On The Standards of Beauty
Fillers, Filters, and other Fake Shit I Won’t Expose My Face To Again
A tight, hot pulse began working its way throughout my face and I began to wince tears thinking it could stop the spread. With this same instinct came the sudden sense of panic that one gets when their body is about to fight off an intruder. Tamar, a new galpal I was rollin’ with at the time whom I’d met in a philosophy class at the Naval Academy, a commander’s wife and mom of 3, was sitting in the supportive companion’s chair in the white, chilly exam room, gushing praise at me as she occasionally hovered behind the stern-faced doctor who was administering collagen from several syringes.
“Now, I know we said 3 but I’m now seeing your body just sucked these up and you’re going to need more if you want to see any real difference,” the tiny doctor said expressionlessly or under the siege of Botox, hard to tell in California. Hoodwinked! Tamar had forewarned me that this cosmetic surgery clinic, this “medical spa” she had brought me to, rolled this way and that they’d make “other vital recommendations” so it was best to just come with big money for what she had sold me as a “fun, well-earned day at the beauty bar”. Sitting under the obnoxiously bright LED lamp contemplating as quickly as I could all the other things I’d rather do with two grand, I was overcome with a peevish desire to just get up and walk out (m’aidez! m'aidez!). To just get up and not decide on this bullshit and storm out of the muted compound leaving gaping mouths in my wake because what I was about to do to my face was going against every fundamental belief I’ve ever held about beauty and vanity.
Tamar was into her second year of botox and fillers because she thought her husband made her cry so much that her crow’s feet were coming in mean, and her kids would stress her enough to the point that it made her face pudgy. “These fucking jowls” she’d scowl and point, and then I’d try my best to make out what she’d meant by a jowl even though I hadn’t noticed it before. We had gotten thick after discovering we were both in theatre and could just as well sing our hearts out at the bars together and draw a crowd. She’d say she had been married too long and as a result got bored easily, and because she no longer loved her husband, she decided to get into “safe escorting” while he was stationed overseas, which was often and for very long periods of time. The more money she made in escorting, the more time she spent at the beauty bar and it got to the point she was getting incentivized for bringing in more clients. It’d be a good refresher, she said to me, it would leave me feeling “rejuvenated and new”.
The women I worked with in Defense at that time, the top earners and respected Ballers, were all doing it too, going under the knife and “maintaining” with “non-invasive” routine botox and dermal fillers. It had become a marker for affluence and success in areas of Industry where women were making big moves and earning top dollar. A close colleague had started plumping her face and I’d ask her about the pain, the varieties of fillers she was using, and whether or not it was spiritually worth it and it seemed to me that these paying women felt empowered by what they perceived to be an investment in themselves, in their careers, and their relationships. To hell that the results were never as subtle as they’d think, each visit increasing in vials and in bloat while decreasing the unique personal charm that gives the face its natural essence. Their confidence and, most importantly, performance power were shooting through the roof, though, and they had polymers, toxins, and bovine elixirs to thank for all of it.
I was 30 years old with a full, round face, no significant creases or wrinkles yet, and thankfully no acne or serious skin conditions, but my new bestie was suffering a feminine existential crisis while looking juicy-faced and making loud money, and I had just stepped into a new paygrade in my own career and was starting to be recognized as an analytics wiz, getting seen and exemplified in ways I wasn’t ready for. It was hard trying to find reasons not to partake in this strange cultural beauty trend; my Feminist principles of the time were not strong enough to overcome the curiosity of just how much of my ultimate potential a little Refresh would help me reach.
