I resent my friends for getting Botox. I resent them for making me look worse

I was radically pro-ageing for about seven minutes. For the briefest of periods, I was totally accepting of the fact that my body is meant to age and who was I to intervene? I was going to mature like Diane Keaton in a Nancy Meyers film, all “coastal grandma” and crisp striped shirts against my crepey yet chic skin, reclining on a rattan sun lounger. I was going to be lined and interesting and my crows feet and furrowed brow would tell stories of all-night rollovers and a lifetime of anxiety. Then, all my friends started getting Botox.

It’s all well and good being crepey and chic as long as that’s the benchmark. The growing popularity in non-surgical facial interventions means that ageing benchmarks – which are ultimately subjective but were once at least somewhat uniform – are moving significantly.

We’ve lost sight of what it means to look 30 or 40 or 50. And like it or not, we live in a world where body and beauty standards can fundamentally impact a person’s lived experience. When the standards change and trickle down, the pressure to change with them does too.

Is Botox just another trend wave to ride out, or do stop naively wondering how everyone looks so well and book an appointment and try it out?

I resent my friends for getting Botox. I don’t resent my friends for wanting to look their best, but I resent them for making me look worse. What a horrible, petty, standard-reinforcing stance. But I can’t help it. How can I maintain my very loose grip on being pro-ageing if the people around me are actively anti-ageing?

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Well, I can of course just let them be and let my face do its thing, but then that affects my confidence and my self-esteem and potentially even the way I’m treated and perceived. And even if I launched a self-centred crusade to persuade my friends to turn their backs on Botox, then I would just be asking them to wade into the same needle-infested waters in their wider circles.

So, why not just get Botox? It may be that I am just behind the curve, and possibly experiencing karmic retribution for a relatively lengthy baby face era. When my age peers were worrying in the mirror I was being asked for ID well into my 30s and not even considering having anything “done”. Then, overnight, it seemed like every second child was referring to me as “that lady” and the attendants at the supermarket self-checkouts couldn’t hit the “obviously over-25″ option quick enough.

I started feeling and looking my actual age when my friends were already aboard the preventive Botox train. I began seeing lines and dips in my face that betrayed the years of being over-served, under-rested and poorly lotioned. I’ve spent way too many vanity hours trying to get a bit of “colour” in the sun while tempting the fate of being burned to a crisp.

Those horrifying lamps that show the UV damage to your skin would gain sentience and recoil in horror if I stood near one. I’m now a Factor 50 lickarse but the horse has disappeared over the horizon and I’m standing uselessly at the stable door, deepening my frown lines by the second.

I placate myself with “once you start Botox you need to keep it up” and “it costs a fortune, save that money for the rattan garden set instead”, but it’s all such a tangled web. I fully support anyone doing whatever they want to their body. I want to be able to live in the present and cherish the age I am now rather than wasting time on regrets about the past and anxieties about the future. Doing that in a world where comparison thieves joy 24/7 and beauty standards evolve – but not always for the best – is difficult.

The era of overfilled, “plastic”-looking faces may be beginning its decline, but the marketing of subtle, preventive, non-permanent measures is aggressive. Celebrities like Kylie Jenner and her Kardashian sisters are undoing some of their reversible “work” as things trend towards “natural”, but if we’ve learned anything from wellness culture, it’s that “natural” usually means “expensive”.

[ Nothing says summer in Ireland like a chic Italian in an ankle-length puffer coat ]

Is Botox just another trend wave to ride out, or do I stop naively wondering how everyone looks so well and book an appointment and try it out? I invest money in colouring my hair to mask the greys, so what’s the difference really? Botox grows out, just like hair. And if my friends come at me for telling them on a national platform that I resent their skincare choices, at least nobody will be able to tell from our faces that we’re fighting.