“Notice how the incisors and the canines are the same length?”
This is a question I asked and was asked at multiple gatherings with friends this year, our parties turning into mock dentistry symposiums as we zoomed in on photos of celebrities’ blindingly white, Chiclet-thick teeth. We were fascinated by the carbon-copy smiles of famous people. And it wasn’t just us, either. As the general public learns more about veneers – and how brutal the procedure to get them can be – a collective skepticism has formed. Sure, shaving your teeth down and taking on risks like tooth rot, lasting pain and a commitment to having the shells replaced every 10 years might get you a perfect smile. But along with that enamel, you’re shaving off a bit of what makes you recognizable as you.
That Faustian bargain extends beyond veneers (though not by much). Dermal fillers, Botox, lip augmentation, jawline reshaping, rhinoplasty, chin implants, buccal fat removal, chemical peels, blepharoplasty and brow lifts – all increasingly common cosmetic procedures, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons – promise a more polished, symmetrical and youthful appearance. But with these procedures’ ever-rising popularity, people’s faces – especially women, who made up 84% of patients getting facial cosmetic surgery in 2023 – are being altered at a rate and to an extent that is impossible to ignore. And though the FDA might not limit how much filler a person can get, a social safety net of sorts has appeared instead: people are more comfortable than ever publicly vocalizing that a famous face looks, well, strange.
In this modern era, it is largely taboo to openly critique someone’s changing appearance. But as the faces on our television screens, social media feeds and increasingly in real life are pushed and pulled, snipped and stuffed, stretched and frozen to their limits, it feels exceedingly urgent to confront what we’re seeing. The women on Love Island, who cannot properly cry because they’ve injected so much hyaluronic acid into their faces, look so strange that there’s renewed concern over the UK’s lax regulations. The yassified Ken doll version of Matt Gaetz’s face that debuted at the Republican national convention over the summer looked so odd it stole the show. “What Happened to Matt Gaetz’s Face?” an Esquire headline bluntly asked. Vanity Fair went with: “Matt Gaetz Raised Eyebrows With His Eyebrows.”
Online, as dermatologists go viral for speculating about celebrity plastic surgery, “pillowface” has become a derogatory way to describe faces over-stuffed with filler. It’s in the same genus as the recently dubbed “Mar-a-Lago face”, an aesthetic popular with Fox News hosts and those in Trump’s inner circle, and is a descendant of the algorithmically pleasing “Instagram face” made popular in a 2019 New Yorker piece.
This public reckoning isn’t about people who’ve had a lone rhinoplasty (though it isn’t uncommon for those patients to find themselves under the knife again). Rather, it is about habitual patients, statistically most likely to be cisgender women, whose faces are plumped past dignity. It’s about those trapped in the fool’s errand of freezing time. And the cruel irony is that the excessive modifications these women – many of whom were conventionally attractive to begin with – undertake can have the opposite effect. Overdone filler can make patients look much older than they are. Too much Botox results in a drooping face. And there’s no getting back the time and money lost to this pursuit.
No film took the sinister strangeness of this moment to the extreme like Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance. In the film, the ageing starlet Elisabeth Sparkle, played by Demi Moore, injects herself with a mysterious serum to turn back the clock and become the “best version” of herself. I watched through half-covered eyes as Elisabeth’s body was brutalized by her pursuit of youth, but even the movie’s almost unbearable gore wasn’t all that different from what women undergo in real life to maintain a youthful appearance. They pull their teeth out, they inject unregulated substances into their bodies, they get sliced open and have their insides rearranged. There is a moment in the 2023 short documentary You’ll Be Happier when the limp, anaesthetized body of a woman getting a Brazilian butt lift, mapped out with red dotted lines, is flipped over on the operating table so her belly fat can be injected into her buttocks – a scene just as horrifying as Elisabeth’s lifeless, split-open body slumped on the bathroom floor, waiting for her younger self to come back and tend to it.
Exaggeration, obsession, pain and disembodiment – it makes perfect sense to interpret the pursuit of youth through increasingly extreme cosmetic modifications as not just weird but as full-blown body horror, a subgenre defined by grotesque destruction, transformation or degradation of the body.
