To paraphrase the late, great Nora Ephron: I feel bad about my face. At the age of 37, I thought I would be well beyond such insecurities. Instead, I’m beset by them more than ever.
I look at photos of myself in my twenties and yearn for a time before I knew about the existence of tweakments and surgical procedures like Botox, fillers and lower blepharoplasty (that’s eyelid de-bagging surgery), when all you had to conceal your apparent flaws was ingenuity, a steady hand and a tube of Nars creamy concealer. These days, my newsfeed is populated by a steady stream of celebrities and influencers who are living proof that even the most minor physical imperfection can be injected or scalpelled away.
So thank god for Kate Winslet, who has come out swinging against the rise of fillers and other so-called aesthetic treatments in Hollywood and beyond.
“Oh, it’s terrifying. I think ‘No, not you! Why?’” she told The Times. “It is devastating. If a person’s self-esteem is so bound up in how they look it’s frightening.” She went on to add: “Some of the most beautiful women I know are over 70 and what upsets me is that young women have no concept of what being beautiful actually is.”
It’s easy to dismiss these comments as the privilege of the already-pretty – after all, Winslet has been known for her staggering beauty ever since she hogged that floating door in Titanic. But, as she points out, “all the f***ing actresses” are at it. I’ve lost count of how many celebrities have debuted entirely new faces and bodies in the last year, with Kardashian family matriarch Kris Jenner being the most dramatically obvious example. The 70-year-old recently admitted that she’d got a facelift to celebrate her birthday, joking on The Kardashians that her nose was “probably the only thing on my face [left] that’s real”.
I know that there is a strain of thought that holds that commenting on any woman’s body or her choices regarding that body is deeply un-feminist. I used to have sympathy for this argument, but I’ve come to believe that fighting for the right of women to have an abortion or have sex with whoever they want is not the same as fighting for the right for them to inject botulinum toxin into their faces.
Do I feel bad that celebrities like Jenner are clearly as plagued by the same looks-based pressures as I am – if not more, given that they have to navigate the glare of the spotlight? Of course I do. But unlike them, I’m not helping to set these beauty standards. It would be like feeling sorry for a Formula 1 driver who has the best car, the fastest pit crew and also happens to be on the organising committee of the race. The rest of us on the track are driving clown cars, resorting to back-alley injectables and cheap high-street clinics to keep up.
In the past, drastic makeovers were the preserve of the very rich or very determined. Rita Hayworth, for instance, had a year’s worth of electrolysis to permanently reshape her hairline. Now we live in a world that tells us anybody can overhaul their face. Don’t have the money? Don’t worry – you can get it on Klarna.
Millennials now spend more money on cosmetics and aesthetic procedures than any other demographic, with Gen Z closely behind. We would normally be suspicious of any guru selling us spiritual enlightenment for a price – why don’t we extend that same suspicion towards those selling us beauty for the cost of a few monthly jabs?
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Perhaps the greatest sign of the aesthetic industry’s cost-imperative shallowness is how it so easily pivoted to sell to a demographic whose youth every other age group is attempting to replicate – now the language for younger people is one of prevention rather than cure, with procedures like Botox couched as a way to tackle visible aging before it happens.
Nobody mentions that these supposedly proactive measures are not singular fixes but ongoing maintenance. You’ve unknowingly signed up for a mortgage on your face and its shiny new facade will be taken away if you default on the loan.
As Winslet puts it so well, beauty isn’t just about appearance – or at least it shouldn’t be. As much as Jenner and the rest of Hollywood try to stave off its approach, age eventually comes for us all. I’d like to think that by the time it comes for me, I’ll have found other things to find beautiful about myself other than my own appearance.
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