I’ve just got off the phone from my mother who called me up just to tell me: “No more lip filler please, and darling have you tattooed your eyebrows – I really hope you haven’t – they’re so tacky and ugly.” I have no idea where this has come from, but my guess is she’s been watching Love Island with my niece.
Not that it’s anyone else’s business, but I’ve not had lip filler for several years, and, in fact, had as much of it as possible removed, as someone did a remarkably bad job. I did drag my mum to come with me once though, and she saw the whole episode, so there may be a trauma there – it can’t have been fun seeing her little girl pumped full of filler – but this was over four years ago and I’ve learnt and moved on from my mistakes.
The fact that she thinks I’d ever get my eyebrows tattooed is just insulting. I’m proud as punch of my face – I’ve mainly just stuck to extreme skincare (fractal resurfacing, micro needling, injectable skin boosters and laser treatments) with a little filler to straighten my nose and incredibly clever Botox , so this statement stops me in my tracks – am I deluded? Is the work I’ve done awful? What if I’m one of those people who is so dysmorphic that they can’t see how awful their face is. Am I…Jocelyn Wildenstein?
I call every one of my friends to tell me straight. The result is a consensus and apparently: I’m “peaking” and the “one we all turn to”, because it’s done so well. Either I have bad friends, or I’m doing alright – but it’s made me realise that I am walking a fine line; I’m one injectable away from really getting it very wrong.
I turn inward and ask myself why I do any of it. Why are these tiny tweakments so important to me – and why can’t so many of us see we’ve gone too far? Is what I call maintenance actually not what’s going on here? Is it time for an intervention?
I rummage through my phone to find an old picture to see if I can identify when this journey really started, and stumbled across an old Snapchat image from 10 years ago. I had taken tens of them, quite obviously thrilled with myself, at 35, with drawn-on freckles, fake glasses and bear ears.
It’s an absurd shot, but what’s even more nuts is that I thought this looked good. I can see the fun in it, but what’s darker is the reformulation of my face and the clean and blurred-out skin texture was the start of me feeling better behind a mask. Then it dawns on me – how much of this journey into modifying my appearance has been influenced by filters on the apps?
Gizzi’s Snapchat circa 2016: ‘The clean and blurred-out skin texture was the start of me feeling better behind a mask’In 2010, Instagram came along with the first social media filters: Valencia, Lo-Fi and X-Pro II were nostalgic and they mimicked analogue film stock. They didn’t change your face; they changed the mood. Then, in 2015, Snapchat introduced Lenses. Dog ears. Flower crowns. Face tracking. A mortifying moment in time for adults everywhere.
Then tech evolved quickly from novelty to correction. Face Tune landed and then people everywhere had a sophisticated airbrushing tool at their fingertips. You can pinch your nose, cinch your waist, get rid of your three chins and clear your skin.
We can now create these perfected versions of ourselves, and it’s kick-started an aesthetic shift. I question whether my own relationship with aesthetics all comes back to that ludicrous picture of me with bear ears and the slow integration and evolution of these apps, have translated into the work that I’ve ended up having done.
Skin treatments are now sold as “IRL filtering systems”; one I had recently with my aesthetics guru Dr Ahmed el-Muntasar, a new treatment called Julaine, is marketed as a “filter skin”. I’ve been working with Dr Muntasar for years, and he likes to work with what’s natural – he saved my lips from someone else’s bad work and I’ve been a happy model for what’s new and scientific.
We don’t touch my lips or forehead anymore; we stick mostly to skin treatments, scattered Botox and lasers, and I really think it’s working for me. But the mistakes I’ve made and had to go back on were undeniably because the cultural discourse took me there.
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Yet I’m still filtering my skin with the help of AI. As I put an image into my phone, AI automatically just knows what to do to make me perfect. It’s natural looking, no one would know.
There is no way we can deny that the evolution of these apps has made a lot of us feel the need to keep up with them. There’s a particular aesthetic that keeps repeating itself; fox-eye lift, poreless glass skin, narrower jaw, fuller lips and higher cheekbones. It’s a seamless beauty.
I know I should quit it for humanity, but it’s human nature to want to look your best. As someone in the public eye I think my responsibility lies in being honest about all this, so here I am – laying it all out there. No one looks like this. Not even me.
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