Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare
To borrow a phrase from Simone de Beauvoir, the face is not a thing but a situation—one that is, increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive, replete with new information but devoid of human meaning. Today, the young inject their faces and look old; the old inject their faces and look uncanny; a twenty-year-old got famous for hitting himself in the jaw with a hammer to become hotter; teen-agers ask strangers on the internet if a facelift is their only hope. The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing people as commodities and stripping us for parts. But only recently has this process been encoded so specifically onto the face, traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity. The face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul, and this is happening in front of us, on our phones, in the most banal fashion, every day.
About a decade ago, the most visible faces on Instagram—those belonging to famous white models and influencers—began to resemble one another. They already had full lips, catlike eyes, high cheekbones, flawless skin; Botox and filler made their lips more plump, their eyes more catlike, their cheekbones more pronounced. They began to look like cyborgs, their faces contoured by the algorithm, perpetually glinting in the light of digital approval. Looks, particularly for women, have long been a capital asset, and smartphones systematized this neatly, providing users with digital tools to make themselves appear more beautiful in photos and videos, and monetized platforms to broadcast those edited faces, which, back in the real world, could then be retrofitted, via cosmetic intervention, to match. The cycle of digital and physical optimization produced a new ideal and new habits. The needle tip of a cosmetic syringe measures roughly a quarter of a millimetre: the Overton window of what happens to faces has widened in almost imperceptible increments.
Now we have arrived at a place where you can acquire Instagram Face at your local strip mall and the monied are seeking facelifts instead. Instagram Face can be achieved with little tweaks and outpatient procedures, although the results are often overtly artificial: when Kylie Jenner began getting filler, as a teen-ager, it was obvious that her lips had been injected. In contrast, the subtle results of the new facelifts conceal serious invasion—hours of slicing and manipulating fascia, muscle, and fat. A writer for New York magazine observed a deep-plane facelift and described the surgeon’s fingers sliding under his patient’s cheek: “Once all the necessary ligaments have been cut, the features on top move freely and in one piece, like a Halloween mask.”
This violence produces an outcome that is almost supernatural. Lindsay Lohan, a totemic millennial celebrity, reappeared in 2025 out of relative obscurity with the skin of a toddler, the brow of a person who had never felt worried—a face just like her old one, if it had been assembled by blushing angels at sunrise that very day. (Lohan has said that her look is the result of Botox and a healthy life style.) The seventy-year-old Kris Jenner, after her second facelift, looked astonishing—at least as young as her fortysomething daughters, who are themselves most famous for public renovation of their bodies and faces. People detailed a set of nine procedures—a deep-plane facelift, a deep neck lift, a brow lift, a lip lift, an earlobe reduction, and more—that were performed in one six-hour session on a sixty-five-year-old woman who, afterward, looked like a fifty-year-old teen-ager, a time of life that previously existed only in the playground of the mind.
Once, plastic surgery seemed garish, its own obvious signs a kind of cost that people paid for refusing to appear old. This blunt artificiality has not vanished completely; it is present, for instance, in Mar-a-Lago Face, a hyper-exaggerated look common among the women of the second Trump Administration, accompanied by a makeup style that signals a lack of interest in the natural. (Like the Administration, Mar-a-Lago Face locates power in the spectacle of dismissing reality altogether.) But the most expensive plastic surgery today is seamless, vaguely Gnostic, suggestive of complex secret knowledge. On social media, speculative analysts pick apart the work that people may have had done. Sometimes, celebrities disclose details in response—Kylie Jenner posted, “445 cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!!!!! silicone!!!” in reply to a TikTok about her breast implants. Vogue dubbed 2025 “the year of plastic surgery transparency.” Such candor is ostensibly laudatory, except that when celebrities disclose their plastic surgery it often feels like a speech act akin to a land acknowledgment: something typically said before another act of perpetuating the system identified as unjust. Vogue quoted a plastic surgeon who claimed that the new openness helps “to alleviate the unrealistic standards, which can cause self-confidence issues in young women,” and also helps make “plastic surgery feel more human and more accessible.” In other words, if celebrities disclose their plastic surgery, the rest of us will get more plastic surgery, and that’s good, because we have bad self-esteem from so many celebrities getting plastic surgery.
