💉 the one about Botox (and also everything)

owning my authentic beauty, holding a vision for our collective future, and giving the middle finger to the beauty industry

The longer I take a break from the newsletter, the more coming back feels like walking into a churning ocean. I know as soon as I get out past the break, I’ll close my eyes, tip back, and float. Feel at home. Held. But fuck if it’s not a fight trying to get out there. From my unstable steps in the sand, all I feel is the waves driving me back.

So, consider this my belly flopping over the waves, my flapping freestyle, my graceless attempt to get back out there: face finally open to the sun, limbs spread and floating, tits up.

Let’s go.

I’m 12 years old reading a Cosmo on the carpeted flooring of my mom’s post-divorce apartment. There’s an article about how putting a piece of tape between your eyebrows while you’re watching TV or talking on the phone can prevent you from making “unnecessary” facial expressions—particularly the scowl, responsible for the vertical wrinkles known as 11 lines.

I discard this advice wholesale, writing it off as ridiculous. Still, it sticks like a foxtail and begins to burrow.

“What have you done to my face?” he says as I walk in, palms up and reaching out to frame my face like some kind of Italian uncle.

The nurse who led me back to the room gestures to the elevated table and I hop up, paper crunching underneath me.

The doctor spins on his chair to face me again. He’s wearing his aqua scrubs. Usual white coat. One of his shitty underwater photographs hangs behind his head, blown up to take up the whole wall. This one’s of a blurry, darkly lit squid partially hidden by a rock.

“I give you this beautiful face and you go and get a nose piercing?”

I’m 19. Nine months ago, I received maxillofacial surgery, a gory 7-hour procedure that entailed breaking and resetting both my jaws to correct an underbite.

The surgery also included a couple cosmetic “fixes” he’d pushed for over the 18 months leading up: shortening my chin and adding cheek implants. The overall effect was teeth that finally fit together and a more “balanced” face. I still looked like me, but all fixed up. The surgery was framed as a correction, a restoration of how I should’ve looked had something not gone wrong.

Despite being successfully fixed, I had trouble adjusting.

What followed was nearly a decade of this scene replaying in my head, of my surgeon asking me, What have you done to my face?

When people called me beautiful, I didn’t always fight the urge to respond, “Thank you, I had a very good surgeon.”

When I had a new crush I’d find some excuse to mention my surgery, as if revealing a dark secret: What you’re looking at isn’t actually my face.

When family or friends—anyone who knew how I looked before—saw me post-surgery, they’d remark on how skilled my surgeon was. “He did such a good job, you can’t even tell! It looks so natural!” On one hand, I felt proud. I had an amazing surgeon, I’m so lucky! Look at how beautiful he made me. On the other, I felt increasingly detached. What does it even mean to look beautiful if my beauty doesn’t feel like… mine?

“I got sick of my husband being able to tell every single time I’m mad at him. I am still mad at him, but now he can’t tell as easily.”

Fast-forward eleven years. I just turned 30, I don’t have a husband, I haven’t gotten Botox, and I don’t even know how we got on this subject, but I quickly nod my understanding. The scowl, at least, I get. I, too, wear my feelings all over my face; my brows knit at every mildly troubling thought.

“Besides,” she continues, “sometimes it’s really not about the principle.”

I’m on a zoom with a well-known poet for private writing classes. Like most women who find themselves under the tutelage of beautiful, opinionated, and older mentors, I keep her words like a gift.

Sometimes it’s really not about the principle.

Today I’m 35, I still haven’t gotten Botox or filler, and despite my best attempts I don’t know how to thread these scenes together, to deliver a succinct, rallying cry. All I know is that they’re related, and it feels important for me to hold them here.

I also know, and want you to know, that this is not my attempt to languish on an anti-Botox hill. I am a conventionally pretty, blonde, blue-eyed, 35-year-old white woman for fucks sake. I’m aware how rich it would be for someone like me to urge everyone to embrace their natural beauty. I am also not aligned with the “fake is ugly/natural is beautiful” people. I do many things to change the natural state of my body, including:

• Highlighting my hair

• Wearing makeup

• Using retinol

• Getting manicures

• Getting facials

Further, to say that I will never get filler or Botox feels naive—I am aware that at any point in my aging process I could very well say enough is enough; I’m ready to throw away my personal principles, my facial dysmorphia, and my general concerns about us all optimizing our beauty to the extent that our feelings are unreadable and our features all look the same.

