We All Have Skin In The Game

If you’re a young woman in this world of ours, you’ve recently popped onto Instagram, whether for a mindless scroll or some appointment sleuthing. And you’ve been greeted — blasted! — with one particular genre of visual stimuli, its ubiquity widespread beyond escape: Call it plastic surgery “content” or vanity porn — what’s the difference?

It’s the before-and-after comparisons, the pre-op confessionals, the post-op debriefs, the self-diagnosis reels, the unsolicited recommendations, the 30-year-old models who’re getting their own facial transformations gratis so long as they’ll bring their tens (or hundreds) of thousands of followers along for the ride. You’re served the good, the deliciously bad, and the can’t-look-away ugly. Then you swipe over to TikTok, where the same vanity-as-status symbol ecosystem has mushroomed into a symphonic chorus of opining and cha-chinging: what did she have done, who did it, is it any good, can I get one too? It’s useful, it’s almost whimsical. It’s play, right? It’s addictive.

Beauty, both as a concept and an industry, has morphed into a checklist of femmebot upgrades and hardware mods, seemingly overnight. I’ve spent the past decade in the belly of the beast — as a writer and editor covering beauty everywhere from xoVain to The New York Times to my own podcast — and there’s no denying it: We’ve entered a new dimension of meta-aesthetics.

For millennia, the quest to make oneself more beautiful, more youthful, through any means more invasive than the season’s newest lipstick shade, was a solitary pursuit — one cloaked in hush-hush doctor’s appointments and precision-timed recovery periods. If a cavewoman went to “lunch” and returned to her tribe with her T-zone looking raw as a freshly skinned rabbit, presumably none of her Neanderthal sisters would dare inquire. That dynamic followed for about 400,000 years. Vanity has been intertwined with shame even before the Bible labeled it a sin; more recently — though perhaps just as urgently — it’s been considered a different kind of offense: tacky.

“I don’t ever remember a time that everybody has to have this enhanced beauty standard to walk the halls of power.  It’s definitely part of the culture.”

Like so many cultural shifts, this one happened slowly, and then all at once. When Instagram emerged as the dominant channel for looking at pretty people 24/7, the perpetual reflection of our digital mirrors was a salad bowl of experimental beauty. (Remember all the wacky things people did to their eyebrows in the early days?) And then once “no-makeup makeup” got a social media–age industrial refresh, care of Glossier, the focus narrowed, and modern beauty ideals quickly funneled into meta-aesthetic territory. By the end of the 2010s, makeup itself wasn’t good enough if the goal was to look like you weren’t wearing makeup. So the skin-care sector happily stepped in, booming with K-beauty’s 10-step routines, dermatologists-turned-influencers launching their own skin-care brands, and a med-washed marketing approach that made consumers feel like chemists. And then, like clockwork, the collective realized that there is a limit to what skin care can even achieve. Beauty isn’t really skin-deep; for the determined, there are more subdermal layers to explore.

Around five years ago, the tectonic plates of the way we talk about beauty began to vibrate. Injectables, lasers, needles, and all manner of toxes reached what, at the time, felt like a fever pitch, a direct result of social media saturation and Zoom-reflection fatigue. Thanks to my chosen vocation, in combination with my God-given hater’s temperament, I have a thick skin that keeps me from withering under the gaze of the licensed pro. When, for example, an aesthetician told me (unsolicited) that my nasolabial folds contribute to an appearance of jowling? I could take it. That said jowling highlighted the asymmetry of my lips? OK, if you say so. That my upper lip disappeared when I smiled — a simple matter of architecture that could easily be buttressed with a touch of neurotoxin? Sure, why not, I said. That even a couple of Ultherapy (or perhaps Emface) sessions could lift my cheekbones and brows to expand my eyelid space and “brighten up” my face overall? My feelings: mostly intact.

Still, I wondered — as you likely did, too: Was this unyielding push not for mere improvement, but painstaking perfection, becoming the new normal? The tweens have begun using anti-aging serums, and early 20-somethings have subscribed to preventative-Botox packages before their prefrontal cortexes are fully formed. Beauty culture has become an all-consuming lifestyle for so many of us that the question has shifted from “Am I beautiful?” to “Could I be more perfect-er?”

Whether we surrender to aging “gracefully,” or resort to medical intervention to resist the effects of gravity and calendar pages past, our original forms are always going to be changing.

This didn’t actually happen overnight, even if it feels that way. But this year, the movement crescendoed as a new level of our collective vanity consciousness was unlocked by our culture-shifters-in-chief, the Kardashian-Jenners — the family onto whom just about every beauty trend of the past dozen years could be mapped — in lockstep with their reality show brethren in and near the White House. Kris Jenner’s “iconic” facelift turned everyone into an aesthetic authority, and Kylie Jenner’s viral breast implant recipe has ushered in a global town hall about plastic surgery transparency. (Shall we all chant it in unison? “445 cc, moderate profile, half under the muscle!! Silicone!! Garth Fisher!!”) The family has always enjoyed speculation around the bodywork they’ve not-so-covertly undergone, and now that they’re opening up about the inputs, it seems that many of the other four billion of us women in the Western world are following suit. That includes Hollywood everywoman-slash-megastar Jennifer Lawrence, who is seizing this unprecedented moment by recently telling The New Yorker that she had plans to get a boob job later this month.

