As someone who has worked in the beauty industry for most of my adult life, I know that there's something soothing about a skincare routine. The familiar order of cleanser, serum, moisturiser and oil can feel less like vanity than a small act of control. The promises printed on the bottles are wonderfully specific: brighter skin, softened lines, renewed firmness, visible transformation. Use this product for long enough and a better version of your face, and perhaps your life, will emerge.
Mona Awad takes that seductive promise and follows it somewhere much darker in Rouge.
Mirabelle Nour, known as Belle, or as Mira, lives in Montreal and works in a dress shop. Much of her private life is devoted to skincare. She watches online beauty videos compulsively, follows elaborate routines and spends money she probably can't afford on products promising renewal. When her estranged mother, Noelle, dies after falling from a cliff in California, Belle travels south for the funeral and discovers that Noelle had accumulated considerable debt.
She also discovers La Maison de Méduse, the secretive beauty spa Noelle visited before her death.
The mansion overlooking the sea offers its clients something far more intoxicating than an ordinary facial. Its treatments promise access to the “Most Magnificent Self”: a perfected version of the face in the mirror, free from age, damage and disappointment. Belle knows almost immediately that something's wrong, but she's grieving, vulnerable and already fluent in the language the spa uses to seduce her.
She enters willingly.
What follows is a strange, lush and increasingly nightmarish story about beauty, envy, consumerism, racial identity, buried memory and the terrible intimacy between mothers and daughters.
I spent more than thirty years working as a makeup artist, so I'm wary of arguments that reduce every interest in beauty to insecurity or oppression. Makeup and skincare can be pleasurable, creative and deeply personal. Wanting to look beautiful isn't evidence that a woman's been duped by the patriarchy, nor is caring about appearance automatically shallow.
Rouge is far more intelligent than that.
Mona Awad isn't particularly interested in condemning the woman standing at the bathroom mirror. Her attention is on the machinery surrounding her: an industry that can only continue expanding if women remain permanently dissatisfied with what they see.
Belle’s skincare routine offers comfort, but it's also endless. One product causes irritation that requires another product to correct it. Retinol begins an anti-ageing journey; the resulting inflammation begins a soothing journey. Every solution reveals a new defect and every improvement raises the standard she's expected to meet.
There can be no point of completion because completion would mean that Belle could stop buying.
The author satirises this beautifully through the extravagant names of Belle’s products and the reverence with which she applies them. Her routine resembles a religious liturgy, complete with rituals, sacred objects and an online beauty influencer whose advice she accepts almost without question. The language is funny because it's only slightly more ridiculous than the marketing language used by real luxury brands.
La Maison de Méduse takes that logic to its most horrifying conclusion. The spa doesn't just sell beauty. It identifies vulnerability, cultivates self-rejection and offers transformation at the cost of memory and identity. Its clients become smoother, brighter and more visibly perfect while gradually losing the qualities that make them human.
They're not being renewed. They're being erased.
The relationship between Belle and Noelle gives Rouge its emotional force.
Belle loved her mother, envied her, and resented the power Noelle’s beauty seemed to hold over everyone around her. She remembers criticism, neglect and emotional distance, but she also remembers compliments she couldn't believe. When Noelle praised Belle’s colouring, Belle heard mockery or dishonesty because she'd already decided that her mother’s kind of beauty was the only kind that counted.
Noelle, meanwhile, appears to have experienced her daughter’s youth and beauty as both a source of pride and a threat. She helped form Belle’s insecurities even as she struggled with her own. Each woman looked at the other and saw what she believed she lacked.
Mona Awad refuses to make Noelle either a secret saint or a simple monster. She could love her daughter and still wound her. She could attempt to protect Belle while being vain, inconsistent and emotionally neglectful. Belle’s grief is complicated because death has removed any possibility of a clear reckoning. She can't ask her mother which memories are accurate or whether the love she needed was ever really there.