For now, facelifts before retirement age remain a niche habit of the unusually wealthy and vain. But that demographic is overrepresented in our visual culture—these are faces acquired for the purpose of profitable display, often on screens—and so the desire to alter one’s face spreads rapidly. A recent survey by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery projected a nineteen-per-cent increase in facial procedures. The authors also note that “one of the most meaningful shifts observed in this year’s survey isn’t which procedures patients are choosing, but when they’re choosing to do them.” Fifty-seven per cent of surgeons reported an increase in patients under thirty seeking cosmetic work. In 2024, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons tabulated almost fifty thousand Botox and filler procedures for patients under age nineteen.
If you Google “facelift in your thirties,” your top suggested search results might proclaim that “mini facelift surgery is ideal” for those at that age and that “a mini facelift at 35” can be “a considered and fulfilling choice.” The A.I.-generated squib at the top of my results told me that surgical facelifts are uncommon for thirtysomethings, and that early aging is “typically treated” with injectables and laser resurfacing. The range of visible argument is so limited. It’s not hard to understand why so many young people, living their lives in dialogue with what they see on their phones, have gone from buying into the idea of “proactive” Botox to believing that visible aging, in any form, at any age, should be treated as one would treat a disease.
Men still have it easy, where much of this is concerned, compared with women: crucially, men are frequently seen as becoming more beautiful as they age. But male-beauty standards have risen markedly during the past decade or so. In the age of social media, women have been able to assert new norms for men, both deep and superficial: for one, men should no longer commit sexual assault in the workplace, and, for another, it would be great if men were expected to be really hot, too. Women have gained the bravado and the platforms to speak publicly about men in the way that men have traditionally often spoken about women—with contempt.
For generations, women have learned at a young age how disgust and disrespect from men might best be avoided. Girls understand by elementary school that they should be sweet, sunny, and accommodating, and also, ideally, competent and interesting, and they should try to look pretty as well. Many men, now subjected to heterosexual contempt as a culturally significant collective force for the first time, have proved less equipped to process it within the bounds of a basic social contract. It has been overwhelming for them: the tweets, the merchandise (T-shirts and mugs with slogans like “Lord Give Me the Confidence of a Mediocre White Man”), and, most of all, the dating apps, which have allowed women of a certain inclination to treat men like commodities. Men are being scrutinized, by women, as though they were women: part by part, inch by inch. And some have responded by seizing the female obsession with looks, already rooted in misogyny, and rebranding it with maximum toxicity—in other words, by becoming looksmaxxers.
Looksmaxxing is a product of the men’s-rights movement, whose adherents previously gathered in fringe corners of the internet, where they solidified their reactionary community around the conviction that women do not deserve equal rights. Now much of their thinking has infiltrated nu-conservatism, and the rest of us have been forced to learn about Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular—the king of the looksmaxxing sphere. Peters, who is twenty, looks like a hot guy in a fraternity; his most remarkable traits are his obsessive commitment to achieving this beauty—he’s used peptides, supplements, meth, hammers—and the total lack of joy it seems to bring him. (“I have, like, no regard for, like, my happiness,” he said recently, on a podcast. “Like, that seems like a very immature idea.” A few months later, he collapsed at a club after a suspected overdose.) The table of contents on the message board looksmax.org enumerates every aspect of the male physique and life style that can be quantified and improved: more than a dozen sections (Eye Area, Craniology, Penis, etc.) broken into even more arcane subtopics (“Limbal Rings Influence Facial Attractiveness,” “The Falio of a Recessed Anterior Nasal Spine”). It goes without saying, or perhaps can be gleaned from the word “craniology,” that looksmaxxers view race, sexuality, and disability from roughly the same vantage point as that of an early-twentieth-century eugenicist.
In the crude days of my own millennial young adulthood, trying to look hotter was often something a person did in the interest of increasing one’s odds of having fun, exciting sex. This was an imperfect and alcohol-addled goal, “problematic” in its own ways—but an interest in the physical self, in your body and the bodies of others, was built in. This element of the calculus is seemingly vanishing; it is disembodied attention, mediated by the screen, that many young people, both men and women, seem to eroticize today. The looksmaxxers don’t actually seem interested in sex at all. Clavicular has said that he’s likely sterile from injecting high-dose testosterone as a teen-ager; he recently told the New York Times that knowing he can have sex with a woman is better for him than the act itself, which, he said, “is going to gain me nothing.”
