Back in early 2020, a couple of weeks before the Covid-19 pandemic hit Australia, I went to an aesthetician to have botox injected into my right eyebrow. I was in a good place financially, having just landed two life altering career opportunities, and I thought it was finally time I poison a long held insecurity to death. They say eyebrows are supposed to be sisters, not twins, but mine have always been third cousins twice removed who harbour a grudge against one another. Botox can help give a person a temporary eyebrow lift, so I thought concentrating an injection into one of my eyebrows might heal the divide and bring more equilibrium to my face.
Of course then the pandemic hit and I lost all of my jobs at once. I went into lockdown with no money, and the kind of eyebrows I’d always wanted, but never dreamed I could have. For people who aren’t up on cosmetic trends, my botox eyebrow lift cost me $450, and lasted only three months.
I’ve been thinking lately about what a fucking waste of money this exercise in vanity was, especially as I flail into yet another Christmas season without secure work. I’d spent so many years wanting to look a certain way, and when I finally achieved that look, nobody saw me. I feel like I’ve become the evil queen in a modern retelling of Snow White that parents use to warn their kids away from the needle or the knife, but when I fell off a cliff, I didn’t die, instead I landed on a jagged pile of debt and bled out slow.
When we came out of our most recent lockdown, my physical insecurities started resurfacing. But this time I wasn’t so worried about my eyebrows as I was my whole face. It sounds self-evident, but these past couple years have aged me, and as a single woman in my 30s, this feels like it might become a problem. I found myself whispering insults to my reflection and wondering if hurling apples at hot bitches in the street would be a more efficient way of taking out the competition. Long story short, I went back to my aesthetician, having learned absolutely nothing from my own morality tale.
Luckily my doctor made a fatal mistake. As I removed my mask to discuss my concerns about my newly acquired resting bitch face betraying my internal world and devastating my career ambitions of becoming an international spy, he remarked that my lips were too small for my face.
I fucking love my tiny lips. A girl I had a crush on in High School once remarked that they looked like a folded rose petal, and it remains one of the most important compliments of my life. It might be delusion, but I think they make me look a bit cute, like an anime character. They’re remarkably pink, which means I never have to wear lipstick to look like I’m made up. And, on the left side, there’s a fleck of pink flesh that sits above the lip line and helps them look not just pretty, but unique.
The very thought that anyone might think they were a flaw made me flush with rage. On the outside I maintained my composure, and simply laughed and said “I like my lips”. To my aesthetician’s credit, he didn’t mention them again, and I left promptly with a prescription for retinoids (because I still have insecurities, I’m not a saint) and a lesson finally learned. Or, so I thought.
All my life I’ve been somewhat poor, partly because of my own mental health problems making it near impossible to obtain stable work, and partly due to a lack of generational wealth. My parents both come from deeply impoverished backgrounds and while they managed to give me a fairly comfortable life that I will forever be grateful for, we still had a household where buying clothes, shoes, or any beauty products (including moisturiser) was an extravagance reserved for once a year, or in some cases, once a decade. I once knocked my mum’s revlon blush off the bathroom counter when I was playing dress up. It hit the tiles with a sharp crack, and the dusty pink rouge splattered like a crime scene. My mum gently and meticulously scooped every speck of powder back into its pan and used it for another twenty years. I know, because I only recently convinced her to throw it out.
I’ve carried on this legacy of frugality, consciously and unconsciously, throughout my life. I only own four pairs of shoes; boots for winter, sandals for summer, sneakers for exercise, and a pair of heels for those moments when I have to suck it up and make an appearance at an “event”. A nice person might describe my fashion choices as “safe”, while others might say I need to stop shopping at Cotton On, for the love of god. I wear the same make up every time I leave the house, and only replace the bottles when they’re bone dry. I’m not immune to the beauty industrial complex — I have a stack of eyeshadow palettes I purchased during a low point in 2020 to prove it — but, until recently, “aspirational” beauty that can’t be obtained with a good night’s sleep or a light concealer has sat at the intersection of “too hard” and “too expensive” in my trying to survive in this world venn diagram.
I have immense privileges, being young(ish), white, and straight sized, which means I’ve been able to get away with a certain level of unkemptness without turning heads for a vey long time. There is also the fact that I’m queer, which allows me sometimes to relax in the absence of the heteronormative gaze and simply exist as the sentient amorphous blob that I feel like most of the time.
Because of this, my sudden interest in botox caught me by surprise. But perhaps after years of scrolling through filtered instagram posts and watching my favourite celebrities age backwards, it shouldn’t have. A ridiculous habit of mine is to combat my own insecurities by googling celebrities my age, in the hopes that one of them might have similar features, as if looking a certain way in such a public facing role gives the rest of us permission to do the same. Unfortunately, I’m the same age as Megan Fox, and, as you might imagine, studying photographs of her is somewhat counterintuitive to this exercise.
