Words by Clare Stephens
I’m a little apprehensive to write about my face. I mostly tell myself no one is looking at it, which is true for the most part, although I guess when I’m face-to-face with someone, or on a Zoom call, or in a photo or a video, people really are seeing all the tiny details I notice in the bathroom mirror. My slightly crooked teeth. My sun damage. The bags under my eyes. The lines on my forehead.
And it’s the lines I’ve been thinking about lately. They’re not just on my forehead – they’re around my eyes when I’m relaxed, and then when I smile they’re everywhere, swallowing my features like hungry worms. I feel like there are more of them post-baby, which seems reasonable given the sheer exhaustion of pregnancy, birth, and caring for a newborn. The whole process takes its toll on your body, on your pelvic floor, your back, and, I suppose, your collagen. Perhaps I gave all of mine to my glowing 17-month-old. Her skin is lovely.
Before I share a few thoughts on being in my mid-thirties with no Botox, I want to acknowledge a couple of things. First, it’s always uncomfortable to frankly state your age in writing. Anyone younger than you thinks, ‘fuck that’s old’ and anyone older than you thinks, ‘fuck off you spring chicken’. Maybe this is only relevant to people who are directly in my age ballpark. If that’s you, hello. 1990 was a great year. How fun was The Sims. If that’s not you, also hello. I hope you don’t find me insufferable.
Second, the ‘vibe’ on Botox is very contextual. Depending on where you live, and how wealthy that little pocket of the world is, Botox may be everywhere and it may be nowhere. It may be so normal it’s not even worth talking about, or it may be so exceptional and privileged that me even raising it suggests to you that I’m a certain type of person. Let’s leave that at the door. For reasons that would take me a lifetime to justify, I live in a tiny apartment in a suburb where there’s lots of beautiful people, and lots of beautiful people with money. It’s on the opposite end of Sydney to where I grew up, and when I drive there to visit my family, I’m acutely aware of how the plastic surgery clinics slowly disappear and are replaced by KFC’s. I love KFC. But the varying ratio of fast food outlets to cosmetic clinics in different parts of Sydney says something about us, although I’m not entirely sure what.
So, I’m fairly sure that a lot of the women I interact with have Botox, particularly those my age and older. With my close friends, we talk about it openly, but otherwise it feels inappropriate to meet someone, look at their smooth forehead, and ask, do you get regular Botox or does your face just look like that? Should mine look like that? Are you noticing that mine doesn’t look like that?
With that said, day-to-day, I don’t notice the details of people’s faces. I’ve never actually thought someone was less attractive because of the expression lines around their eyes, or because of their ability to frown. I’ve never thought, you’d look better with Botox. I’ve also never thought, wow your Botox looks great. I guess the entire point is that you don’t notice it. I’ll admit I once went to dinner with a friend and complimented her on what I thought was flawlessly applied makeup, only to have her smile and say that her makeup wasn’t the reason she looked so fresh. It was probably her recent injectables. And damn. Her skin did look quite velvet-y.
But genuinely, apart from that one time, I’m somewhat blind to this thing that Australian women spend about a billion dollars on, annually. I don’t really see it. Not in the sense of it making someone more attractive. Perhaps that’s because real social interactions are loaded with so much stimuli that you’re not taking in the micro contours of someone’s skin. There’s their energy and the aliveness in their eyes and the rhythm of their voice and the charm of their mannerisms and the content of what you’re talking about. There’s how they make you feel.
The challenge, of course, is trying to apply the same logic the other way around. If the way someone looks forms such a small part of my judgment of them, then maybe I could imagine that it forms a small part of their judgment of me?
HA! Unlikely.
I notice the new lines on my face whenever I look at photos of myself. I wish I didn’t, but I do. The temptation then is to turn off the noise and just give in, get the Botox or some other beauty treatment and think about something else. But I don’t think that’s how it works.
Knowing myself, I know I’d ‘fix’ one part of my face and then start focusing on another. The truth is, I’ve never felt beautiful. Not when my hair was at its thickest or my skin was its clearest or my body was its most toned. The treadmill of beauty standards and capitalism never runs out, and for me, setting an arbitrary, illogical line in the sand is a personal way to rebel against it.
Right now, a lot of women don’t want to talk openly about whether they do or don’t get Botox, because they’re subjected to judgment either way. If you get Botox, you’re worried people will perceive you as vain or as contributing to a false ideal of what it means to age. If you don’t get Botox, you’re worried that the people who do will think you’re judging them. I’d be a massive hypocrite if I was judging, while I sit here with my salon-coloured hair and my orthodontically straightened teeth and a layer of expensive foundation on my face.
But strangely, I do think it’s important to know what a 34-year-old face with no anti-wrinkle injections looks like. Especially when, in all likelihood, the faces we’re seeing in ads and on TV and on our phones are creaseless. And I’m happy to be that face. Hi. My face isn’t here, but it exists in the world. And sometimes I even put it on the internet. Expression lines and all.
Those are my unfinished, imperfect thoughts about Botox. I’d love to know what you think.
This piece was originally published in Clare Stephen’s Substack newsletter, NQR. Republished with permission! You can read the original here and while you’re there, subscribe!