The vibe, over all, is a kind of internet-invented nonsexuality: putative straightness is only the pretext for various broadcast demonstrations of dominance and submission, in perpetual psychological reference to other putatively straight men. Women are called “foids” in the looksmax lexicon, short for “female humanoids,” and they are sliced and diced, worshipped and denigrated, in the same coldly unfeeling way. One popular post on looksmax.org lists four versions of the “Top 30 Most Beautiful & Attractive Girls On the Planet (Combined Golden Ratio + Sexual Dimorphism & Appeal + Side Profile).” The post displays a bunch of famous models with Instagram Face; an author’s note clarifies that the lists only contain white women and “mixed-race women who are sufficiently white-passing.” It is important, to looksmaxxers, that these women seem to be naturally beautiful: the post imperiously rules out the many Instagram girls who have obviously altered their appearance. The community has invented a way to admire men for beauty work and to hate women for the same.
Of course, no one understands quite like a model, or maybe even like “any woman in general,”that beauty involves labor and performance. The comically tangled impulses here—the admiration of women who organize their lives around their looks, the disgust toward women who could be so superficial as to organize their lives around looks—can only develop in the absence of real intimacy, of regular exposure to women in their actual natural state. Such thoughts also make real intimacy increasingly impossible. The corporeal self—the face and the body that respond to the presence of another—retreats into the shiny carapace of the commodity, and wonders, from this hidden vantage point, if it will ever be known.
Last year, a thirty-six-year-old woman asked a Guardian advice columnist if it was wrong to judge her peers for getting facelifts, or even to judge herself for kind of wanting to get a facelift as a result. The columnist replied, supportively, “It is a little weird that beauty culture is convincing so many people to surgically saw off some of their facial skin and sew it back on tighter,” before adding, “Am I being judgmental? Yes! But judgment, like mimetic desire, is both human and unavoidable.” This exquisitely careful tone indicates the caution of a woman writing in the delicate space between the slightly ironized worship and heavily ironized contempt that now dominate the internet.
The current media environment is so grim that critique of anything has become radically attenuated. About two decades ago, the feminist website Jezebel, in one of its first posts, offered ten thousand dollars to anyone who could provide the original, unaltered version of a recent glossy-magazine cover photo. The images of women in magazines were “essentially female forgeries,” Jezebel argued, “what with all the computer-artistry involving airbrushing, contouring, and, sometimes, outright body-part swapping.” A few months later, Jezebel published unretouched photographs of the country singer Faith Hill, contrasting them with the image that ran on the cover of Redbook, in which Hill’s body had been thinned, her eyes tweaked, her ordinary lines and wrinkles erased.
After Jezebel came other websites—DoubleX, Rookie, The Hairpin—and a new wave of pop feminism began to infiltrate the mainstream. As an especially commercial form of feminism began to flourish, these sites debated its merits. “Is Kim Kardashian a Feminist Role Model?” a Jezebel headline asked, in 2013. “The short answer is: no,” the article began. “The long answer is: noooooooooooooooo.” That same year, Sheryl Sandberg published “Lean In,” which broadcast to millions of women the tantalizing idea that enriching yourself could be, in itself, a feminist act. Instagram, which was newly ubiquitous, offered a platform for women to “build their brands” through posting hot pictures of themselves. Altering your body and face, and obsessively displaying yourself on the internet, was, by many people, deemed feminist, too. In 2016, BuzzFeed published an article titled “Here’s Why Kim Kardashian Is Actually a Feminist Despite Saying She’s Not.” Donald Trump was elected President three months later.
The following years have entailed chauvinistic backlash and the disappearance of women’s media. The feminist sites have largely shut down, and physical media is vanishing; many of the magazines that Jezebel targeted—Redbook, InStyle, Marie Claire, Glamour, Self—have ceased printing or gone entirely defunct. (The thought of a website criticizing a magazine for Photoshop is almost unbearably quaint.) These were flawed but robust publications, staffed by professionals in dialogue with their audience about the state of women’s lives. They have given way to Instagram and TikTok, where the P.R. operations of celebrities and influencers can propagate the same aspirational imagery without dialogue or substance or investment in anything, really, other than algorithmic success.
One of the few things that lives on from the twenty-tens is the idea, honed over the course of a million Instagram captions, that essentially self-interested actions can be part of a progressive journey toward personal actualization—an idea that many women have attached to cosmetic surgery. “I never imagined that a neck-lift would be a transcendental, life-changing experience for me at the age of fifty-five,” Kris Jenner wrote in her memoir, in 2011, adding that the surgery had taught her about “love, friendship, loyalty, self-control, and the power of letting go.” This past year, a former on-camera personality in her fifties detailed her own facelift, on Substack, with admirable forthrightness, explaining that the procedure had changed her relationship with aging by making her “unapologetic.” She could now, she wrote, “redefine what aging gracefully means for me.” It meant empowerment, self-authorship, self-love, rebellion, autonomy, and evolution. She looks amazing.
