Pretty much everyone these days has given cosmetic intervention at least a passing thought. How can we not? It’s fired at us from every conceivable direction. Reality TV hawks it, social media sells it to us as a route to looking ‘flawless’, celebrities talk about their ‘good genes’ while we strongly suspect they’ve had something done. It is everywhere. Which has given us the mindset that ‘everyone has done it’ and ‘it’s no big deal’ — in fact, most of us probably either have, or know several people who have had, some ‘work’ done via any number of non-surgical, cosmetic ‘tweakments’ now on offer.
But have we ever considered that it is just that…work? Like an invisible job on top of our careers and other roles in life demanding our time, one that requires us to keep our faces line-free, plumped and ageless at all costs. Except that’s not quite how tweakments are sold to us. Just this morning I was emailed about a ‘thread lift nose job’ to get that ‘perfect ski jump nose’, a temporary solution to our perceived problems. But the release didn’t tell me anymore than that - the dangers or issues that could be associated with it. Or that aspiring to have a ‘ski jump nose’ comes from a long history of the cosmetic surgery industry placing a higher beauty status on caucasian features than others, seeing them as the ideal. Nor does it let us pause for a beat to consider if we really want them, or crucially, what made us feel so lacking in the first place.
The UK is the fastest-growing market for facial filler, male tweakments are on the rise, and ageless, plumped, shiny faces have become ‘the new normal’ across the board. And yet, our levels of body confidence and self esteem seem to be decreasing. This chasm is what I set out to uncover in my book 'UGLY', because there’s no word to describe the concept that the more we hate our appearance, the more certain industries profit from it.
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It’s not a notion we want to dwell on as we reach for what we now feel is that necessary quick fix to fight the ‘battle’ with ageing - our most natural human process - or to follow an aesthetic trend. It’s hard to pinpoint where this malaise started — did the boom in cosmetic tweaks cause us to feel worse about ourselves, or did it offer us a solution to a pre-existing problem? It's not overly cynical to believe it's the latter.
That’s not to say that tweakments are all bad: they can of course be a lifeline for those who decide to have facial filler as part of a gender affirming process, to cite just one example. But it’s also true that trends like the ‘fox eye’ thread lift (a brow lift that has received criticism for culturally appropriating some Asian eye shapes), or the most recent trend for buccal fat removal, a relatively invasive cheek reduction procedure, come from somewhere. That somewhere isn’t some kind of Frankenstein-meets-stepford-wife lair, it's scientific labs and cosmetic doctors' offices. It comes from marketing and ad companies who drip feed it into our social media and actual media. It comes from a desire to tweak us as much as possible, for profit.
And that is something we often forget. Which is unsurprising when filler or Botox are sold to us as being as easy to access as popping to Pret for an artisan cheese and pickle baguette over our lunch breaks. Even the word ‘tweak’ was designed to suggest it is little more than buying a lipstick or a new way to do a smoky eye - and that it’s risk free (all tweaks have a host of possible side effects, from lumps, allergic reactions and even loss of sight.) And terms like ‘facial optimisation’ imply what society has always told us - that we need fixing, we need an upgrade and that we’re lacking.
Just recently I was interviewing a leading aesthetic doctor, explaining that I’d tried filler in the past, but that I'd found the gradual wear-off mentally damaging - and it was something nobody had warned me about. (In fact, nobody had even questioned why I wanted it in the first place, or checked in on my mental health at all.) In my case as the filler wore off and my old face crept back in again, I began to loathe it with far more intensity than I had before the tweak.
Regaling my experience seemed to simply provide a new challenge to tackle. Not only did he try to convince me that I'd look better (read: younger) if I tried filler again, he also pointed out the ‘flaws’ in my profile and how those would also be improved with filler and botox. None of this was solicited. After the interview, I walked home, checking out my side profile and nose in every window on the way - now feeling there was something wrong with it. If doctors are supposed to cure and to heal, then this seems like the opposite.
Of course, not every practitioner is like this, and many work by the code of ethics that doesn’t try to upsell (buy an extra round of filler and get some botox for half price!), seek to be minimally invasive, and might question a client's motives to check in on their mental health. Sadly, for me, this wasn’t the first time I've been in this position, and it worries me that this has happened to friends too, women who popped in for a facial and left with injectables.
As well as pointing out my flaws, the aesthetic doctor I saw also informed me that the filler I’d had some 8 years ago had left my lips and migrated elsewhere in my face, creating what some surgeons reportedly call the ‘Juvederm moustache’, or a sort of puffy-looking area above the upper lip. When you consider the impact on our faces, our self esteem and our bank balance (if you factor in costs of paying for tweakments, potentially for the rest of your life), making a truly unbiased, informed decision on if, when, and how we are tweaked, requires far more consideration.
We now expect people to fix anything that falls below the current and ever-shifting standard of perfection and youth obsession. We think — and are encouraged to believe — that fixing the 'problem' will make the bad feelings we have about it go away. On the surface, they might, but the wider problem still exists and still lurks, waiting for its next chance to make us feel ugly.
If we can acknowledge that we are trying to fit into criteria dictated to us by patriarchal beauty standards (that prizes youthful beauty in women, but allows men to age far more easily) and industries who profit from us hating our looks and paying to change them, then that is at least a step away from their power. It gives us a moment to pause and to remember that there is a choice if we want to tweak or not and the nuance of how much and what we do. And we should take that time to reflect.
None of us are immune to the pressures put on us to remain ageless, but I know that before I even consider getting anything tweaked again, it won't be a flippant decision. Feeling ugly isn’t an intrinsic part of our experience, it’s been put there by those who reap the rewards of it, and by industries that hold up an unattainable version of beauty as the standard. As is so often the case, getting tweaked isn’t the cure-all it’s sold to us as, because the system that’s selling it to us is what’s really broken.
UGLY by Anita Bhagwandas is available 16 February 2023 SHOP NOW
*This book extract has been edited for ELLE UK