From a Hybrid’s perspective, the Chicano/Hispanic/Latino beauty ideal has been, is considerably more savage than the persnickety American standards of attractiveness. Melanated people experience the Colorist and Racist Western beauty standard when it is imposed by the White World; if only that harm stopped there. Back in the village, inside of each Melanated culture exists its own rotten caste system where value is irrationally assigned based on the shade of brown upon a person’s skin, an added layer of attractiveness bias we needlessly impose on our own Raza. Mexican aunties, las tias, in birthing room hospital gowns let out pained sighs when they are handed beautiful brown newborns, “salio morenito, el pobre!”, he came out brown, the poor baby! Color determines where you’ll rank in categories of opportunity, networking, courtship, approachability, and selection, and will even determine one’s ability to assimilate into White America. Exploitative pageantry is popular in Latinoamerica. So is cosmetic surgery culture, so is porn, so is rape, and so is Femicide. Growing up in machista hovels gave me an early awareness that I was unlike the women destining themselves for men, I was able to see clearly all the ridiculous and degrading shit that women were subjected to for the slightest nodding of heads from unimpressive men and I swore to Goddess I’d have none of that circus life.
The first alteration that I saw the brown women in my family succumb to was skin and body hair lightening creams. Fair & Lovely and Sally Hansen creme bleach lightening kits were flying off shelves at the corner bodega, the owners would be seen restocking again and again as barrio people pined for acclimation and opportunity. Yet, this mentality has warped brown people into white-washing our own cultural tolerance for rich dark tones and ancestral indigenous features. Any color caste system and any absurd beauty standard can only be valid if it is practiced and upheld, valued, and given relevance, and that is not something I’ve ever been willing to do because women, like all sentient beings, have human value. We are not puppets for adornment and exhibition, this is not our destined purpose.
An objective towards fairness between the sexes, the female beauty standard is in dire need of decolonization from the infection that is the male gaze, and not just by brown and black women. The irrational standards have created a big hole from which all women have to crawl out as we find our way toward Liberation, and this will not be an easy task, either. Concepts like “equality” and “equity” between the sexes have been generated under impossible beauty parameters, they are unable to promise a reality in which Jay Z performs provocatively on stage in Spanx and a two-piece thong bikini, dangerous stilts, heavy wigs like his wife does, and do this to perfection like his wife does or else he has no real value, an improbable scenario because it would be considered absurd that he do any of this, but this is precisely what this adornment and performance scheme is like for Women, it is that absurd. The fairer, the thinner, prettier, quieter, the more indifferent she is “the better”, he’ll say, positively reinforcing all the so-called finer virtues that win over uncles, preachers, teachers, husbands, and pornographers, men who say this attentiveness comes with some exciting opportunity or experience that would make any young girl very lucky to be taken under his wing this way.
The method acting-grade performances that I saw women like Tamar put on for the superficial approval of men would never be something I’d accept as any way of living a self-fulfilling life, it would not at all be a life that Men would choose for themselves, and so I knew feeding into any unattainable beauty standard was, essentially, the ultimate act of self-immolation in their honor. I reconciled with getting some of this plumping juice after Tamar’s convincing, “you’re only 30 and not too far desiccated, you’d reap the most benefit!” as she had put it. Besides, all the women were wearing collagen like a new Louis bag if they were ballin’. Status, peer pressured.
Stepping outside of what I was then calling my Realness to perhaps even escape into the fantasy of a little glamour and the potential that a new face could give, I resolved to give in this one time and see what would happen. When in Capitalism you do as the Capitalists and Industrialists do and I decided to buy into the shitty American Standard of (unrealistic) Beauty for no good reason, and very half-assedly. I looked at the tiny, stoic, and juicy-faced Plasticizer Doc and told her “fuck it, just do it where you think I need it”.
