I’m a writer who covers fashion and beauty. That doesn’t mean that my job is to be beautiful or to look young. But reporting on that world sometimes feels a little masochistic.
I spend a lot more time than most with the world’s most beautiful people — Gwyneth Paltrow, Zendaya, Anne Hathaway, Christie Brinkley. I’ve learned, from them, that feeling pretty is a difficult thing to preserve; being professionally pretty is even harder to maintain. Lately seemingly everyone famous has a new face, or, at least, a face that is what I would generously call refreshed. When I see Demi Moore, at the age of 63, looking far younger than me at 48, I wonder if I should be figuring out a way to keep up.
I have author photos from the past 18 years of my life: five photos for five books, ranging from age 29 to 47. I can see the changes in style of clothes and hair length and fluctuations in weight, but mostly I see my changing face. The real mind game of aging is that one day the way you look on the outside will not correspond to your own memory of yourself. Where once I saw deep-set eyes and sharp cheekbones, now I see a lady who vaguely resembles me (or in certain light, perhaps my mother), with jowls, newly hooded lids and eye bags.
I resent knowing what a deep-plane face-lift is, but I can’t stop poring over photos of the women I suspect have gotten one. Neither can my friends, who love to dissect celebrity faces with me in group texts. Who did that work? How much did it cost? What exactly was tucked or injected or stretched?
The other night, plagued with insomnia, I watched a TikTok about a woman seeing a doctor in Michigan for a $12,000 cocktail of procedures she got in the time it took to order and eat lunch. I truly wondered if I should book one myself. When a face-lift from a Park Avenue doctor who works on celebrities can cost $100,000 or $200,000, it’s easy to bamboozle myself into thinking $12,000 is a good deal.
Some celebrities are public about their work. (Who could miss Kris Jenner’s joking claim that after a face-lift that left her looking younger than her daughters, the only real part of her face left was her nose?) But even they are rarely transparent about the pain and cost involved. I live close to several renowned cosmetic surgeons’ offices and sometimes see patients coming for post-op check-ins, faces wrapped in bandages, a loved one gripping an elbow to guide them. Even after enduring all that pain, are they truly any happier?
Celebrities have, of course, been changing their faces since the days of Old Hollywood, but this past year, surgery crossed the Rubicon. Youth is no longer the sole aesthetic goal for those who change their faces. Of course, plastic surgery is often sold as a way of looking 10, 15, 20 years younger. But many famous people who are getting work done do not necessarily look like a younger version of themselves anymore; they simply look expensive. “Uncanny” is an overused word these days but it’s a good way of describing the inhuman artifice of the prevailing plastic surgery trends, which basically amounts to unabashedly announcing that you have had work done — puffed cheeks, swollen lips, a shiny, waxy forehead that doesn’t move.
We are now at the point where forgoing cosmetic procedures is almost remarkable. At least for celebrities. The expectation for famous people, especially women, is that they look to be trying to be beautiful and young — and spending money to do it. If their effort isn’t visible, they don’t have a business.
This year, I published a biography of the actress and singer Jane Birkin, who decided to just let herself age in public. By the end of her life, she looked like someone who smoked, tanned and enjoyed life, except for perhaps an occasional injection of something in the Botox family for her forehead wrinkles.
Many interpret her resistance as an almost anticapitalist way of rebelling against gender norms. She used to say publicly that the best face-lift was smiling. But privately she would ask friends if she should get her eyes done, or get a lift to treat sagging in the lower half of the face. “I have flat lips like Dad’s,” she complained to her daughter. “A doctor told me yesterday your lips will completely disappear unless you do something about it.” (Even so, she never did.)
Readers often ask me about Ms. Birkin’s aging because they are stuck in a culture that keeps raising the bar on beauty standards and targeted by an industry that wants them to buy their way to aesthetic perfection. The industry around all of this is huge and keeps growing, the cost of minimally invasive cosmetic procedures is low enough that they are accessible to more than just the ultrarich. And for those who don’t have the cash for a tweak, many doctors offer payment plans or financing. Beauty standards, like the filler people are injecting into their faces, rapidly balloon until staying beautiful is something of a job.
The fact that the most wealthy and famous among us are expected to buy a new face to stay bankable doesn’t mean that the rest of us have to — or even should. After all, even if I were to get plastic surgery to alleviate visible aging, would I even see myself? If I don’t recognize my current face most of the time, it’s still me, authentically growing older. And I know somewhere inside me still is the teenager who wanted to resist the patriarchy, who thought any pressure for women to conform to societal norms was something to protest.
The truth, and maybe the more difficult thing to accept than aging, is that beauty should not be the currency women have to use to make our way through the world. I’m not going to start now.
Marisa Meltzer is a senior staff writer at Vanity Fair and the author of “It Girl: The Life and Legacy of Jane Birkin.”
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