The truth is this exercise is becoming more and more futile every single year as celebrities rapidly merge into a single, insurmountable beauty ideal. If Megan Fox, Kim Kardashian, Ariana Grande and Kendall Jenner were all Power Rangers, they’d unite to form a giant mecca Snow White (with emphasis on the “white”) ready to crush us all under her Jimmy Choo’s. In our modern retelling of this classic fairytale, “natural” beauty is just a good base for getting some work done. And the evil queen’s plight isn’t so much a moral failure, as it is a failure to invest in a pony tail face lift before the age of 35.
As of 2017, cosmetic surgery in Australia has become a billion dollar industry, with 90% of these procedures done on women. In 2018, we spent 40% more on cosmetic procedures per capita than in the US. And in the 2020/2021 financial year, the number of injectables we received tripled, which seems especially wild considering most of the country spent half of that time in lockdown.
These statistics worry me.
I have absolutely no issue with someone getting cosmetic surgery. I’ve written papers about transhumanism and, frankly, if we don’t have a future where surgical “enhancements” are normalised I will be extremely disappointed. Of course, when I was imagining this future, I saw cosmetic surgery as an outlet for creative self-expression, rather than a template for uniformity. I sort of expected less dermal fillers and more detachable cyborg arms. I certainly never anticipated that I would drop hundreds of dollars just to force my wayward eyebrow into conforming to a rigid beauty standard I’ve never found attractive in other people, let alone beautiful. To put it bluntly, I couldn’t give less of a fuck about the symmetry of another person’s eyebrows.
However, I did like it on me. For a short amount of time, I enjoyed having a more symmetrical face. I felt like a fucking movie star and I’m not sure what to do with that feeling. Just as I’m not sure what to do with my belief that Sandra Bullock might be the most beautiful woman on Earth, despite her having had a new face carved from marble by an artist and grafted onto her fleshy skull some time around 2013.
For me, it’s not enough to say that cosmetic surgery is “good” or “bad”. I believe that bodily autonomy is a sacred right for all humans, and that right should be protected. I think a person should be able to modify their body in any way they choose, as long as it causes no harm to another person - so, laser eyes or machine gun legs might be where I draw the line.
But this, of course, assumes that our decision to have cosmetic surgery is entirely our own. We live in a country where “beauty ideals” are being sold to us at an exponential rate, but those ideals are often governed by negative forces; sexism, fat-phobia, ableism, transphobia, ageism, racism, anti-semitism, colonialism (white supremacy truly accounts for a lot of this), and, perhaps more than ever before, capitalism. It’s not a coincidence that smaller lips were often considered the beauty standard in most colonised countries up until larger lips were modelled on wealthy white women. Nor is it surprising that when fleshy butts came into fashion in the late-2000s, the fat from fleshy stomachs and fleshy thighs was sucked out and used to manufacture them.
Even if we agree that individuals have a right to manipulate their own personal aesthetics, it remains concerning that these cosmetic procedures are being used to either erase or appropriate certain ethnic features. Even if we might argue that cosmetic surgery is not an inherently anti-feminist act, it should still give us pause that this billion dollar industry is sustained by women’s paycheques.
Ever since I first let that prick of a doctor prick me with poison and watched my reflection morph into a shape more pleasing to my own eye, I’ve had questions racing through my mind. My biggest question is, how fucking dare he? I wanted to hate botox. I didn’t want to know that being slightly more conventionally attractive was accessible to me if only I could afford to pay $450 every three months for the rest of my life. And I’ve always loved my lips, but now I catch myself playing with filters on instagram and imagining what my life might be like if I looked like every other beautiful siren on that damn app.
I wanted to write one essay (ONE!) about my experience getting botox, and now I’m spiralling. I’ve watched hundreds of YouTube videos, TikToks, and Instagram reels of mostly very young women documenting major surgery like it’s a make-up tutorial, and it’s completely freaking me out. I have no clever summary here, no neat ending, I didn’t learn my lesson after being shoved off a cliff, so what can I expect from writing about it?
But, as is demonstrated by my desktop folder full of saved Megan Fox pictures, futility has never stopped me before. Cosmetic surgery is experiencing an unprecedented boom right now, and I think it might be a problem. So, let’s discuss.
This is Part One of an ongoing series about Beauty and Capitalism called ‘The Beauty Gap’. Please subscribe to receive all future essays straight to your inbox. <3
I've always hated my very thin top lip (and creases above it, despite never being a smoker) but last year - after seeing myself on endless Zoom screens I became obsessed with the fact that the crease between both eyebrows was akin to a butt crack with full-on butt cheeks either side of it.
I had some regular work at the time so splurged to have some filler put in. It was $300-350 a pop from memory. I did it twice but then was unemployed and freelancing so haven't done it since.
I'm not a fan of the large lips or lifeless shiny foreheads, or those whose faces have changed beyond recognition but certainly understand the fact that sometimes short-cuts to (perceived) self-improvements can be alluring. (Particularly when most involve things like 'dieting and exercise'.)
I saw your oven light instagram post just now and the first thing I thought of was this piece…
I’m almost certain “..your lips are too small for your face…” was the last thing Meg Ryan heard before her career imploded…