Is this any way to treat a face?
The era of the 'undetectable face lift' is here, and it's coming for us all...
Remember when we all had different faces? That isn’t a trick question by the way, just an honest one. Back in the 1990’s stars like Angelina Jolie, Cameron Diaz and Halle Berry we all celebrated for their beauty, but all differed in their appearance. Likewise in the 1980’s Naomi Campbell, Claudia Schiffer, Tyra Banks and Christy Turlington might have all been unachievable amazonian supermodels, but facially at least, each looked entirely unique.
I’m not looking at those aforementioned periods through rose-tinted glasses. They were unequivocally shit and damaging times in beauty culture in many ways - from the elevation of 90’s heroin chic thinness - to intense focus on anti-aging in the 80s. But they are useful to show us how much things have changed in the space of the last decade. Gradually, scalpel by scalpel, injection by injection, those in the public eye, on our social media feeds and starring in our films and tv shows, have started to largely resemble each other - but it’s become so normalise that we can’t even see it.
The choice to have any kind of surgery or procedure is entirely yours alone, but to me, the uniformity we’re now seeing - characterised by faces like Ariana Grande (above) -signals an alarming change in our beauty standards. Now, there seems to be a tick box of facial attributes to pick from to be a celebrated beauty, and the uniformity feels genuinely terrifying.
-Taut skin pulled upwards at the eyes
-The same plump uniform lips
-Prominent cheekbones protruding above hollow cheeks
-A shiny immovable expressionless forehead
-Super white, identikit teeth
This peculiar sameness that's emerging among celebrities and influencers right now is our new beauty standard and it’s one that blurs individuality, genetics, race and age. A singular template designed to elicit the external reaction: “she looks good.”’ Christina Aguilera (above) revealed her vastly changed appearance to rounds of applause on social media and the tabloids recently. And in the last few weeks a barely recognisable Lindsay Lohan (top) has given rise to a Cluedo-esque slew of content on social media about what she’d had done to look ‘so good.’
Some guessed a brow lift, a face lift, eye lift, and new teeth giving rise to these new faces. Others have suggested that this ‘work’ - being performed on women in their 20s and 30’s when only relatively small amounts of natural ageing occurs - amounts to an eye watering $300k a pop. Others guessed it was all down to one singular cosmetic surgeon in Hollywood working their ‘magic’ on so many prominent, mostly female, often quite young faces in Hollywood. Either way undetectable face lifts and surgeries are being hailed as the new frontier in aesthetics. But, honestly, I find this praise for these cosmetic surgeons pretty galling and short sighted. Why? Because what all of the comment and praise for these new ‘undetectable’ procedures ignores is that is that these celebrities aren’t having these new procedures to simply halt the ageing process. They’re really being used to homogenise faces, and to fix the mistakes that the injectors and surgeons had previously made.
This happens with every shift in the aesthetic field. What has been done before - like the last decade’s obsession with injectables - starts to look old fashioned, obvious and begins to cause long-lasting damage like ‘pillowface’ the term used to describe faces that suffer from excess and migrating filler (see Madonna, above), and stretched-out skin. All of which is fine, if the person having them likes the effect (and is free from any kind of dysmorphia that might prevent them from being able to make an impartial call on it.) But the industry, or those surgeons, never take responsibility for causing this damage to their ‘patients’ - instead the blame is always placed on those getting the procedures. And with the focus off them, these ‘doctors’ simply use the time to create new techniques to ‘fix’ the faces they ruined in the first place. If you think about it, it’s a canny way to keep yourself in business indefinitely- with the gratitude from the patient replacing any kind of responsibility.
Sadly, little do these patients know that they’re now trapped in this loop forever. What will these new undetectable faces look like in a decade’s time? Here’s my guess. They will naturally age, but because of so much intervention, they might sag in odd places, create asymmetry and bulges perhaps. But the issue now is that there’s not enough skin to remove. But fear not, the cosmetic surgeons hailed as anti-ageing heroes will step in with a new technique to fix the damage that started with their own scalpels and needles in the first place.
How did we get here?
If you’d asked me 15 years ago at the start of my career as a beauty journalist if this was the place we’d end up, I’d have laughed it off as the unthinkable plot for a dystopian horror movie. And yet, we’re actually living this in real time.
When I first saw the unsmiling image of Lohan doing the rounds on social media, I had wondered if it was an AI picture - she looked like an avatar, or a zip off version of herself, as seen in body horror films like The Substance (above). It took me ages to even realise who the person in that picture even was! Did it even matter who is inside that body? All we cared about was that Lohan looked like she could be anywhere from 25 onwards and that meant that she looked ‘good.’ Completely different, expressionless, and generic - but good.
