It’s happened several times in the last year. A woman celebrity whose face we all know appears in public. It might be Demi Moore, Lindsay Lohan or, most recently, actor Anne Hathaway. It’s them – but somehow it isn’t. Work has been done, clearly, but precisely what that work is you can’t say.
It’s a face from 15 years ago or more but crisper and more perfect. The jawline is sharper, the nose neater. The eyes brighter and skin tauter and more even. The neck is a new neck. The brows are higher on the forehead, but not in that old surgically induced, perma-shocked way. Here is a person who has ascended to some hitherto unknown level of aesthetic aspiration.
Legions of articles follow, hypothesising about what’s been done. Social media commentators weigh in. Women like me sit at home in nine-year-old pyjama bottoms staring through their ordinary faces at this imagery, unable to decide if it’s impressive or horrifying.
Because whatever has happened here – whatever series of medical procedures this person has undergone – we understand to be unattainable to almost everyone.
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Talk to any decent aesthetic doctor and they will tell you this fascinated puzzlement is the goal. This sense of mystery, as though a familiar face is a room in which all the furniture has been suddenly upgraded with similar but far newer and more luxurious fittings.
Whether they’re using lasers, injectables or surgical means (or most likely all three), the ideal outcome is an absence of evidence of what has been done. Apart, of course, from this incontrovertible sense – this irritating, curiosity-piquing knowledge – that something has.
The slackening-sharpening-softening-loosening of the ageing process brings its challenges – for women most of all. It can create a dissonance between who we feel like and who we see in the mirror. It’s us, but more tired and cross looking. Our younger self on a really bad day. It changes how other people behave toward us, generally not for the better.
Since ageing is considered neither positive nor value-neutral for women, this aesthetic celebrity alchemy can leave us feeling unsettled, inadequate and slightly offended. Defensively judgemental and covetously sanctimonious. We despair of the beauty standards which permit people to increase their social and professional capital through needles, scalpels and lasers but mostly through money. Huge sums of money.
As soon as working-class women became more associated with the filler aesthetic than wealthy elites, the “Instagram face” aesthetic became passé and in poor taste
This level of aesthetic overhaul cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s the exclusive remit of the exorbitantly wealthy and supremely well connected. Beauty standards have always been a status game, linked directly to socioeconomics. How we present our bodies in the world is directly reflective of our values. It signals our social and economic status.
This is why when a standard becomes easier to meet, it loses prestige and must change accordingly. With the radical advancement in aesthetic procedures in the last five years, looking “done” has become a hallmark of low status. Invisible work is the new ideal.
Lip filler’s popularity in the 2010s saw facial fillers become more affordable and accessible, then reach saturation point and move from aspirational to tacky. For a while, filler was touted as the non-surgical solution to everything from undereye hollowness to sagging jawlines.
[ Women are overwhelmed because these are overwhelming times ]
As soon as working-class women became more associated with the filler aesthetic than wealthy elites, the formerly highly aspirational “Instagram face” aesthetic became passé and in poor taste. More expensive and less “obvious” treatments became more desirable.
Think of treatments like polynucleotides, which stimulate collagen production and repair in the skin, and a course of which could cost you up to €1,000 at a reputable Irish clinic. The language around these elevated aesthetic standards reveals the values that inform them: “clean”, “glowing”, “expensive”, “quiet luxury”.
This new era of beauty is about inscrutable refinement. Everything is augmented, enhanced and elevated. All of it signals wealth, but no particular feature yields easily to description. It’s an atmosphere. A vibe.
Beauty has extended far beyond lipstick and nose jobs to become less about tweaking and more about aesthetic transcendence. That which is beautiful is that which is hardest and most expensive to obtain.
This isn’t new. Beauty’s elite status has always been maintained by lack of access. It’s the target that changes; the horizon necessarily recedes as we run toward it.
As someone who worked as a beauty editor for over a decade, all this makes me a bit sad. Not because the standards are impossible for most of us to reach – they always have been.
Neither is it because many women choose to augment themselves in pursuit of an ideal – that is a reasonable choice in a world that conflates beauty with health, status and money. It’s clearly advantageous to make oneself as physically attractive as possible and it is in everyone’s interest to seek advantage where they can.
Mostly, I’m saddened that we never seem to learn that obsessing over individual women – judging them harshly or championing their personal aesthetic choices – is what keeps the game going.
All of us are subject to beauty standards. All of us reinforce and are incentivised by them, even when we think we’re opting out. There is no opting out. In a world where beauty is considered a proxy for value, there is no moral high ground.