But until that day comes, I am stuck holding something along with my stories, and it feels heavy: the fucking principle.

Not to out myself as someone you don’t want to get stuck talking to at a party, but, to me, the decision to receive cosmetic injectables is very much about the principle. It’s about capitalism and the patriarchy and euro-centrism and ethnic fetishization and too-high beauty standards and systemic racism and policing each other and distracting ourselves from our own mortality.

Trust me, I know how this sounds. I know I sound like an interminable white feminist who takes everything too seriously. I can hear people already typing comments just like my poetry instructor’s, telling me “Erin, it’s not that deep. Stop overthinking it.”

But I’m worried it is that deep. I’m worried we’re all massively underthinking it.

I’m not here to go blaming individuals for the evils and impacts of a multi-billion dollar global beauty industry. That gets us nowhere fast.

Still, I can’t help but feel that completely throwing our hands up and giving into the pressures to maintain, balance, tighten, sculpt, fill, and generally participate in “anti-aging” is akin to refusing to recycle just because companies are at fault for the gross majority of pollution. It may be futile to blame each other, but it doesn’t mean we should give up on all resistance.

Resistance. Maybe that’s what I’m after—maybe that’s the elusive principle I’m dragging around with me. I want us to resist.

I want to see huge statuesque noses and thin lips and dark circles and crows feet and laugh lines and scowl lines. I want to see turkey necks and hooded eyes and coily hair and round cheeks and soft jawlines. I want little girls to look at us and feel safe to age. I want us to all be a little bit ugly in our own unique ways. I want us to resist external beauty standards so that we can define and meet our own internal beauty standards that reach beyond our aging faces, our crooked noses, our sagging skin.

I want all this and in another few years I’ll want to see whatever features don’t fit the latest trend. I want all this and I know there are real, lived consequences that keep people from wanting it for themselves. I want all this and I know we don’t all have the privilege of resisting. I want all this and I know we have a long fucking way to go.

I want all this and I know my wanting must first be held in me, for me, so that I might become a manifestation of my wanting.

I always called the psychic disconnection from my post-surgery face “facial dysmorphia,” but these days I am less sure. All those years of apologetically admitting that my face had been surgically changed, all those years of wondering what looking like myself meant— they were likely not an inability to see my face as it existed in reality, but an inability to see my face as mine anymore… as an authentic part of me.

Here, I think, is where I can get clear on something important. I think one of my purposes in life is to radically accept, embrace, and give a voice to my most authentic, liberated self. Lofty, I know.

But it feels like a thread. It feels like a way of grounding into a truth I haven’t known how to articulate, which is that cosmetic procedures for the purposes of beauty or anti-aging currently feel at odds with my higher purpose.

So that’s where I am now: holding both the effort to define and own my authentic beauty after surgery left me feeling detached from it, along with the desire for collective resistance of our booming, predatory beauty industry.

This is the beginning. I know my thoughts and feelings on this topic will keep evolving. Still, it feels unlikely I’ll change my mind completely. Even that 12-year-old reading Cosmo knew my scowl was important, eleven lines be damned, and I don’t plan on letting anyone tell her otherwise… at least not any time soon.

CRIERS TO THE COMMENTS 👇🏻

first, omg hi guys!! my month-long break from writing the newsletter is officially over, and i’m so happy to be BACK, BABY. next week, expect a crying/numbing/sparking that will spark you right up.

in the meantime, i’d love your thoughts on the topics i’ve attempted to explore above:

in what ways are you interested in resisting/pushing back against the beauty industry? in what ways are you like, meh, whatever, it’s not that deep?

🖤 liking, sharing, or commenting on this post helps me reach more criers. thank you for these small but crucial acts of support.