Not only are we all getting work done, we are talking about getting work done — and the work other people are getting done. Plastic surgeons are taking to TikTok to speculate about the procedures celebs have undergone, racking up millions of views. (The hashtag #plasticsurgeonsoftiktok has about 36.6K posts, and #plasticsurgery has about 763.7K.) We’re poring over before-and-after photos on the internet and tuning in to amateur sleuths who analyze celebrity faces.

We have cutesy nicknames (if you don’t know what “bunny lines” are, you’ll probably never guess from the name itself) for all our “problem areas” and sleek, detached labels for the ways we smooth, fill, and otherwise delete them. We’ve developed aesthetic genres to describe the uniform appearance of certain socioeconomic cliques: Instagram Face, Ozempic Face, Mar-a-Lago Face. “ It’s this bizarre duality that people want you to know that they’ve got something done because there is this kind of universalized standard. When I look at the current administration, some of the people, male and female, definitely look like they’ve had stuff done,” Dr. Steven Williams, a board-certified plastic surgeon and former president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons told me. “ I’m an old man, and I don’t ever remember a time that everybody has to have this enhanced beauty standard to walk the halls of power.  It’s definitely part of the culture, and it’s definitely part of the power structure, which is just a fascinating cultural turn.”

Now that the prevailing aesthetic is perfection, the uncanny valley we find ourselves in may as well become home ominous home.

In other words, the beauty matrix has reached peak integration. In 2024, there were close to 1.6 million plastic surgeries performed, plus more than 28.5 million minimally invasive procedures. While the exact forecast is as easy or difficult to predict as the Kardashians themselves, the plastic surgery market is projected to be worth nearly $67 billion in 2026, up from $50.67 billion in 2018. The shift is as seismic as its implications for our psyches and our bank accounts. Until recently, beauty trends came and went, with certain features’ stock rising and falling with hemlines. Now that the prevailing aesthetic is perfection — the ceiling of which continuously rises with emerging technological innovations, plus the inundation of visual references ad infinitum (many of which, thanks to AI, we can’t even tell are “real” anymore) — the uncanny valley we find ourselves in may as well become home ominous home. The pursuit of a technically gorgeous face has become a lifestyle, one that comes with some measure of “democratization” — if you can even use that word for a set of procedures that can land in the ballpark of $300,000. With the right tools, enough effort, and capital to spare, anybody can be carved into their ideal proportions. No skin is too thick for a keratome-blade scalpel. (Does this mean that none of us are ugly, we’re just poor?)

Therapist Jessica Steinman of No Matter What Recovery tells me the key to a healthy relationship with one’s own beauty is “not to compare and despair.” The phenomenon of endless scrolling, hearting, liking, and commenting creates addictive pathways in our brains, she says, that lead us further from reality. “We’re escaping into fantasy, so when we are faced with reality, what we’re seeing in the mirror, how clothes really fit, that a makeup color might look different on us than it does on Kim Kardashian, we start feeling less than.” Of course, there is another option within democracy: to opt out altogether. And let everyone get hot without you? Where’s the fun in that?

Our distaste for body modification and its stigma of fraudulence stands no match for the status and privilege bestowed upon the beautiful.

In my Carrie Bradshaw–style inner monologue, I can’t help but wonder about the parallels between the bodies we were born with and the ship of Theseus’ philosophical thought experiment: If all the planks of Theseus’ ship are replaced, is it still the original ship? When we reach a time where we can gradually replace all of our parts by choice, will we still be our original selves? At the rate of our beauty culture’s evolution, it’s hard to fathom a truly finished product, and that’s the point: Our bodies are always changing with time. Whether we surrender to aging “gracefully” or resort to medical intervention to resist the effects of gravity and calendar pages past, our original forms are always going to be changing — something we can’t help but not remember until we’ve actually arrived.

All of which is why the editors at Bustle are bringing you the Vanity Project, a 17-part investigation into our collective relationship with our visages and ourselves, including an unflinching portrait of one of New York’s most sought-after plastic surgeons and a summit of doctors answering your burning questions; a conversation with teens about the future of their faces; and a 100-reader survey in which you tell us about your hopes, dreams, and, yes, fears about the fast-and-furious beauty landscape.

We as a society could certainly despair at the direction a “new normal” appears to be taking. But I don’t see beauty — as a concept, an industry, or a pastime — plateauing anytime soon. “Normal” is quickly becoming irrelevant as optimization becomes queen. Our distaste for body modification and its stigma of fraudulence stands no match for the status and privilege bestowed upon the beautiful. Now that we’ve accepted vanity as a pillar of identity, faking it is a viable avenue to making it. In “Doll Parts,” Courtney Love sings, “I fake it so real I am beyond fake.” I’m reminded of the invention of Beyond Meat and its promises of indistinguishability from real animal flesh. Turns out, we humans are very open to adopting substitutes for the real thing if they satisfy our experiences. And as we’re seeing, Beyond Beauty is thriving.