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In recent years, cosmetic procedures like nose jobs, Botox and lip fillers have become increasingly common, according to Women’s Health.
What was once rare or stigmatized is now often seen as routine maintenance, comparable to getting a haircut or whitening your teeth. While there is a demographic that frames this shift as not only acceptable but empowering, the implications for women are troubling.
This change is startlingly visible on reality television, for example “Love Island” and “The Bachelor” where it is difficult to find faces that haven’t been altered in some way. The aesthetic of smooth botox-filled skin, surgically refined noses and exaggerated lips has become the new status quo.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum — media is shaping what we think faces are supposed to look like.
Because this transformation has been so gradual, people hardly notice how strange it is. Ten years ago, people did not see obviously altered faces very often. Now, many of us recognize that someone has had work done, and not only accept it, but aspire to it.
Think back to how people responded to “The Hunger Games,” specifically the Capitol characters with their extreme body modifications. That abnormal and unreal vision of beauty was disturbing, especially in the context of the poverty in the rest of the districts. However over the years, we’ve crept closer to that reality without much resistance.
Arguing against the normalization of plastic surgery often sparks backlash, especially from people who connect the issue to bodily autonomy. Letting women do what they want is their top concern and rallying cry.
Women should have freedom over their own bodies, but freedom means more than choosing from a menu of socially sanctioned insecurities.
Supporting the cosmetic surgery industry isn’t an act of feminism — it’s the opposite. Conforming to a narrow, ever-shifting standard of beauty serves systems that have long profited off of women’s illusion of inadequacy. There’s nothing powerful about paying to look more like someone who’s been photoshopped.
No one chooses surgery in a vacuum. A woman doesn’t wake up hating her nose or lips unless she’s been taught that those features are problems to fix.
If someone grew up alone in the wilderness without media or social pressure there would be no concept of aesthetic flaws. There would just be a face. These insecurities are manufactured.
We’re told choosing to modify our face is an act of self-care and a form of empowerment. But power doesn’t come from freezing your facial expressions with botox or chiseling yourself into a different person.
Power comes from rejecting the idea that your worth is based on how well you fit into a pre-approved mold.
Women don’t have to accept beauty standards as unchangeable facts.
They can live boldly and unapologetically, challenging what it means to be beautiful rather than reshaping themselves to meet the demand. That resistance is a powerful form of self-love.
There’s also a cultural and historical rejection at play. Our faces carry the features of countless ancestors. Nose structures, eye shapes and skin tones evolved for specific climates and conditions, according to the Library of Congress.
Cosmetic procedures often erase these markers, prioritizing a Eurocentric beauty ideal that is ultimately rooted in colonialism.
This is especially true for women of color, who often “correct” their features in ways that align with whiteness, according to Qualitative Health Research. On reality shows, it is common for women of color to have replaced their ethnic noses with slimmer European-style ones. That’s not personal preference, it’s racial preference disguised as aesthetics.
So why do we praise women for loving themselves only to encourage them to change everything about their natural faces? If a person truly believes in self-acceptance, it makes more sense to reject the systems that taught us to hate what we see in the mirror in the first place.
The more normalized cosmetic procedures become, the less standard natural faces seem. Some actresses are called unattractive despite fitting classic definitions of beauty, simply because they haven’t augmented themselves into inhuman standards, according to Times Entertainment.
We may be rapidly approaching a future where cosmetic surgery isn’t just accepted but expected. It feels intuitive to know that this is a problem.
Women should ask themselves where their desire for modification comes from, who benefits from it and whether they are willing to pay the price of power through authenticity for power through cosmetically achieved “perfection.”
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Contact Mahali Kuzyk via email: mahali.kuzyk@pepperdine.edu
