Whenever I can, I try to deprogram my daughters from the overwhelming cultural imperative to look conventionally hot forever. Sometimes this involves showing my eldest daughter videos of women older than me who I admire. This is my way of pushing back against the idea that we should do everything in our power to look younger.
A recent standout of the genre is a TikTok I found of Shirley Manson, the lead singer of the band Garbage, talking about being in her 50s. “I understand why women are scared to admit what age they are, but my feeling is that will never change until women change it,” she says, with her trademark blazing red hair pulled into a high, off-center ponytail, revealing a shaved undercut.
My older daughter, who is in middle school, sat silently through the two-minute video. I thought she was deeply and mindfully considering Manson’s message, until she turned to me when it was over and said: “I hate her eye shadow.”
Honestly, I get it. My older girl has always been able to sniff out a Very Important Maternal Lecture from 100 paces away, and because she’s inherited her mother’s innate skepticism, she rejects any of my overt attempts to indoctrinate her. I remember being in the middle school Thunderdome in the 1990s. If my mother had tried to talk to me then about beauty by showing me Joni Mitchell or whoever I would have laughed her off the face of the planet. Her entreaties would have been so irrelevant to my daily experience among tween insult comics — I was dishing it out as well as taking it, and an earnest call to hippie values would have been ridiculous to me.
Normal preadolescent dismissal won’t deter me, because the pressure to look good in a hyper-conventional way is only getting worse and feels more overwhelming than it did when I was growing up. Women’s magazines don’t even seem to bother being mildly critical of plastic surgery or injections anymore, the wonky logic being that it’s anti-woman to be judgmental of anything a woman does. A recent article in The Cut about the “best” age to inject your face with the same toxin that causes botulism quotes a dermatologist who says, “I’m conservative by nature, so for Botox, I usually say late twenties at the earliest.”
And the sad thing is that dermatologist is being conservative. In The Atlantic in September, Yasmin Tayag explained that “baby Botox” really is a thing: “The number of Americans ages 19 and under who got injections of Botox or similar products rose 75 percent from 2019 and 2022 — and then rose again in 2023.” Tayag then quotes another dermatologist who says, “There’s no age that’s too early,” before clarifying that it wouldn’t be appropriate to treat a teenager. Though as she also points out, when England banned fillers for the under-18 set, they simply traveled to Wales for treatment.
My other tactic is full transparency and media literacy. I told my older daughter about how I got Botox once, right before I turned 40, and didn’t like the results — it destroyed my asymmetrical eyebrows, was shockingly expensive, and didn’t even make me look that much younger. I explained to her why I got it, too: I spent so much time looking at my face during video meetings in the depths of Covid and was unhappy with what I saw. I was about to do a lot of press for my new book on TV and social media, and it was easier to fix my doldrums cosmetically than it was to work on my bad feelings.
I also point out cosmetic surgery on models and actresses when it’s obvious; as a celebrity once told me, few people in Hollywood have their original noses or teeth. I don’t tell my daughter these things in a cruel or mocking way, but in order to show that nobody just looks like that without tens of thousands of dollars of continuous upkeep.
As I get further and further away from my own dalliance with Botox, I am more committed to resisting cosmetic intervention beyond a daily application of S.P.F. Even though my daughter rejects my carefully curated videos of ’90s alt-rock stars, I know that she is a close observer of my behavior and my hypocrisies. The best thing I can do for her — and for her little sister, when she becomes aware of beauty standards — is to redefine them in our house.
I can choose to admire the new angularity of my face, rather than long for an artificially smooth and unweathered exterior. I can enjoy dressing in ways that I find chic regardless of whether they are currently in fashion. I can find a way to stop criticizing, if only silently, my eye bags — because I know the only fixes for that particular genetic legacy are plastic surgery or death.
I’m not suggesting that it’s easy. Or that women aren’t punished in many, many ways for refusing to adhere to beauty standards. But I’m tempted to go full crone in 2025, and the idea delights me. At the very least, I hope it prevents my girls from thinking they need Botox before they’re old enough to vote.
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