Getting Real About Injectables
My honest thoughts about Botox, filler and other such tweakments – plus some words of advice.
I had some hesitations about writing this because any mention of injectables tends to provoke very strong reactions. I’m also very aware that my take on the topic is less black-and-white than internet discourse usually allows for, but I’m going to dive in any way. For the past few years, I’ve been writing about beauty, wellness and grooming for magazines and that’s involved diving into the world of aesthetic ‘tweakments’. I’ve dabbled in a couple and been happy with the results, but I also find so much of modern beauty culture, especially around cosmetic work, to be jarring. Ultimately I decided to lay out my thoughts in this newsletter because I have a lot of them – as well as a decent level of knowledge on the subject.
One of my main frustrations with the current conversation around injectables is that it’s often so reductive. Recently on Substack, I read a comment by a writer about how she’d never have ‘what are repulsively called tweakments’. On TikTok, my feed serves me creators who seem to suggest anyone who gets cosmetic work isn’t capable of critical thinking, and others who proclaim that the girls really need to stop getting filler now because it looks terrible. You’re either a foot-soldier of the patriarchy or a proper feminist. You’re either natural and ‘ageing gracefully’ or you’re fake.
What genuinely confuses me, though, is why any beauty treatment administered via a needle elicits a particular moral outrage, no matter its intended purpose. Does trying to minimise signs of aging with Botox threaten your feminist credentials more than doing so with a retinol serum or hair dye? Do the acts of getting filler because you want to achieve pouty Kylie Jenner lips and getting filler so you look less tired belong on the same axis of evil? I’m not so sure.
My stance on cosmetic interventions in general leans fairly liberal, especially for someone who doesn’t subscribe to the wishy-washy notion that feminism is merely about women doing whatever they want. That’s mostly because I’m especially cognisant of just how powerful beauty can be, thanks to a rather complex personal journey with it. I think you’re allowed to care about how you look, and you’re allowed to want to look better. I think our appearance has a huge impact on our confidence, and I think staunch critics of beauty work tend to ignore our innate liking for good-looking faces for the sake of their arguments. All that said, I find the sort of beauty standards that are proliferated by social media, porn and reality TV in particular to be dystopian. The fact that so many young men now desire a look that is completely unachievable without any medical intervention – and are oftentimes unaware of that – is especially depressing to me.
I won’t pretend that my personal liking for a taut forehead and a ‘snatched’ jawline isn’t a lesser symptom of those same forces, or that the necessity of being beautiful as a woman hasn’t been imposed on me for 30 years, implicitly or otherwise. I have enormous respect for the women who completely refuse to participate in any of it, but I also think it’s wilfully ignorant to deny that the social benefit for those who do can be immense. Life-changing, even.
‘In my mind, injectables become icky when women start to morph into this unrecognisable, un-human version of themselves; a flattened, Kardashified ideal of beauty that I believe to be inherently misogynistic, not to mention boring’
Perhaps it’s a much-too-simple way of looking at it but I’ve tended to view injectables as an effective route to treating aesthetic concerns. Take, for example, the under-eyes, my personal bug-bear. If you don’t like that you always look knackered, you could buy a £99 eye cream that promises to nix your bags and brighten your dark circles but you’ll probably just have wasted £99. What can actually help is a course of polynucleotides (and, in more ‘severe’ cases, I’m sorry to say, surgery). I once had a guy friend discreetly ask me how to treat his ‘crow’s feet’ which were bothering him. I told him the second-best option would be a gentle retinol formulated for the eye area and an LED mask, but that neither of those even come close to Botox.
How exactly do you distinguish between a relatively harmless desire to look and feel better and an unrealistic, unhealthy pursuit of physical perfection? (It’s surprisingly easy to slip from one to the other when you start getting compliments about ‘looking well’, or a couple mls of Juvederm in your lips suddenly make you notice your chin could use just a teeny bit of projection...) Where I’ve decided to draw that fuzzy line is in the end goal. In my mind, injectables become icky when women start to morph into this uncanny, unrecognisable, un-human version of themselves; a flattened, Kardashified ideal of beauty that I believe to be inherently misogynistic, not to mention painfully boring. I also have a strong belief that faces should move, and I find something about women not being able to show expression from too much Botox particularly creepy.
Almost no one, doctors included, has ever guessed that I’ve had anything done – which I say not to one-up the people who don’t have ‘good work’ but to prove that it is possible to do this stuff without fully succumbing to that ideal. I like that I look like myself, but a bit more rested and glowy and harmonious. If ever a friend clocks that I’ve done something or my brutally honest little sister tells me to cool off, then I know I’ve gone too far. It’s an arbitrary measure, but I’m morally content existing in that space.
Ultimately, how you feel about how you look and what you want to do about it is highly personal and, for many people, sensitive. I think it’s especially crappy to shame individuals for dealing with their insecurities in whichever way they choose when you’re not the one who has to live with them. If you are someone who has thought about getting any ‘tweakments’, then I’m happy to help in you being informed in your decision, and beyond the paywall you’ll find my unfiltered, rather extensive advice as someone who’s regularly in contact with the best of the best in this field. If, however, after my ramblings above, you still think it’s all rather vain at best and morally objectionable at worst, then more power to you. You probably have a lot more money in the bank than me.