Late last year I read a pitch-black novel which hinged on the idea of a woman grieving for her pre-Instagram, pre-surgeried self. It is set in 2032, and Anna, a former influencer, is due to undergo an extreme surgery, Aesthetica (also the title of the book, by Allie Rowbottom), which promises to reverse every cosmetic procedure she’s had on her face and body over the past 15 years. “This is the best I can hope for,” Anna thinks. “A clean slate before the next storm, next tragedy, next decade.” As soon as I’d finished reading the book, I started to read about the book. At the author’s book launch, Botox was available alongside the drinks, a sly little nod to the slipperiness of the subject, and the strange dissonance between who we are and how we look.
That reversal surgery seemed both the grim stuff of a body-horror film and also, completely reasonable. When Kylie Jenner appeared to have dissolved her famous lip fillers, clinics reported an immediate rise in requests for similar procedures. And more celebrities started doing the same: the Evening Standard reported how Kate Moss’s half-sister Lottie had paid £450 to get lip fillers then the same price to get them dissolved. American model Blac Chyna posted a video of her facial fillers getting dissolved. “Back to the baseline…” she said. Courteney Cox talked on a podcast about her biggest beauty regrets: “Fillers,” but, “I was able to reverse most of that.” We are seeing a shift in beauty, a living make-under montage. Almost a decade since Jenner first admitted to lip fillers (increasing Google searches for them by 11,300% in 24 hours), injectables have spread through towns and faces with remarkable speed, sometimes “migrating” from eye to cheek, leaving people looking vaguely uncanny, or from famous pop stars to tired mums on a Black Friday deal. But now, patients are reporting “filler fatigue” and sharing their own journeys back to that mythical “clean slate”.
