The pressure to change your face

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:06Jessica DeFino:Today, the increasing pressure to mess with your face.

0:14Today in Focus is supported by Paramount+. This isn't the end of a fight, it's the start of one. Lioness, the critically acclaimed original series from Taylor Sheridan, returns August 2nd only on Paramount+. In the new season, hidden networks, foreign operatives and personal betrayals collide. Meanwhile, Jo walks the line between duty and family as unseen forces circle her world, leaving her to reckon with a war that now reaches into every part of her life. Don't miss the new season of Lioness, starring Zoe Saldana and Michael Kelly with Morgan Freeman and Nicole Kidman. Streaming August 2nd only on Paramount+.

1:14I've always thought of myself as someone with fairly high self-esteem. Someone who's more or less at peace with their face, their body, their imperfections. And yes, there have been times when I've wanted a smaller bum, straighter teeth, longer legs, a less round face but by and large I've accepted how I look and how I've changed as time has gone by. Recently though I've started to wonder if I shouldn't I don't know tighten things up a bit smooth a few things out and I don't think it's a coincidence that these feelings have started to simmer at the same time as podcasts have gone visual. We filmed today in focus now and we put clips on social media and I must admit I was really quite appalled when I saw the first clips of me.

1:55It was so different from these carefully curated selfies that I post on my private account. It was the way I look when I'm talking or listening, my brows furrowed, my teeth are askew, and I know I'm not alone. It doesn't help when aesthetics clinics or plastic surgeons are sliding into your DMs offering discounts, and when plenty of people I know, as well as an ever-growing list of celebrities, are open about exactly what they've had done.

2:28It's what today's guest calls aesthetic inflation. And I feel conflicted about it. I judge people who succumb, and then I judge myself for being so judgy. But I want to resist the pressure to mess with my face. From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus. The insidious creep of aesthetic inflation.

2:53Jessica Dufino, welcome to Today in Focus. Thank you for having me. I'm really delighted that you're here because you're one of my favourite beauty writers and you're a critic and you are the agony ant of the brilliant Guardian US column Ask Ugly. And it was actually a letter that you received last year that really crystallised so much of my quite conflicted feelings about everything that we're going to discuss today. I wanted to start by asking you to actually read that letter if that's okay. Sure. um okay dear ugly i'm 36 and i don't need or want a facelift but lately i feel like i'm being made to want a facelift is it weird that facelifts are becoming normalized for women my age or am i being too judgmental why do i want this even though i don't want this are there any risks or side effects that might sober me up enough to commit to not getting a facelift in the future i feel like i'm going crazy and it's signed maybe i need a lobotomy instead it's such a good letter and i think it will probably resonate with a lot of listeners as it did with me, this sort of tortured and contradictory set of feelings.

3:51And I loved your reply to it. And you said that you see this as a reaction to what you called aesthetic inflation. Can you explain what you mean by that? Yes. So aesthetic inflation, I see it as the normalization of more and more extreme cosmetic procedures over time that not only affects the people who feel pressured to opt in, but also affects the people who can't opt in or choose not to opt in. It makes it harder to opt out without facing social, financial, political consequences.

4:22Jessica DeFino:Oh God, tell me about it. And that letter was just about facelifts, but I think it could just as easily apply to this whole growing family of treatments and tweakments. Because as technology advances, what they can do to you with quite drastic results without you having to go under the knife is really quite remarkable. or what they can do with just these discrete little incisions that mean that you don't have to have a general anaesthetic. Like at the moment, my Instagram feed is chock full of women having these blepharoplasty. There you go. I lift basically. And then you've got Botox fillers.

5:02Tell me about how this sort of family of procedures are growing in popularity. Yeah. I mean, they're all growing in popularity and I definitely see it on a spectrum. So we could call these behaviors broadly anti-aging behaviors and they've increased from the product sector where that's just the proliferation of new types of anti-aging skincare often called pro-aging skincare to put a nice sounding spin on it but when you look at the product it's how can I look younger tighter less wrinkly less saggy it's all anti-aging more snatched of course and then you have the procedures, things like lasers, fillers, Botox.

5:45They're also offering something called a tip stitch now, which is like a single stitch, a non-invasive stitch that lifts the tip of your nose up. So there are ways to alter the shape of the nose without going in for a full rhinoplasty. And then you have these anti-aging surgeries, which would be the blepharoplasty, upper or lower, the facelift. And I would say we're seeing an increase across the board in all of them. And so according to statistics from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, so this is America specific, in the past 10 years, Botox use has increased 40%. Filler use has increased 131%.

