The ironic curse of not submitting to botox
Recently my colleague and I were discussing the rise of botox. We joked about the ironic curse of not getting it: that it ends up taking up more space in your brain than it would if you just got it. Hit your early 30s, and suddenly botox feels like it’s everywhere – no matter how much you think of yourself as someone chill about ageing; it takes a lot of energy not to fall into the scary black hole of youth = beauty and beauty = good.
For my colleague and me, we’d somehow found ourselves in the position of making the decision not to get botox (making our ageing skin a political stance) – only to walk around manically rubbing our forehead lines, worrying we’d be the only wrinkled friends in the rest home. As all around us friends touted its amazing preventative benefits, we spent summer lathering our faces in sunblock and wearing our caps down to our eyebrows. Unsurprisingly, literally no-one cared about our silent protest – we commiserated that we could just have got it, enjoyed a much more glowy forehead, and been done with the whole debate.
In the last decade botox (and cosmetic procedures in general) have had a major shift. What was once the domain of celebrities has become an everyday beauty treatment; no more expensive than getting your hair done. Accessible, affordable and more importantly, no longer shrouded in secrecy and shame – beauty influencers recommend their favourite spots, public figures are praised for their honesty and openness around the procedures they get, and the entire thing is marketed as a tool for empowerment and confidence – if it makes you feel better about yourself, why wouldn’t you?
In 2020, botox was the top cosmetic procedure plugged into Google across New
Zealand. And I get it – this is not the era of frozen faces and puffy lips. As far as I can see, botox in 2024 is subtle, comfortingly temporary and largely normalised. Lots of my friends have had botox – although, crucially, this is still relegated to female friends only.
The lines everyone breezily rolls out about why they get botox are exactly the same. Harsh New Zealand sun, botox helps prevent wrinkles, everyone has just one deep frown line they’d like to reduce. No big deal. And that’s all true. But it’s also easier to roll them out than acknowledge the much more depressing reality: we’re all under crazy pressure to assimilate to an ageist, sexist, classist system, which awards power and privilege to women who look a certain way.
We all engage with this system to some extent. I personally shave my legs, dye my hair, wear make-up, diet – which makes drawing the line at botox feel totally arbitrary. In this sense, women are forced to constantly grapple with a bigger question – how to engage with the beauty standards that ultimately hurt us?
Every beauty choice that personally benefits me will effectively harm the collective. The more we all assimilate, the more the pressure mounts – and more women as a whole are harmed in the process. Because where does our quest for assimilation leave women who are not in a position to care about, let alone pay for, their beauty treatments? A beauty class system where only some can afford to participate – in doing so, generating the financial and social privilege that comes from fitting aesthetic norms.
It’s exhausting – to protest the broader injustice, while also navigating a system that seems to be wholeheartedly pitted against my natural body. And although men who get botox exist, I think we can all agree that when more than 85% of procedures globally are for women, there is something wrong with the picture. I’ve also read that the makers of botox have donated tens of thousands of dollars to US legislators attempting to enact a national abortion ban. So, there’s that.
To be clear: the helpful answer here is not demanding that women “age gracefully” (whilst pointing out people like Kate Moss – a literal supermodel). It’s also not acting aghast that women feel the need to get botox in the first place (please stop doing this). There is no right answer, except maybe some empathy, or some radical systemic change – and for my colleague and me, I guess maybe a really really wide-brimmed sun hat.