#22: Plastic surgery: not older, not younger, but a secret third thing
Heads up! Freezing and filling your face does not do what you think it does
I went to a parents evening recently.
Ignoring the fact that it was the same school I had taken my last steps in over twenty years ago, I noticed something that didn’t get past me back when I was a student rehearsing my response to each teacher who said ‘she’s just really quiet! Next lesson I want you to put your hand up, because I know you know the answers.’
I noticed a woman out of the corner of my eye struggling to pull the world’s tiniest mini-dress down over her thighs as she sat beside her teenaged son to speak to a teacher. She wore high-heeled boots (the kind I haven’t seen around since the earliest 00s — think J-Lo in the snow) and her expressions were trapped behind facial muscles that couldn’t move. She was around 50-something. I knew it was a case of I need to be the yummiest mummy in the school! I need everyone to think I am the youngest looking mother there! Unfortunately, you can’t convince me there’s any other reason to dress so provocatively to a parent’s evening, unless she’s got her eye on a math’s teacher somewhere.
It got me thinking about this need a lot of (not all) women have: to be the best looking person in a 10-mile radius. It then got me thinking about the lengths women will go to in order to achieve that. (Side note: I am very well aware that men have their own flavour of this, but as I am not a man, more on the peackocking of wealth later).
I’ll say it over and over again: social media is the worst. In so many ways.
I talk, rather incessantly, about how women are made to want a billion alterations made to their faces and bodies, and the seed is planted from a very, very young age. TikTok bombards girls and women from as young as their pre-teens with the assertion they just need to take some preventative measures — Botox is so cute and it’s the best thing you can do in your early twenties! All you need is a brow lift, nose job, chin implant, fox threads, ear alterations, and some liposuction! Just a teeny-tiny bit of work that will save your whole life in the future, because there’s obviously nothing worse than ending up with wrinkles because you smiled too much.
There is a huge obsession with looking ‘better’ that actually coincides with looking ‘younger’. The desire to grow old gracefully and graciously is almost non-existent — unfortunately I don’t see this ever changing as long as the beauty industry exists, as long as inauthentic influencers are allowed to flourish, as long as men will always be comparing women to the plastic barbie dolls they see around them (no longer just on TV and magazines, mind you).
Although these alterations have been designed to make women look younger, I think we’re shifting towards something else.
It is insane to me that a woman in her thirties will boast about how she stillgets asked for ID when buying a bottle of lambrini when she actually paid for this ‘privilege’ of looking unlike her age. Really, though, it’s not the looking old that bothers her (the closer to thirty I get, the more I realise there’s a longway to go before I start to feel old). It’s not having to dig out her ID from the bottom of her bag that bothers her, either. Really, there is a lovely, floaty feeling of triumph when the cashier says ‘can I see some ID please? It’s just for the red bull’ and a similarly sized heavy, dejected feeling when they don’t. What do you mean I, a thirty-three year old, look over 21 years of age?
I also want to point out that a face full of plastic does not look the same in real life as it does online. I don’t mock these women, rather I am quite upset that they’re made to do this to themselves. How did we get here?
The problem that I’m noticing is that people don’t actually look younger. They just look… weird.
I believe there’s a third category that exists for people who get copious amounts of filler, botox, and surgery. I’m not sure what it is but it exists somewhere in the uncanny valley.
You look like you’re in your thirties, your forties, your fifties, and beyond, however old you are. You look good (depending on what you’ve done), but you don’t look young.
A youthful face has volume (read: buccal fat removal is ageing you) and, most importantly, movement. A young face moves. A young face is expressive. Any face moves and is expressive, but you cannot implant or fill your way into staying youthful. Alterations in your twenties, God help you, ages you most definitely. Alterations in your thirties may freeze your age for a little bit, if done in moderation; but then we open a whole other can of worms because, in a world where changing your appearance is now normal, what is moderation?
I’ve seen some aestheticians who slowly turn into jigsaw over time because the addiction to modifying themselves warps their view of what a normal, human face looks like — the idea that someone is trusting their face with someone who looks like that is terrifying. I was watching an old episode Come Dine With Me and there was a woman on there who claimed to be a model. At first I thought huh?, but then I shook those thoughts out of my head and realised: she just looks normal. She was a normal, attractive woman back in 2013 when the world wasn’t full of lip fillers and implants.
I fear we have lost that. I don’t think it will come back until the world is so saturated with near-identical faces that we learn to love natural beauty again.