That uncertainty shapes the entire novel. Belle isn't just mourning Noelle’s death. She's grieving the relationship they never managed to repair and the mother she spent her childhood waiting to receive.
The novel becomes most touching when its extravagance falls away and allows this sadness to surface. Beneath the red shoes, enchanted mirrors and sinister treatments is a daughter still trying to discover whether her mother considered her beautiful, and whether she was loved independently of beauty at all.
Belle is far more comfortable discussing her skin than her grief.
Whenever genuine emotion threatens to emerge, she redirects her attention towards products, irritation or the condition of her face. Her eyes are watering because something stings. Her skin is wet because she's applied another layer. The physical language of skincare gives her a way to experience grief without naming it.
This is one of the novel’s cleverest ideas. Beauty rituals aren't presented just as evidence of narcissism. They're also a method of avoidance. Belle concentrates on the surface because what lies underneath has no clear shape and no easy remedy.
La Maison de Méduse understands this. Its treatments promise to remove painful memories as though they were impurities trapped beneath the skin. Trauma can be extracted. Regret can be cleansed. A damaged self can be exfoliated until something smooth and untroubled remains.
The price is devastating because memory isn't separate from identity. Removing Belle’s pain also removes the self who experienced it. The more beautiful she becomes, the less certain she is of her name, her history and the people around her.
Rouge offers freedom from suffering by destroying the person who suffers.
Mona Awad’s prose is seductive, repetitive and increasingly fragmented. Product names are recited like spells. Words slip into other words, revealing the threatening truth beneath apparently harmless language. Belle’s narration becomes less reliable as her treatments progress and her hold on herself begins to loosen.
The style places the reader inside her obsession. We experience the soothing repetition of the skincare videos, the appeal of the products and the dreamy unreality of La Maison de Méduse. The atmosphere is extraordinarily vivid: California sunlight, crimson silk, reflective glass, cold ocean water and red jellyfish drifting through illuminated tanks.
The problem is that the same dreamlike repetition that creates the atmosphere also slows the novel considerably.
The middle section circles repeatedly through Belle’s rituals, visits to Rouge, lapses in memory and increasing confusion. I understood the purpose. Obsession is repetitive, and Belle is caught in a cycle she can't recognise clearly enough to escape. Still, there were points when I wanted the narrative to move forward rather than restate the depth of her enchantment.
The surrealism also creates a certain emotional distance. Belle moves so quickly from recognisable grief into a fever dream that I would have liked more time with her in the ordinary world. A stronger sense of who she was beyond her skincare obsession might have made the gradual loss of her identity even more disturbing.
Hud, the private investigator attempting to uncover what happened to his brother at Rouge, is similarly underdeveloped. His presence shows that the beauty industry’s promises and punishments aren't confined to women, and the reversal of the expected rescue narrative is satisfying. But he sometimes feels more like a device required by the plot than a fully realised person.
Rouge is ambitious, intelligent and gloriously peculiar. Its imagery stayed with me after I'd finished reading, as did its understanding of beauty as something far more complicated than vanity.
Mona Awad recognises the genuine pleasure of beauty rituals while exposing how easily that pleasure can be manipulated. She understands that the mirror can offer creativity and self-expression one day and become an instrument of punishment the next. Most importantly, she recognises that our feelings about our appearance rarely begin with the beauty industry alone. They're shaped much earlier by childhood, race, family and the faces we were first taught to admire.
The novel’s finest achievement is the relationship between Belle and Noelle. Their love is damaged, competitive and often painful, but it's not false. Noelle doesn't need to become an innocent mother for Belle to mourn her, and Belle doesn't need to deny the harm she suffered in order to acknowledge that she was loved.
I didn't give Rouge five stars because the middle is overextended, some of the symbolism is too heavily reinforced and the dream logic occasionally obscures the emotional story rather than deepening it. The Tom Cruise element will either delight readers or test their patience, and I found myself somewhere between the two.