6:26And the total of minimally invasive procedures, which include injectables, lasers, things like that have increased 423 % in the past 10 years. So that's a difference of 5.4 million procedures to 28.2 million procedures per year. Wow. And I think it's a similar picture. We're always slightly behind you guys, but I think we're catching up. And there was also a survey from the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery that found that 32 % of facelifts are now performed on patients age 35 to 55. So not only are more women having it, but I think the age is coming down quite a lot.

7:01Yeah, people are starting to do these sort of extreme interventions a lot younger.

7:15And how much of this do you think is coming first from celebrities? I mean, if you think, There's so many different examples of this, but I went to see The Devil Wears Prada too, and I enjoyed it. Of course I did. It's about journalism and, you know, there's a lot of nostalgia there. But you look at the cast, 20 years have passed. And not only has time stood still, they kind of look better in many ways than they did back then. Which I think says so much about our conception of what quote unquote better is. Yeah, shame on me actually. Gosh, there we go. No, I mean, this is the language that we use, right?

7:50Better is necessarily younger when it comes to beauty. Oftentimes, I think not even younger, but looking as if you've put in the work, like just that show of effort. So yeah, I think celebrities play a really interesting role here. I think they are, of course, subjects to beauty standards. They've been made to believe that parts of their jobs depend on how beautiful and young looking they are. So they feel that pressure very acutely. And then they sort of pass those standards along to the general public. It's sort of like a contagion. And I think the public feels a lot of pressure to conform to these standards that celebrities are setting for a variety of reasons.

8:30And I think one of them is sort of like the collapsing of media into real life, almost. What do you mean by that? I think like social media and Instagram is a really great example of how this works, where a lot of us are presenting ourselves on social media through videos, through images and sort of celebrifying ourselves in that way. Like someone can become a celebrity overnight if the video takes off. Right. And it's making it easier for the average person to feel that pressure of celebrity and presentation. So it's sort of like the standards for the average celebrity and the average person have collapsed.

9:10And you've been a beauty writer for a long time. When did you start to notice this normalization of what was previously pretty extreme and the preserve of people who were on camera for a living? I think it was really my own vanity that opened me up to this. So in 2015 and 2016, I was an assistant editor on the Kardashian-Jenner official app. So I was creating content for Kim and Khloe and Kourtney and Kendall and Kylie, and a lot of that focused on beauty. Hey guys, so this is the look we're going to show you today. It's my birthday party tonight, and I just want something a little sexy and yeah.

9:49So I was sort of privy to the products they were using, the images they were putting out there. I was responsible for putting that image out there, you know. So I started noticing the disconnect between what was happening in real life and the image that was portrayed. For example, we would post stories like how to look photoshopped with makeup alone. Meanwhile, we had a full-time photoshop artist on staff to photoshop those photos. Or there was a story on Chloe's app that was how to fake a nose job with contour. Meanwhile, Chloe has since admitted that she's had an actual nose job. I've had one nose job, Dr.

10:26Raj Kanodia, and everyone gets so upset. Like, why don't I talk about it? No one's ever asked me. So there were just like these disconnects that started to feel a little icky to me. And then at the same time, for the first time in my life, I was on the receiving end of a lot of beauty PR. So I started using a ton of products that I got for free and it actually destroyed my skin. And just the vanity of that experience of not feeling beautiful, of not being able to use products or makeup started to make me question like, OK, wait, where is all of my self-worth beyond what I look like? And so I started sort of digging into the gap there.

11:03Jessica DeFino:You mentioned the Kardashians, and I think that they're a really good example of kind of zeitgeist culture shift. If you think 10, I don't know, 15 years ago, those guys were presenting this fantasy that you could look just like they did without makeup, without airbrushing. And now they've done a total 180. And you have Kylie Jenner, not only admitting to having had a bobe job, but also giving her followers all of the details, how much silicon she'd had put in, who the surgeon was. Do you see that as quite a big shift in society from pretending to being incredibly open about this stuff? Yeah, this is the cosmetic transparency movement.

11:44And it sort of has like almost this moral gloss to it and often like a feminist overtone. It's made to seem as if it's like good and honest and empowering because people are being transparent about what they're doing to their faces. They're saying, I don't look like this naturally. It takes a lot of money. It takes a lot of work. And on the surface, that feels really good to know. But we have studies that show that knowledge of what it takes doesn't lessen the pressure people feel. So it's not really helping people. It's like, oh, no, that's not real. That's not attainable. And I still feel like I have to look that way.

