Facing up to the fact something’s off with faces
As a general observation, people in Australia are looking odd. Everyone looks genetically blessed online, with pouty lips, sculpted cheekbones, and lineless faces.
However, everyone looks a bit askew in real life, like that throw on your lounge that won’t sit chicly.
I can only compare it to trying to follow a recipe for a beautiful cake you’ve seen online. You’ll give it a crack and come up with a similar result, but you know a MasterChef judge would be slightly puzzled by your result.
That’s how people’s faces look now.
I recently ran into a girl I vaguely know, and while we were talking, I couldn’t look away from her face. She looked the same but different, older but also slightly frozen in time.
It wasn’t until I walked away from the chat that it dawned on me that she’d had work done. It wasn’t making her look better; it was making her look just a bit strange: it was like she’d become the Kmart dupe of herself.
Online, people look great with filters, lighting, and the fact that they aren’t moving. In person, their skin is stretched too tight, which looks odd. Their faces don’t move, which is confronting, and their lips can look too big for their faces.
People are wandering around thinking they look like Kim Kardashian when they just look like concrete that was walked through before it set.
It has become such an epidemic that people looking a bit weird has become normal and none of us are even questioning it anymore.
If I stopped to gasp every time I saw someone looking a bit silly with giant lips, well, then I’d finally have a real excuse for why I never have time to go to pilates.
My mum’s best friend Jan, who is in her 60s and has always been incredibly chic and beauty-literate, recently texted me and asked me, point blank, “What are all these young women doing to their faces?”
She’d caught a few minutes of an Aussie reality television show and was horrified to discover all the women looked identical.
Considering she knew me through my fake eyelash stage, which involved me paying $200 for fake lashes that left me partially blind and feeling
like something was constantly in my eye, I think she was trying to warn me off going down the same path.
At the time, I thought I looked vampy and gorgeous, but on reflection it’s hard to look sexy when you’re constantly rubbing your eyes.
It seems too simple to bring it back to the Kardashians, who have shaped beauty culture with the same vigour as they contour their faces, but it isn’t wrong.
The way many women want to look has changed, and it is all very muchKar dash ian inspired. Line less faces and big lips are their brand, and suddenly, everyone’s just genetically blessed that way? Absolutely not.
The truth is that particular look only looks really good on a few people. It is the equivalent of wearing the wrong foundation shade for the rest of us. Sure, our skin looks blemish-free, but we also look a bit silly.
I understand the desire to look younger and follow trends, even when it comes to our faces, but at some point, we’ve got to ask ourselves, do I want to look my age, or do I want to look strange?