. Each is a plain pairing of nouns joined by "and": "Heels and pumps," "Fillers and botox," "Piercings and nail fixes." The speaker barely appears in her own routine. There are only objects, items ticked off in a rush. The list also moves piece by piece across the body, taking in feet, face, skin, hair and nails, as if the speaker were being assembled rather than simply dressed. The lines lengthen slightly as they go ("Extensions and highlighters" is the longest), so the list seems to pile up and gather weight.
Individual word choices are quietly revealing. "Heels and pumps" is almost a repetition, since both are shoes that add height, as though one kind were not enough. "Fillers" suggests something hollow that needs filling, and "layers" suggests something to be buried. "Extensions" literally adds length. Best of all is "fixes" in the last line of the list. We fix what is broken, so the word slips in a verdict the speaker has already passed on herself. Judging by the imagery, several of these products seem aimed at the very flaws the last line names. Heels and extensions answer "short," and make-up and fillers answer "ugly." Nothing in the list speaks to "skinny," which may hint that some insecurities have no product to fix them.
The last line is where the poem turns, and nearly every word in it matters. "Yet" reverses the direction of the poem, and "still" admits that this has happened before and will probably happen again. "Feel" is the only verb in the whole poem. That is the key detail, because everything that can be bought is a noun and the only action left is an emotion. Then there is "the ugly, short and skinny me." The speaker says "the" instead of "my," as if describing a separate person, an old self that follows her around. The line also mirrors the list's structure, because "ugly, short and skinny" is a second list, this time of wounds instead of remedies. Five items of treatment are set against three of self-criticism, and the three win. The line is also much longer, thirteen syllables against the three or five of the early lines, so it drags where the others hurried. The effect is of a breath let out after holding it.
The poem has no rhyme and no regular metre, and that suits it. A rhyme would suggest a neat closing click, and the poem's whole point is that nothing clicks into place. It ends on a plain full stop, the first and only one, which feels like a door shutting.
The title, "Artificial," works in two directions. It names the products, which are manufactured and added on. It also hints at the speaker's fear that the new self is fake, a costume over the "real" one she dislikes. The poem never says who is to blame, whether the speaker, the beauty industry or the people around her, and it is wise to treat the "I" as a voice created by the poem rather than assume it is the writer. The lack of an answer is part of what makes the poem significant. Its world of fillers and highlighters will be familiar to many teenage readers, and it refuses the comfortable ending in which the right transformation makes the insecurity disappear. In only a few lines it makes an uncomfortable point: someone can look polished to everyone else and still not recognise themselves as anything but "the ugly, short and skinny me."