Your Body Is A (Candidate For) Temple (Filler)
Hello and welcome to another edition of THE DON’T BUY LIST! The other week, while scrolling Instagram, I came across this promo for temple filler:
And then, during research for my latest article on the “facial harmony” craze, a plastic surgeon gave me the following quote: “As we age, temporal hollowing (the loss of volume in the temples) can occur, and fillers can help restore volume in this area, enhancing the overall balance of the face.”
So consider it official. Temples are the hot new body part to hate.
That surgeon mentioned something else I haven’t stopped thinking about since. She said many patients come to her seeking “fuller lips, but forget to consider a receded chin or a subtle nose bump that affects their profile.” (Emphasis mine.) I am beside myself at the thought of people “forgetting” to develop an insecurity!! The phrasing suggests there’s a right way to look, and if you don’t look that way, not only are your features wrong, but you are wrong for failing to recognize their wrongness.
Anyway! Onto the links.
IN THIS ISSUE: Fragrance downsizing! The dairy agenda! Dermorexia! Making America blonde again! The supposed difference between wrinkles and pimples! Preventative face lifts! Sephora parties! Beauty by robots! White Lotus merch! Republican blowouts! Attacks on trans healthcare! & more!
REMEMBER WHEN: I coined the term “dermorexia” in 2023? Reporter Sara Radin did a deep dive into whether “our obsession with skincare [is] becoming a disorder” for Dazed if you’d like to learn more about it.
FACE IT: I talked to Laura Pitcher of Dazed for her piece “Is there ever such thing as a ‘preventative facelift’?” My (and Pitcher’s) answer: No.
“There’s no such thing as a ‘preventative’ facelift, just like there’s no real way to know how your face would have aged without your anti-ageing creams or baby Botox. Ultimately, the ‘ageing’ we may be running from may just be the simple act of looking like a living, breathing person in real life. ‘I think a lot of what we’re seeing with beauty standards today and surgeries is not so much a fear of ageing as an urge to stay the same as in an image,’ says DeFino. ‘We’re so attached to these frozen images of ourselves that we want our physical bodies to match.’ The only way to do that is to become 2D or freeze time – both of which aren’t physically possible. ‘That’s how a picture works, but it’s not how a body works,’ DeFino adds.”
I also don’t think getting a so-called “preventative” facelift today will save anyone from looking “old” tomorrow.
“DeFino says the preventive cycle never ends because our current concept of ageing is less attached to age than it is attached to norms. ‘The over-plumped look was a norm and indicated something about the era you’re born into,’ she says. ‘Now, with what we’re calling the ‘undetectable era”, this ‘undetectable facelift‘ will be a marker in time – tightly lifted and irreversible.’ With this in mind, your face could be ‘lifted into oblivion’, as DeFino puts it, but kids in ten years may still say you look old because it’s clear you had the procedure done when it was trendy. It’s a cruel dance: forever chasing the ever-changing aesthetic of youthfulness.”
Read The Full Article
BEAUTY-BORGS: Vogue Business released a mini-series about “Beauty Run by Robots.” I was thrilled that reporter Amy Francombe wanted to expand on my 2021 term “Meta Face” for it: a face inspired by the characteristics preferred by Meta algorithms, yes, but also a meta face — a face that is in itself a reference to the idealized face of robots, cyborgs, dolls, etc. It’s “hyper-perfected, otherworldly and disturbingly devoid of human imperfection,” Francombe writes. “Think flawless, textureless skin, exaggerated proportions and hyper-feminised features — an uncanny vision of beauty that is more simulation than reality.” Brands are leaning into this by using literal AI to create beauty campaigns and marketing imagery. Read more here.
PAULINA VS. PIMPLES: I want to get behind Paulina Porizkova, the 59-year-old model who’s seemingly part of the anti-anti-aging movement, but I simply cannot.