Kylie Jenner—who began getting lip filler as a teen-ager, got her first boob job at nineteen, and helmed a billion-dollar business selling her look back to consumers—has said that she’d be “heartbroken” if her daughter chose to get plastic surgery as a teen-ager. But the march of these practices seems almost inevitable. According to one survey, there was a seventy-five-per-cent increase, from 2019 to 2022, in patients under the age of nineteen seeking Botox and similar injectables. Young women, in seeking out the same procedures and practices that older women purchase to look younger, are altering the look of youth itself. It may soon be normal for children to fear aging before they have come of age. A couple of years ago, a fourteen-year-old on TikTok went viral for detailing her anti-aging skin routine, which she had been practicing since the age of twelve.
Kids are growing up at a time when the beauty ideal is upheld, more and more, by completely artificial women—flawless physical specimens generated by A.I., placed in real-world scenarios, in images and video clips, to fool the horny and gullible and torment the insecure. (Recently, a bunch of such videos, purporting to capture spontaneous footage of insanely hot girls in the stands at baseball games, went viral.) Instagram demanded a certain sort of woman and then produced her, deranging broad swaths of the population in the process. A.I., which delivers an experience of absolute plasticity, and which builds on the premise that what is specifically human is inferior, for being imperfect, will do worse.
That so many of the most visible women on the internet resemble one another has already had swift consequences in the realm of visual A.I., which understands these qualities to be central to what a woman is. When reporters at the Washington Post asked three A.I. tools to generate images of a “normal woman,” in 2024, nearly every woman produced was thin and light-skinned. When prompted to show a “beautiful woman,” every woman was thin; just two per cent showed any visible sign of age; the vast majority had light- or medium-toned skin. A.I. image generators love to spit out hot women; on X, Elon Musk regularly shares short videos of beautiful fantasy girls generated by his own technology, Grok Imagine. This past November, he posted an unselfconsciously tragic prompt—“She smiles and says ‘I will always love you’ ”—and also the result: a doe-eyed brunette, freckled and glowing. In May, he posted a video of a freaky jellyfish princess blowing bubbles. Both of these artificial females had variations of Instagram Face, and both wore a look of unconditional devotion that is mainly captured, for public consumption, in pornography—which, of course, A.I. is trained on, and is now used to produce.
All of this is so completely unhinged that I occasionally feel the urge to reject modernity and embrace the religion of my childhood. But religion hardly keeps people from fucking with their faces: by one count, fourteen per cent of Mormons have had major cosmetic surgery; if you are in the Dallas area, you can get Botox from a faith-based medical spa where staff members “wholeheartedly embrace the philosophy that each person is fearfully and wonderfully made.” The beauty ideal has always been terribly evil; today’s version is a mark of docility under surveillance, and still, on many days, I wish to bear that mark. Can I save myself from this? “Beauty is finite, ugliness is infinite like God,” Umberto Eco wrote. Maybe I have to go back to St. Augustine: Deformitas Christi te format—the deformity of Christ forms you.
But even that line is always interpreted to lead back to beauty. He hung deformed upon the cross, but his deformity was our beauty. We can’t help wanting beauty, and I don’t think we should. There is a version of human beauty that exists alongside, underneath, and entirely separate from today’s warped ideal—a version that emerges simply from immanence, from the specificity and inalienability of each existence, including our own. This kind of beauty has nothing to do with perfection, which is distributed so arbitrarily and approximated so gracelessly. It does not induce unhappiness and compulsion but makes desire withdraw, as Hegel put it, because the beautiful object is revealed as “inherently free and infinite,” “an end in itself.” When we encounter something beautiful, Elaine Scarry writes, “we willingly cede our ground to the thing that stands before us.”
These ideas—of ceding ground, of viewing another as infinite rather than as a means to address our own unfreedom—are of no use to the industries and technologies that treat the face as a display commodity before all else. The face is no longer supposed to be something that holds intimate, idiosyncratic human information; it has been reconfigured as a consumer guide and a disciplinary manual. It would be ideal, maximally profitable, for the tech and beauty industries if the gaze that emerges from the face learns to seek nothing but its own reflection, and if the gaze that looks at the face learns to stop seeking anything strictly human at all. ♦