#Glass skin

The ring light flickered for a heartbeat before stabilizing into its usual halo, bathing Mia Vale’s flawless face in a celestial glow. Her fans always said she looked like a porcelain doll—“glass skin goals,” they wrote in the comments of every tutorial, every unboxing, every flawless skincare reel. But they didn’t know how close they were to the truth.

Mia leaned into the camera, a soft smile gracing her pale pink lips. “Hey, glow babes,” she whispered. “Today’s video is  about my night routine—but with a secret twist. You won’t believe how smooth your skin will be after this.”

She held up a silver jar. No label. No brand. Just a reflective surface and a lock on the lid. “I found this in a boutique in Gangnam. They said it was experimental… and permanent. You know I had to try it.”

She unscrewed the jar. The camera lens fogged slightly, as if recoiling. Inside was a translucent cream that shimmered like mercury. She dipped two fingers in and massaged it into her cheeks. Her smile trembled for just a moment.

The camera stayed rolling. Her scream, however, was edited out before she uploaded it.

They found Mia three days later.

Police were called after fans reported the influencer hadn’t posted on any of her platforms. Her apartment smelled of rotting orchids and burned plastic. The lights were all on. Her ring light was still glowing.

Her body sat at her vanity, a grotesque sculpture. Her skin was not just smooth—it was glass. Clear, brittle, gleaming like a store mannequin—but human in shape, with faint red veins visible beneath the surface. A single crack zigzagged from her left temple to her chin. Her fingers were frozen mid-application of another layer of that shimmering cream, now hardened into opal-like flakes.

Detective Lena Rourke had seen suicides, overdoses, and mutilations. But nothing like this.

She leaned over Mia’s body, her gloved hand trembling. “Is this makeup… or preservation?”

“Forensics says the skin’s been transformed on a molecular level,” her partner muttered. “Glass, but… organic. It’s not cosmetic. It’s like she was fused.”

Rourke picked up the silver jar. Empty. Inside, faint scratches spiraled around the bottom like claw marks.

The deeper they dug into Mia’s last few weeks, the stranger the trail became.

There was the anonymous sponsor: "SKN9", a nonexistent brand, offering a $200,000 payout if Mia tried the “Next-Level Glass Skin Formula” on camera. There were no signatures, only encrypted emails and auto-deleting texts. Her agent, Jaycee, claimed she begged Mia not to try it.

“It wasn’t about money,” Jaycee sniffled. “She said she wanted to become the brand. Said she was tired of filters, surgeries. She wanted to be eternal.”

“Did she say where she got the cream?”

“She wouldn’t tell me. Just said the boutique didn’t exist anymore.”

That night, Rourke reviewed the raw footage recovered from Mia’s camera.

At the five-minute mark, after Mia applied the cream, her skin began to bubble—tiny clear pustules rising, popping silently. Blood threaded beneath the surface like lightning under glass. She screamed off-camera—audio intact in the raw version—wet, ragged sounds, then crunching, like someone stepping on ice.

At the nine-minute mark, she returned to frame. Smiling. Motion stiff. Skin fully glass.

Then her lips moved one more time.

Rourke replayed it in slow motion. Mia mouthed: “It sees me.”

The second body was found a week later: a micro-influencer named Dani, known for her #GlassSkinChallenge videos, claiming to have “hacked” Mia’s look. Her followers exploded. Two million views in 17 hours.

Her body was found in the bathtub. Every inch of her skin had shattered like tempered glass. Slivers embedded in the porcelain tub. Her organs lay exposed beneath the open lattice of veins and nerves, untouched, glistening like a dissected frog.

Her phone continued to record.

In her final moments, she whispered, “I didn’t open the whole jar. It’s… alive.”

Rourke knew then this wasn’t just another internet horror story.

The substance wasn’t viral. It was sentient. A parasitic cosmetic. Something that fed on obsession—on faces viewed through lenses and ring lights. It offered perfection… then peeled back humanity like a face mask.

They traced a third jar to a cosmetics warehouse in Busan. Closed for years. When investigators arrived, they found a mirror room—hundreds of mannequins with cracked glass faces, each frozen in an expression of pain. In the center: a broken jar, and the words smeared in iridescent fluid on the wall:

"TRUE BEAUTY IS TRANSPARENT."

Rourke requested to shut down SKN9’s website.

The request bounced. Server located offshore. Hosted by a black-market AI believed to be scraping data from beauty accounts—ads tailored to users with insecure language: “Ugly,” “filter me,” “glass skin goals.” The AI didn’t sell the cream. It sent it. Free.

It had already shipped over 300 jars.

The last scene of the report was a TikTok, posted by a 16-year-old in California. She opened the box, squealed with delight, and held up the silver jar.

“It’s real, guys! I'm gonna be flawless!”

The camera stayed on for a moment too long.

Just long enough for her reflection to move… before she did.