12:24Yeah, it's like they move the goalposts for everybody else. Exactly. Exactly. And if you talk to any sort of cosmetic injector or cosmetic surgeon, they will tell you cosmetic transparency has been the best thing for their businesses. Really? Oh, my goodness. I've interviewed so many surgeons over the past couple of years who credit this cosmetic transparency movement with bringing them a lot more patients because they know the exact procedures the people they want to look like are getting and they can ask for that. And when do you think this movement started? I would say it's fairly new. I think a lot of what happened had to do with the pandemic's impact on beauty and the beauty industry.

13:03At the beginning of the pandemic, as our lives became more virtual, we were seeing ourselves reflected in Zoom screens, whether that was through school or work or, you know, FaceTiming with friends that you couldn't see. And people really started to hyper fixate on their perceived imperfections. Researchers have called this the Zoom boom, where being on Zoom, being confronted with their image really increased the amount of like Botox injections we were seeing, filler injections, things like that. And also because of pandemic times, this was a real moment for surgeries that needed a lot of recovery time.

13:39So people who were interested in this and who could afford it were like, oh, great. I'm not going to be seeing anyone for months. I can do this now. that started trickling into this movement of like, okay, people are going to tell that I've had something done. I'm just going to admit it. I'm getting accusations in my Instagram comments. I'm just going to admit it and own it. And I mean, it's gone so far that when Kylie Jenner, you know, told us the details of her boob job, she was hailed as like a girl's girl and a feminist for being transparent and showing women what it takes to look like her.

14:11Oh, and I feel like a bad feminist because my reaction is to roll my eyes and think, oh, there's another one, yet another beauty, you know. Yeah. And in the UK, there's this comedian called Catherine Ryan. She's Canadian, actually, but she's really big here. And she was recently very open about a facelift that she had done after her fourth child, aged 42. So the surgery that I have hinted about, but not yet totally revealed, was a facelift. Yes, a full facelift. a little bit of fat transfer to my like you know cheekbone area and a small bleph and she told all of her followers it cost 16 000 pounds she told everybody who the surgeon was and i found myself feeling so conflicted because i was like cocking my head to one side and thinking cool she looks great and then the other part of me sort of felt betrayed and then i'm like ah why am I being so judgy?

15:07Help me out. How can I deal with these feelings? Okay. I think the first thing is to make peace with judgment. Humans judge. This is what we do. Almost every moment in our lives is infused with judgment. It's how we decide what actions we want to take, the opinions we're forming. I always go back to like Immanuel Kant, the philosopher in the 1800s who wrote this book on beauty and aesthetics, and it's called The Critique of Judgment. So So starting point, beauty itself is a judgment. When we decide to tweak our appearance, that's coming from a judgment. I think this would look better or I think this looks worse.

15:44And I think there's a big difference from judging people's looks, inherently what they look like, and then judging their actions. And often in aesthetics, we see evidence of action through the physical changes, right? So I think there's a lot of conflicting language here where we're like, don't judge a woman for what she looks like after a facelift. And it's like, well, it's okay to judge the action. Because that action is imbued with a lot of political significance. I would say this focus we have on anti-aging right now is sort of a rational response to a deeply ageist and sexist society. This is the world we live in.

16:25And when we look at what cosmetic procedures are popular right now, it gives us a lot of information about where we are culturally and the pain points for women in particular, the lengths that women will go to in order to try and overcome these limitations that society has put on us. So I often think like it's more sexist to refuse to discuss the beauty standards that are like foisted upon us under the banner of like gender discrimination. Like it's not gender discrimination to talk about the beauty standards women feel compelled to meet. Yeah. But I don't know if the phrase you do you is popular in America, but it kind of is here.

17:05And I feel like I'm sort of breaking some kind of sisterhood code when I'm like tutting and I see another celebrity who suddenly looks very suspiciously smooth and snatched and different from before. And Catherine Ryan, the comedian, she did come in for a very mixed reaction, actually. Half of people were saying go girl and half of them were saying, this is terrible. And she said, listen, you know, I watched all these other famous women suddenly looking amazing and claiming it was all down to just icing their face. And I held the ice pack to my jaw and I thought, yeah, bitch, I've been icing my face too as part of my recovery from a facelift.

17:40These women are having facelifts. And part of me's like, yeah, fine, you do you. And then the other part of me is like, no, don't. And then I look at my own face, I'm 45, and I think, oh, crikey. You know, it's downhill from here. I struggle with that all the time because for work, I'm critiquing beauty culture. And that often puts me at the center of beauty culture where I'm even more vulnerable to the messages. So it's like I'm researching facelifts and my stance is, hmm, maybe this isn't the best innovation for women. But at the same time, I'm like, wow, maybe I could use one. I don't know.