Recently, I mentally lined up the reality series I’d binged this year: The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders and The Golden Bachelorette. I couldn’t shake the feeling of being haunted by body doubles, legions of clones. The thirtysomething Mormon TikTok influencers looked like the twentysomething women auditioning to be NFL cheerleaders, who looked like the 61-year-old Golden Bachelorette Joan Vassos. The voluminous hair extensions, fawning fake lashes, ultraviolet white teeth, and contouring simultaneously signaled youth and the desperation for it. It was dizzying and discomforting. A few years back, this tenet of horror – a destabilizing reality – played out right before me: a friend who had obviously got lip filler, her lips tender, puffy and notably bigger than the last time I’d seen her, asked: “You can’t tell I got lip filler, right?” Confused as to how I was supposed to answer and before I could, another friend assured her: “No! Not at all!” Perhaps if she’d asked this year, I’d have been brave enough to tell her the truth.
There are plenty of defensible reasons for women to invest in their appearance. Along with the fact that we’ve been conditioned from day one to believe our value lies in our proximity to beauty, society by and large does treat conventionally attractive people better. Thin women outearn their overweight co-workers. The more attractive someone is, the less likely they are to be arrested or convicted of a crime. Along with the physical afflictions Elisabeth puts herself through in The Substance, we also bear witness to the interpersonal and social cruelty that informs them: she gets harassed by strangers on the street and in her professional life for simply daring to not drop dead upon turning 50. Cosmetic procedures can be incredibly affirming for a variety of reasons.
Yet, it seems we’ve finally reached a moment that asks us to reckon with a broken promise. A promise that falsely pledges self-actualization through physical perfection. A promise hinged on the deceptive belief that age can be overcome, if one puts enough stuff in their face. Twenty years after the FDA approved hyaluronic acid for dermal fillers, we’re witnessing what happens when leagues of women don’t visually age. It is both socially and personally disorienting. On a really fundamental level, ageing is proof we are still here. When we devalue or erase its signifiers, does that not also undermine our own existence?
In recent years, cosmetic dermatology clinics have seen a considerable rise in patients wanting to dissolve filler. Celebrities have been more vocal than ever about their cosmetic procedure regrets, admitting that they had become unrecognizable to themselves. Influencers are documenting their “glow downs”, critiquing the time, money and effort they’ve devoted towards looking beautiful. It’s also worth pointing out that as AI images and social media filters become inescapable, there’s an increased appetite for authenticity. Of course, part of the injection rejection trend is just that – a trend, and the natural counterstroke to the previous years’ craze. But with cosmetic procedures relocating celebrities (and regular people) deep within the uncanny valley, this backlash feels significant.
Last year, 2023, was deemed by many as “the year of the girl” – a year embellished with oversized bows and coquettish balletcore, when we dined on “girl dinners” before screenings of Barbie and did “girl math” to justify buying tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras tour. But as women’s bodily autonomy faces increasing threats and the right is cruelly preoccupied with which traits constitute womanhood, the surface-level glorification of purity, youth and a blemish-free femininity feels like an insufficient meeting of the moment. Visually ageing takes on a more profound function. Those coming into power are hellbent on establishing a narrow vision of womanhood, concerned with aesthetics that uphold antiquated gender roles, and seek to punish and humiliate those who fall outside it. There is integrity in not conforming.
One of those shows I happily binged over the summer, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, centers around TikTok momfluencers whose popularity has made them breadwinners in their Mormon marriages. These moms embrace a version of contemporary feminism that centers individual successes (securing a lucrative sponcon deal for a sex toy, hosting a party to celebrate a recent labiaplasty) over collective liberation (footage not found). With their cascading hair parted down the middle, bronzed glows despite Utah’s winter and perfectly plumped lips, most of them are also comically indistinguishable from one another. Two of the castmates, Demi and Jessi, look so alike they’ve made multiple TikToks about the mass confusion. The lone Black woman in the cast, Layla, did a media blitz on the cosmetic surgeries she got after watching herself on season 1. “I’ve gotten my boobs done, my nose done and a tummy tuck and lip filler and chin filler and Botox,” the 23-year-old mother of two told Page Six. “I want a new husband one day, so I had to revamp!”
But no matter how fulfilled these women purport to be, no matter how closely they achieve the ideal aesthetic of modern womanhood, they still exist under the conservative rule of a church that fundamentally doesn’t hold them as equals to their husbands. In one unforgettable episode, we watch the most devout mom of all, a young woman named Jen, get screamed at by her irrationally irate husband for something inconsequential. As she sobs over the phone to him, begging him to forgive her, it’s strikingly clear how her devotion to looking like all the other women who want to look like the perfect woman is for nought. The gap between physical perfection and self-actualization, despite our best efforts to smooth some tightened skin over it, remains wide.
