Corey Gamble, left, and Kris Jenner at the wedding of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and journalist Lauren Sanchez in Venice in June.Yara Nardi/Reuters
I can’t tell how old anyone is any more. This could be related to my own advancing age (or, relatedly, my eyesight), but maybe something else is going on. During one of my 2 a.m. online deep dives meant to stop myself from stewing on the horrors of the world and/or my personal finances, I went down an unexpected rabbit hole – one that took me to a world of taut, gorgeous and expensive treasures.
In case you too are looking for a distraction from everything, join me in the strange – and apparently ubiquitous, in some circles – wonderland of cosmetic surgery. Although, spoiler alert: this comes with its own distressing note about late-stage capitalism and how deeply inequality seeps into every corner of our lives – including our faces.
“The face-lift is better than ever, and everybody wants one,” declares a viral piece published by The Cut called “The Forever-35 Face.” It announces that there’s a new facelift in town (especially if “town” constitutes certain stretches of Manhattan and Los Angeles) – almost undetectable, apparently, creating a “glamorous tribe of the nebulously de-aged, appearing somewhere between 35 and 50.”
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I dove deep – nauseatingly deep – into what such facelifts entail, including clear-eyed surgical details. Turns out the word “lift” is not just a description of the improvement. They actually lift your face! (In one scene, the writer describes part of a woman’s face being “tented open like the hood of a car.”) The doctor says, during that surgery, that he’s going to “make Anne look 35.” Anne, in human years, is 65.
More than a third of facelift recipients these days are 35 to 55, the piece reveals. “I live in a part of the world where everybody looks 35 forever,” a prospective patient says. “And so that’s why I wanna get a face-lift.” Her bill will ultimately total more than US$75,000.
Is there nothing that money can’t buy in this era, the Kardashianocene? It was in fact Kris Jenner’s (Kim’s mom) own facelift that apparently got everyone talking about the procedure to begin with. (When I googled “Kris Jenner,” the first autocompleted suggestion was “Kris Jenner new face.”)
The problem, if there is one, is that normal plebs – those of us who have not made a fortune from a reality TV series and instead slog it out at actual jobs to (barely) pay the rent – are marketed these faces as if they’re accessible. As if it’s possible to look like Jennifer Aniston at 56 or Nicole Kidman at 58 if we only juiced more often. I haven’t independently confirmed that either of these women have undergone cosmetic procedures, but something tells me it’s not the Aveeno night cream alone that gets Ms. Aniston’s face “twinkling” like that.
Women are being shown an impossible standard and told that we (a) should look like this; and (b) can look like this.
“I feel bad about my neck,” Nora Ephron famously disclosed in her essay named for that sentence. “The neck is a dead give-away. Our faces are lies and our necks are the truth.”
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Well today, in the age of Instagram, we can feel bad about not just our necks, but about everything from our eyebrows to our driveways. But great news: some influencer somewhere has a fix!
It’s gonna cost us, though. One surgeon in The Cut story has a facelift starting price of US$125,000.
I remember working in retail, 10 million years ago (as my own face openly testifies), and being advised by a co-worker that a surefire way to tell if someone could actually afford to shop in our store was to check their shoes – the ultimate purchase-power truth-tellers. These days, apparently, the hands are the dead give-away. Because the face, for a price, can lie.
Far be it from me (or anyone else) to tell women what to do or not do to their faces, lips, eyelids (oh, to be able to afford a blepharoplasty) – although there are, to be sure, medical risks. But what has our age-obsessed patriarchal society done to us?
So what I hoped would be a middle-of-the-night distraction turned into a full-on 4 a.m. (silent) rant about late-stage capitalism, the concentration of wealth, income inequality, the new oligarchy – and the audacity of people paying for this stuff while the rest of us are studying supermarket flyers for the best deal on chicken breasts (if we’re lucky enough to afford chicken at all).
It sure makes you wonder about societal priorities. Women in their 20s are getting Botox. There is a Canadian firm that specializes in financing for elective medical procedures: Want a mommy makeover? You can have six years to pay it off. This stuff is often framed as female empowerment. Everything is topsy-turvy! I was raging.
The hours of sleeplessness, let me tell you, did not help with my dark circles.