Yet its imperfections didn't erase what worked. This is a visually extraordinary Gothic novel with serious ideas beneath its lacquered surface. It made me think about the difference between choosing beauty and being governed by it, and about an industry that promises to reveal our best selves while profiting from our inability to believe that the selves we already possess might be enough.
🪞 Read this if you enjoy surreal Gothic fiction and dark modern fairy tales
🌹 A mysterious beauty spa offering dangerous transformation
💄 Skincare culture, impossible standards and obsessive self-improvement
👩👧 A complicated mother–daughter relationship shaped by love and envy
🪼 Grief, buried memories, racial identity and the cost of perfection
⚠️ Contains death, grooming, racism, body horror, disordered self-image and parental neglect
Book Details
Rouge by Mona Awad
Paperback ISBN
978-1398504967 — Scribner UK paperback edition published on 1 August 2024 and available through Australian retailers.
Hardcover ISBN
978-1398504936 — Scribner UK hardcover edition published on 18 October 2023 and available in Australia.
eBook ISBN
978-1398504950 — Scribner UK digital eBook edition published on 14 September 2023 and available to Australian readers.
Audiobook ISBN
978-1398527454 — Simon & Schuster Audio UK unabridged digital audiobook edition published on 14 September 2023.
Genre
Gothic Fiction; Literary Horror; Contemporary Fiction; Psychological Fiction; Surrealist Fiction; Dark Fantasy; Satirical Fiction
Subgenre
Modern Gothic Fiction; Feminist Horror; Beauty Horror; Body Horror; Psychological Horror; Dark Fairy-Tale Fiction; Mother-Daughter Fiction; Grief Fiction; Cult Fiction; Mixed-Race Identity Fiction
Tropes / Literary Threads
Mysterious beauty cult; sinister luxury spa; estranged mother and daughter; death of a parent; obsessive skincare routines; dangerous transformation; buried childhood memories; unreliable narrator; enchanted mirrors; red shoes; predatory mentor
Publisher
Scribner UK — an imprint of Simon & Schuster — publishes the hardcover, paperback and digital editions available to Australian readers. Simon & Schuster Audio UK publishes the English-language audiobook.
Series
Standalone novel — Rouge is not part of a series.
Formats Available
Paperback; Hardcover; eBook; Kindle; EPUB; Unabridged Digital Audiobook.
Audiobook Narrator
Sophie Amoss
Audiobook Length
14 hours and 42 minutes — unabridged English-language recording.
Original Release Date
12 September 2023 — first published in the United States by Marysue Rucci Books and Simon & Schuster.
Australian Release Date
14 September 2023 — Scribner UK eBook and Simon & Schuster Audio UK audiobook editions became available to Australian readers; the export paperback followed on 4 October 2023 and the hardcover on 18 October 2023.
Page Count
384 pages — Scribner UK paperback edition with ISBN 978-1398504967.
Where to Buy Rouge by Mona Awad
📚 Amazon
Affiliate Disclosure
As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. If you purchase through my Amazon affiliate links, I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you. I also encourage supporting Australian booksellers such as QBD Books, independent booksellers, and self-published authors whenever possible.
Danielle Robinson is a literary critic and writer whose
work explores literature through the
lens of atmosphere, memory, culture, and emotional experience. Holding a double degree in philosophy and theology, she combines academic insight with a deeply refined aesthetic sensibility shaped by more than three decades working across the creative industries as an internationally published, multi-award-winning makeup artist, fashion stylist, and interior stager.
She reads widely and rigorously, reading and reviewing more than 200 books each year as both an ARC reader and commissioned critic. Through Silk & Sentences, Danielle approaches literature as something immersive and lived with — not simply stories to consume, but works that shape the way we think, feel, and move through the world.
She writes from her semi-rural Queensland home, where she lives with Alex, her husband of 33 years, their dogs Oscar and Paige, and an ever-growing library of books.
Terrific review