Do you remember MTV’s 'I Want a Famous Face’? It ran for four seasons from 2004, just one of the many shows on the station’s reality TV roster, which included Rich Girls, Made and My Super Sweet 16. RTÉ even tried to cash in on the craze with Diary of a Debutante – a fun aside is that I interviewed Mica from Diary… for a college journalism assignment.
The premise of I Want a Famous Face is pretty self-explanatory, although the one episode that sticks out to me is the one in which a young man got calf implants, as he was embarrassed at his lack of muscle definition in that particular area. I can’t remember which celebrity’s calves he was holding up as the standard.
It wasn’t the only bizarre, plastic surgery-related show to debut in 2004; that year also saw the launch of The Swan, a show that went on to inspire the creation of Dr 90210. One small step for surgeon-kind, etc.
It’s fair to say that the idea of “correcting” someone by giving them plastic surgery has kind of gone out of fashion. Now, one of the most popular plastic surgery shows is Botched, in which the poor unfortunate souls whose faces and bodies have fallen afoul of bad plastic surgeons come to have those procedures corrected, to finally achieve the levels of beauty they had originally been shooting for.
But the sentiment – the desire to whittle ourselves into the ideal versions of ourselves, and the tacit acceptance that this is something to do with freedom of individual choice – remains omnipresent, something that has become clear to me as I’ve been enthralled by suffered through seven-plus seasons of Vanderpump Rules, all for the sake of keeping up with the headlines.
One of the most depressing truths of reality TV – and, honestly, I think, life – is witnessing how little the people involved change, despite the passing of, in some cases, 10 or more years. The petty gossips are still petty gossips; the attention seekers are still attention seekers; the insecure woman who needs, so desperately, to be loved… well. You get the picture.
As someone who truly believes that people can change, being faced with this evidence that I am, in fact, misguided is… depressing, at best.
I started secondary school in 1997, a year that would see the death of Princess Diana, the mass suicide of 39 members of the Heaven’s Gate cult in San Diego, and the first episode of a TV show that would come to define and occupy the majority of my teen years, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Each September I would come back from my summer holidays determined to be a different version of myself. No longer would I be the first person to raise my hand in Irish class; I would share a bit less, cultivate an air of mystery; if I ever got upset, because of some careless remark someone had made to or about me, I would wait to cry until I got home. I would be cool, calm, laid back…
Except, I would not. Throughout my life, there are certain things I’ve managed to change. I’m not as judgmental as I once was; I’m not as quick to publicly criticise people; I don’t make off-colour jokes any more (in my early twenties, I thought these kinds of jokes made me “edgy”). But cool? Calm? Laid back? Not me.
ANYWAY.
Seeing many (many) surgically altered faces on our televisions is nothing particularly new, but the difference now is that it’s not just confined to our TV screens and, unlike with The Swan or I Want a Famous Face, the nips and tucks our favourite reality TV stars undergo happen offscreen.
In a way, it gives the impression that this is the kind of glow-up that comes with fame and (I assume) fortune (although, in the case of Vanderpump Rules, how much could they possibly be earning from this show if they’re still working at the restaurant?!) – rather than with needles, knives, threads and injectables.
And it’s having a knock-on effect; according to data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, more than 27,000 lip procedures took place last year, with one happening every 20 minutes. The normalisation of a “look” that can only be achieved through surgical intervention – with the exception of a very small number of people who just look like that naturally, and even then, do they really?! – has created a new beauty standard that can actually pretty easily be achieved, at least if you have the means (and the stomach) for it.
Don’t misunderstand me; there’s nothing intrinsically “wrong” about lip fillers, or Botox, or fillers on your jawline (I strongly considered doing this, but was told that it might just make my face bigger – LOL – so went for Coolsculpt beneath my chin instead).
The reasons we do it are understandable; not only do we see these perfectly symmetrical, plumped, smooth faces on TV and cinema screens everywhere, we’re bombarded with them on Instagram, too, and all of this only compounds the pre-existing pressure to achieve a certain youthful beauty standard, pressure that’s been on women since way before the internet or reality TV got in on the action.
And it’s not like knowing, learning or acknowledging that pressure, knowing that it comes from a place of misogyny and the objectification of women and the deification of female youth (while male ageing is considered sexy), means that we’re immune to it. I can know that unrealistic beauty standards function to keep women undervalued, underpaid and distracted from the bigger picture, while also strongly believing that my life would be easier if my lips were plumper, forehead smoother and jawline more chiselled.
Roxane Gay writes about this in her book, Hunger, in the context of anti-fat bias; she speaks about undergoing weight loss surgery while also advocating strongly for fat acceptance. “I had to accept that I could change my fat body faster than this culture will change how it views, treats, and accommodates fat bodies,” she wrote in an essay for Medium.
If someone really wants to feel beautiful, what would be easier? To get Botox, or lip fillers, or to work at increasing their self-confidence through affirmations, positive self-talk, therapy… and God knows what else?
The one aspect of this body modification trend that I do find troubling is how homogenous the finished “products” are; Jia Tolentino wrote about “Instagram face” for the New Yorker in 2019, a whole four years ago, but her description of the look she’s describing could well have been written today.
It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.
A decade ago, the prevailing beauty standard was one of thinness, which at least is not so specific as to say, “a 22-inch waist, 30-inch bust…” and so on. Today’s beauty standard is limiting in its very specificity, a specificity that makes it achievable exclusively via artificial means, at least for the very vast majority of us.
The other issue with all of this is: it’s boring. It’s incredibly boring, not to mention disorienting, to see dozens, hundreds even, of women morphing into one specific version of woman. Continuing along this path leads us towards a distinctly Stepford-looking future in which women are barely distinguishable from one another and, far worse, nobody will even care.