Celia Walden
We shouldn’t let teenage girls inject their faces with fillers
‘It’s scandalous that we are the only country with this free-for-all’
Not long ago, I found myself seated beside a man at a party who introduced himself, proudly, as “Mr Botox of Beverly Hills”. Waxy-faced and rigid-featured, with a perma-startled expression, the cosmetic surgeon was a fitting advert for his client base. Only he was concerned by how young that client base had become – and how faddish the demands now were. Whereas it used to be human potpourri, desperately trying to reproduce their former bloom (my words, not his), it was now predominantly teenage girls, trying to achieve a particular fashion-forward look. “Right now, it’s ‘filter face’,” he explained. “They tell me they want to look ‘filtered’, like on Instagram – and I tell them: ‘Honey, look around: you don’t see filter face IRL’.”
Actually, you did: both in the US and the UK – or the mangled results of “attempted filter face”, anyway. The next fad was “resting bitch face” – a condition where a person looks fierce while facially relaxed – which surgeons were being asked to fix by droves of youngsters, blissfully unaware of their own “RBF” until social media helpfully pointed it out. But that was months ago. And according to Harley Street surgeon Dirk Kremer – who is calling on MPS to make it illegal for children to have cosmetic fillers and Botox injections – today’s requested look “which gets more ‘likes’ and more [social media] followers” is “rich-girl face”.
Inspired by the plump lips, chiselled jaws and raised eyebrows of billionaire influencers such as Kylie Jenner and Ivanka Trump, the US president’s daughter, “rich-girl face” involves having a shedload of Botox and dermal filler injected into the frown lines, crow’s feet, pronounced nasolabial folds and sagging jaw lines that no young girl in history has ever suffered from.
In the wrong hands (and you have to query whether the right hands would ever agree to desecrate a child whipped up by Instagram), these injections could lead to everything from skin necrosis and sight loss to a stroke. Then there are the youngsters simply left looking like they’ve had a stroke. And, yet, unlike tattoos, teeth-whitening or even tanning beds – all illegal for under-18s – the injectables industry is largely unregulated, and there are currently no laws in place to safeguard children, who are having their flaws plumped away from as young as 13. As 21-year-old Morgan Davies – who had Botox and fillers without parental permission at the age of 17 – sums up: “It’s your body. If you want to enhance it or modify it, that is your choice.” “Choice” and “identity” are the buzzwords of generation Y and Z. And, crucially, they’re both discussion silencers. So just as it’s your choice – your right, really – to identify with the Insta-icon du jour and modify your face to look like hers, it’s your choice to take puberty-blocking drugs, aged 10, in the name of identity. With both words promoted to such an extent that all logic is outweighed, and science moving far faster than accompanying reason or judgment, we have allowed underqualified practitioners, overzealous gender warriors and cowardly law-makers to indulge what can often turn out to be childish whims. When I asked Dr Christopher Rowland Payne of The London Clinic yesterday whether he would support Dr Kremer’s petition, the top British dermatologist explained the need to address the wider problem of regulation first. “There might be medical reasons like Bell’s palsy that Botox may help with, [so] a legal exclusion of all children from these treatments would be wrong. But in every other civilised country but Britain, fillers, Botox and laser are considered medical procedures – and only provided by the medically qualified. So it’s scandalous that we are the only country with this free-for-all.”
As the mother of a girl who is watching this scandal play out, it’s the underlying message I find so disturbing. If “finding your identity” is the holy grail, then making peace with the superficial inadequacies we’re liable to obsess over as children, and learning to focus on the inner values and knowledge that make us who we are is where the richness lies – not in Kylie Jenner’s face.