The beginnings of this shift to uniformity was evident as Instagram started to dominate our culture a decade or so ago. The gradual emergence of ‘instagram face’ - characterised by the same drawn on heavy eyebrows, doll-like false lashes, heavily contoured features and a uniform stare at the camera - was the look du jour. Filters, and apps that allowed people to alter themselves on their phones became the undetectable norm - visible only when somebody went a step too far.
But when the filters and make-up was off, we were left with ourselves and our natural faces again. If only there was a way to make our faces look like this permanently? Enter the injectable boom, with people seeking surgeries and aesthetic ‘tweaks’ to make their real faces match their filtered faces. I caught a sharp glimpse of the dystopian nightmare that was to come when an eminent cosmetic surgeon told me people were bringing in filtered pictures of themselves, and asking to be made to look like the image. Was that image merely a refined version of themselves? I guess that depends on how you define ‘refined’, because it’s apparent to anyone who wants to see it, that refined has an agenda. ‘Refined’ is the beauty standard laid down for us by white supremacy; noses are slimmed, skin is lightened and eyes are altered, all stamped with the invisible hallmark of Eurocentric beauty standard. Words like ‘refreshed’ which i’ve seen used to describe Lohan and Aguilera’s new faces are delivered straight from the mouth of patriarchy and capitalism. And do the beauty, tech and cosmetic surgery industries care that they are fuelling this? That’s a resounding no.
Remember when doctors were meant to heal us?
I don’t say that to be inflammatory - I come from six generations of medical doctors, which has included plastic surgeons. But my issue is that the cosmetic surgery - which has a different function to plastic surgery - positions itself as a saviour, when it’s actions and it’s history often suggests otherwise. During WW1 plastic surgery was a relatively new field in the western world. Using techniques sourced from early Indian medical manuals, western plastic surgeons began to work on soldiers who had suffered from the injuries of war (which ended in 1918) helping to give them function and an element of their former appearance again - naturally they were grateful.
Seeing that there could be some serious cash in this, the plastic surgeons started to offer prototype cosmetic surgeries, and Hollywood’s stars who were under huge amounts of pressure to remain ageless and look ‘good’ (as they still are) were the first guinea pigs. Mary Pickford (above) was one of Hollywood’s first and richest stars, and a leading lady of the silent film era. That was, until she had a face lift in the 1930s, back when the procedure was still in infancy. Sadly, the botched job left her unable to smile and express emotion which was crucial in the silent film era. It completely ruined her career.
When WW2 ended in 1945 plastic surgery was used to help soldiers injuries once more, and started becoming more sophisticated and respected as its own field. But after the war ended, the soldiers were patched up, and with no more conflict on the horizon, there suddenly a surplus of plastic surgeons with very little to do. So, they turned en masse to offering their services and experimental procedures to regular people - aimed mostly at women - in the form of rhinoplasties, facelifts and breast augmentation.
Those early days of the industry were laden with trial and error. Rubber, foam, wax, in industrial silicone and worse were inserted into peoples bodies and faces, before they realised that these didn’t work and caused the body huge amounts of trauma. And those early-day facelifts? There was a tell-tale startled look with glassy eyes and a wind-tunnel effect. The kind that caused actor and inventor Hedy Lamaar (above) to become more and more reclusive with each botched procedure she underwent.
Who else needed ‘help’ from cosmetic surgeons? When segregation in the US ended in 1964, it left a legacy where non-caucasian features were othered and seen as ugly. To help with this supposed problem the cosmetic surgery industry turned its attention to westernising facial features to help people assimilate into their new, mixed environments. And the industry still carries a legacy of this today, with noses being judged by western standards, for example, rather than being evaluated by the metrics of the heritage of their owners.
Not all aesthetic doctors are like this of course - I know plenty who turn away people with obvious dysmorphia or those seeking westernising surgeries due to internalised racism or societal pressures, I also know plenty who don’t. And, I’ve had multiple aesthetic doctors and surgeons point out what they’d fix in my face, often without my consent. The effect? I felt inadequate, ugly, like I was broken and in need of a fix - one they handily offered. Quelle surprise!