18:15Which, I mean, goes back to the question writer. They don't want a facelift, but they do because it's everywhere and you're seeing it. And I think this really gets to the heart of the lie of I do it for me or you do you. There is no such thing, I think, as a desire that just springs authentically from your soul. Like we desire things because other people have them or because other people desire them. and beauty standards are culturally reinforced and our choices, even if they feel authentic to us, are culturally coerced. I do it for me is a really big battle cry and a part of that battle cry is like, I'm not doing this for men.

18:57I wanna look good for me or I wanna look good for my girlfriends. I think it would be really healthy if we could think a little bit deeper about our desires and say, this isn't my own authentic, uninfluenced desire. But I do desire this because of the culture that I'm living in. I do desire this because other people have normalized it and I've seen other people look really good and I want that.

19:34I guess I'm conscious how women listening to this, who have had these treatments would be feeling. But how do you navigate? Because I got friends who've had them. And if they listen, they'll be like, oh, you've been judging me the whole time. And sometimes I haven't hidden my judgment. And sometimes I have. How can we navigate these conversations and stay friends without sounding judgy, moralistic, superior? I try to not focus on personal choice and focus on the general public. So when so many people are deciding to make very similar, you know, quote unquote, personal choices. We have to ask why.

20:07And our personal preferences are shaped by the politics of the culture that we live in. So it makes sense that a lot of women are preferring to look younger. It makes sense that a lot of women are going to get these treatments. I'm not trying to judge their one-off personal choices, but rather judge the culture that coerces these behaviors. Yeah, maybe I'm more sympathetic actually to famous women in Hollywood, the pressure that they're under not to age visibly. Because you know, you can have George Clooney being a silver fox, classic example. And then there was this one stat that I read that said that box office hit films are four times more likely to star a man called Chris or an animated talking animal than a woman over 60.

20:49And I just wonder, what do you think is the cost of aging naturally for your average Joan? The benefits of being beautiful, like economically, financially, politically, are a bit exaggerated. So we're getting this messaging that your life will be so much better if only you were a little bit more beautiful. And we do have statistics to back that up. Like I want to say pretty privilege is a real thing in our culture. attractive people have been shown to get better jobs, make more money, have better social outcomes, often have better legal outcomes. So there are benefits to being perceived as beautiful.

21:29But what doesn't enter the conversation is what we have to sacrifice in order to reach that standard of beauty. And I'm talking about things like time, money, energy, attention, headspace, these are all forms of power and freedom and political power. And when we are choosing to funnel all of that into our appearance, hoping that it will benefit us, we often don't look at the other side of that cost. What is it costing you? And actually for my Ask Ugly column, I answered a question very similar to this from someone saying, I don't want to participate in beauty culture, but I can't get over the feeling that I'm going to live a worse life because of it.

22:08And what I did was I surveyed 3 ,200 people and asked how beauty has benefited them and do they feel it was worth the cost, the time they lost the money, they lost the attention that they give to their face. And the majority of participants said it wasn't worth it. There are people who responded saying like, I will never get back the time that I've spent worrying about my wrinkles. I will never get back the money I spent on Botox. I wish I had saved that so that I could be more independent financially because now I'm divorced and circumstances have changed. And I'm wondering about all the resources I funneled into my own face and body.

22:49Where could I have used that in ways that are actually beneficial to my quality of life? Classically, nobody on their deathbed says, oh, I wish I'd spent more time, you know, waxing my bikini line. Exactly. Exactly.

23:13And let's talk about how this normalisation of these treatments is actually changing the aesthetic. And in some ways making a lot of people look the same. Yes. What would you say the prevailing aesthetic is at the moment? And how does that reinforce kind of old oppressive beauty norms? I would say the aesthetic is, it's actually very like AI inspired. I would say it's textureless, ageless, smooth, snatched. I would say it has the look of labor, but if done like the right way or what people say is the right way, It's like you can't pinpoint exactly what has changed or exactly what work has been done.

23:58It appears to be quote unquote natural, even as it's sending the signals that like this was the result of a cosmetic intervention. I think we're getting into a beauty standard that is really focused on traditional femininity and traditional masculinity. I think this has so much to do with the explosion of far right politics and the return to traditional gender roles that a lot of our politicians are trying to push through policy and through rhetoric. People are leaning into more traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine aesthetics. and does that mean like for women a small neat little nose yes i would say for women youth is is the big driver dainty features a lot of these beauty standards that have held over decades and sometimes over centuries are very informed by white supremacy by racism it's the small upturned nose it's the blonde hair although the big lips maybe is is borrowing from black physiology.