Dear Ugly One,
I am 36 years old and do not need or want plastic surgery. But recently made I want plastic surgery. Is it strange that plastic surgery has become common among women my age, or am I being too critical?
I don’t want this, so why do I want this? Are there any risks or side effects that would bring me to my senses and make me do the following? ~ no Will there be a facelift in the future? I feel like I’m going crazy.
– Might we need a lobotomy instead?
There is no need for a lobotomy. But that’s because beauty culture has already lobotomized us all by basically “reducing the complexity of our psychic lives.” (At least this is how psychiatrist Maurice Partridge described the effects of barbaric brain surgery.)
Do you feel “self-conscious”? Skip the internal work and get plastic surgery! Are you dealing with “inappropriateness” in your office? Above all, don’t question your labor priorities. Get plastic surgery! Are you having trouble “recognizing” yourself as you get older? Forget about calculating your mortality – get plastic surgery! Are you “dissatisfied” with how you see your FaceTime calls? Why suffer from appearance anxiety when you can get plastic surgery?
According to many recent articles about the growing popularity of this elective cosmetic surgery, tight skin is the answer to all of life’s mental ailments.
This illusion is reflected in the numbers. The number of cosmetic surgeries performed in the United States has increased an impressive (or depressing?) 17% since the pandemic began. During the same period, searches for ‘facelift’ on Google doubled. “[Plastic surgery] “Patients are now 10 years younger than they were before the pandemic,” Dr. Robert Schwarz, a New York-based plastic surgeon, said in a press release. “Instead of their mid-40s, they are approaching their mid-30s.”
Recently, many celebrities and influencers, including Kris Jenner (70), Kat Sadler (51), and Vanessa Giuliani (36), have publicly confirmed their lifts. On her new album, Lily Allen, 40, sings, “I’m so drawn to it, I feel so old/I booked a facelift.” “Trust me,” actress Jennifer Lawrence, 35, told The New Yorker. [get one]!” The varicosectomy craze has even reached “regular” people: real estate agents, gym-goers, young women setting up payment plans with their plastic surgeons.
No wonder you want it! This is how desire works.
The beauty industry’s favorite marketing line, “Do it for you!” – True desires do not spring from the deepest recesses of a person’s soul. Rather, as philosopher René Girard argued in his 1961 theory of “mimetic desire,” all human desires are derivative. We want what we want: labubu, barrel jeans, aging faces. Because other people want it.
Mimesis is “to psychology what gravity is to physics,” wrote Girard scholar James Alison in his 1998 book The Joy of Being Wrong: powerful, inevitable, and universal.
As technology changes, so does the look we want, especially when it comes to beauty. possible To look like. New facelift innovations – less invasive techniques, more “natural” results, finer scars, faster recovery times, buy now, pay later – lower the barrier to entry. Access has been democratized. Demand soars.
The “cosmetics transparency” movement is also playing a role in this. Celebrities who publicly share their procedures help lift the stigma around cosmetic work and give people a blueprint for A-list beauty. “Increasing openness to plastic surgery is one of the reasons younger patients are seeking out these procedures,” New York-based plastic surgeon Dr. Ari Hoschander said in a press release.
All of this contributes to what I call aesthetic inflation: the normalization of increasingly extreme cosmetic interventions over time.
To summarize: You’re right. you is You are “made to want” a facelift.
Personally, I think the biggest reason you shouldn’t get a facelift is because – as you put it – you don’t want one. But there are plenty of other reasons to opt out!
More of Jessica DeFino’s work:
In addition to cosmetically “wrong” results, complications from facial plastic surgery can include hematomas, infections, nerve damage, hair loss, scarring, deep vein thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, and in extremely rare cases, death (the ultimate anti-aging agent!). Moreover, according to a 2022 paper in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, “adverse psychological reactions to facial plastic surgery have been shown to occur in approximately 50% of patients, with depression and anxiety being the most common.”
The cost of the procedure can range from $8,500 to $200,000. That’s enough to pay for a potential down payment on a house, a car, a vacation, several years of psychoanalysis, or a sizable donation to the National Center for the Restructuring of Aging.
Plastic surgery also perpetuates ageism, classism, and all-around oppressive beauty norms. (Of course, the facelift motivation Crucially, however, they do little to alleviate the material disadvantages suffered by individuals as a result of these systems and do nothing to challenge these systems. do The challenge of limiting gender ideologies.) And political philosopher Dr. Clare Chambers says, “Individual acts of resistance can actually matter because individual acts of compliance can reinforce these norms.”
Last but not least: it is It’s a little strange that beauty culture convinces so many people to surgically cut off part of their facial skin and sew it back on.
Am I judging? yes! But judgment, like imitative desire, is human and inevitable. We judge. We can’t help it. (beauty itself It is a judgment; See also: Kant’s 1790 Treatise on Beauty, literally titled ‘Critique of Judgment’.)
So if we must judge – and we must! – It’s better to think it’s weird to get plastic surgery at 36 than to think it’s weird to start getting older.
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