I’m not lumping all aesthetic doctors or practitioners under this banner, and some surgeries can be truly life changing for the people that have them, but I do think the casualness of current approach - without measured discussion - now lures us into a false sense of security and safety. After all, it’s only been in the last couple of years that we’ve discovered that facial filler doesn’t merely dissolve into the skin over time as we were told - and it can and does migrate around the face. Or take the very casual way we’re sold botox as totally harmless, when in fact, if done incorrectly can cause botulism - “a condition where the toxin spreads beyond the local site and attacks the central nervous system causing muscle paralysis, difficulties breathing”.
So how do we begin to get our heads around the undetectable era of cosmetic surgery? Honestly I’m not sure. The impact of seeing celebrity after celebrity appear as a mannequin version of their former selves is a mirror to our own appearance; and one that will only ever feel lacking, unless we too partake. But that is where - as we’ve seen - money and access becomes the deciding factor. Do you choose to have a dream trip or have a facelift? Suddenly cut-price versions seem appealing, but are so often aimed at those who can’t afford the top cosmetic surgeons, and take the risks. In 2023, 67 cases of botulism were traced back to a clinic in Turkey, and just this week in the UK there was an inquest into a woman (above) who died from a ‘barbaric’ butt lift surgery there too. Yet again, this becomes an issue of class, as money and access give you a certain (but not always guaranteed) degree of safety.
I can’t help but think that this era of undetectable cosmetic surgery, is the living incarnation of becoming a filter; an ageless, poreless, expressionless face. We’ve rallied against the objectification of women for centuries, but in my lifetime, we called out the tabloids and magazines that drew circles around celebrities 'flaws as being anti-feminist. But now drastic changes in appearance, driven by the endless pursuit of beauty’s changing and unrelenting grip, are being analysed by beauty-obsessed sleuths across the globe. This is often led by cosmetic surgeons (see above) ‘breaking down’ exactly what each celebrity might have had I suspect as a means to sell the industry, their services and to normalise invasive treatments to the degree where ‘lunch hour boob jobs’ are starting to emerge as a trend.
It feels strange to me, that fixing the things that patriarchy has always loathed, like women getting older, loving themselves as they are and being individual - with cosmetic surgery has become a feminist act. And one we’re being sold as being entirely our choice, when distinguishing between societal pressure and our own autonomy is so, so hard to do. But I also can’t help but think that this normalising of cosmetic surgery and the way it’s being promoted, ties in with the growth of far right movements, the trad wives reclaiming a woman’s position in the home and only fans creators trying to monetise the sexual male gaze as empowering. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. But seeing my social media feed full of images of Lohan’s ‘new’ face, with the next scroll resulting in the fake life of Nara Smith, followed by another scroll revealing 23 year old Only Fans creator Lily Phillips in tears after sleeping with 100 men in a day, it just feels like something is truly, truly broken right now. I can’t help but feel like it all adds up, somehow.
You’ll have to forgive the slight stream of consciousness of this column, I’m still working out how I feel about all of this, and I feel so conflicted about it, because when I’m 50 and everyone around me looks like a 30-year-old Stepford wife, with identical taught faces, there’s every chance I’ll succumb to it - and maybe you will too. Maybe that will become the norm, and ageing naturally will be rare and obsolete - who knows? But I do know, and can see how the loss of diverse beauty standards that erase our autonomy, identity and heritage will affect all of us. The age of the singular global beauty template is coming for us all - whether we engage with it, covet it, or try to refuse it.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this….
Much love….
FURTHER READING: If you liked this you might like my most-read columns on similar topics below…
Who is to blame for the Love Island look?
Do you need an ageing plan?
Does tech have a whiteness problem?
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This is such a good, and depressing read. I am a journalist and broadcaster and will never have what are repulsively called "tweakments". But when I see myself on screen I am depressed because I look "old" compared to peers who have regular Botox. I am 59. I agree NOT having work is a feminist act. Well done and thank you.
I completely agree with you, anything that gives a woman any aesthetic quirkiness or uniqueness is being eradicated by this standardisation of desirability. And this - 'only fans creators trying to monetise the sexual male gaze as empowering.' - is a problem. Feminism has become synonymous with women treating themselves as men would, but because it's self imposed it's empowering. No, we're just doing the subjugation for them.
And, since you raise it, let's talk about Madonna. Does she really believe, that, after breaking barriers and taking on the music industry on her own terms, that the most she has to offer the world now, is an ever slipping grasp on the fallacy that she is wrinkle free and still has a firm arse?
And, l(ast one I promise), I can offer you my position botox at 58, which is that my determination not to get botox is holding steadfast, but the onslaught is real and I realise I will be the wrinkliest one at the table.