This pricey invitation resulted in facial dysmorphia that would take me several years to get over, something I didn’t ask for but probably deserved for bringing this flawed vessel to the perfection police for them to colonize with their blanched Ideal. The top lip is askew on the left - one vial, the whole bottom can take two more, an odd indentation on the temple - what the hell happened to you there? let’s fill this old pore, and this seriously pronounced frown line here - you’re lucky to have 1 and not two to make it look like 11 on your forehead haha. You have the beginnings of your marionette lines - you need to stop smiling so big but we can fix them today with 1, your chin you can fix later with a quick nip - the receptionist will give you more information on your way out, but for now let’s get back to these cheeks and plump them with 2 to bring back youth and cheerfulness to your face…
In the reception area, Tamar dipped out to the open mini-bar while I took care of the invoice at the front desk. The staff of young women moving behind the counter, typing, copying, and dispensing surgery pamphlets all wore the same expressionless, disaffected and heavy-lidded stare. They looked years older than what their energetic bodies displayed, the overly plumped cheekbones and near-bursting lips advertising just how replenishing these so-called preservative measures can be, how full, how radiant on already youthful examples. One of these front-desk quintuplets handed me after-care and surgical literature as Tamar handed me a short whiskey on the rocks on a napkin with fancy gold lettering that read “Cosmetic surgery: Come as you are, leave as you wish”.
Once I was out in the light of the sun, as I was getting settled in on the passenger side for the ride home, I kept looking at myself in each car mirror and already feeling skeptical. “I look like fucking Cindy Lou Who!” was the first honest impression I blurted out as I tripped on this new synthetic aesthetic, this foreign face I knew right away I was not going to be at peace with. “You don’t!” Tamar replied, “it’s just swelling and it will go down by tomorrow!”. But that disconcerting swell didn’t just go away. I’d be enduring unevenness on my lips and around my chin and nose for the next 4 months. The 5-years-younger-than-me soft butch woman that I was dating at this time didn’t like the results, either. “What’s up with your face, Ro?” she had said sternly when she first saw my shiny, puffy swellings and similar dissent would be echoed among family and friends who knew me better, knowing that I had always thought of plastic surgery and “anti-aging” campaigns as demoralizing and evil, knowing that I had once considered this another sign of desperation and defeat for the woman undergoing it, that for me it meant that the male gaze had demanded more and she gave that, too. The collagen vials I dug deep into my pockets for wore off completely after about 8 months, thankfully, and I never got on any med-spa regimen despite Tamar’s best efforts.
15 years later and I’m fighting the good fight in the never-ending war against my naturally-aging female face never having gone back to plumping tweakments that aim to inculcate buyers into a porn-modified beauty culture that promotes an increasingly homogenous aesthetic, refusing to support an industry intent on MANufacturing lines of bimbic androids as imagined by the lineages of sexist men in “entertainment”. The culture of the fembot. Cosmetic modifications, near-religious practices as promoted by the entertainment industry, have crossed over to the general consumer by way of these drive-by beauty bar markets designed to drain women of our hard-earned money by selling us the lie that fillers are healthy and will make us look youthful. By extension, it promotes the idea that we should want to look youthful to appease the men of our society. I’m not surprised that these practices have gone steroidal with the current trend of over-inflated lips made proportionate to match up with the trend of giant Madame Alexander Doll eyelashes, another trend I refuse to understand. Are we giving ourselves facial labia minora to signal and appease patriarchy now? I refuse!
Peace with our more refined, more valuable virtues is vital to finding a higher plane of beauty realism within. What does it mean to be beautiful, to be unique to our own beauty when we are so often reminded to conform to a standard? We must condition ourselves away from the idea that there is some value, some reward in meeting these unrealistic, patriarchal expectations when the system of measurement is grotesque in the examples I provided above and deviant in its cheapening of the actual characteristics that truly make humans of both sexes Special to one another in the real world. Never believe what a culture’s mass media considers as beautiful because - real talk - the ideal will fuck the majority of people over, and the majority of the general population will not qualify, thus making any so-called ideal an extremely harmful concept, an absurdity of misinformation regarding human socialization!
When I visit with mi abuela, with granny, and we sit together to chat and she looks deeply into my face, into my skin, and even when she is sizing up the rest of her 40-something granddaughter who people have lovingly said resembles her, I see the pride in her eyes and perhaps a recognition of her once youthful self again. I feel her really seeing me, a product of her, a receiver of her genes and many of her virtues, even her stoic serenity (what the kids call the resting bitch face), I’ll proudly wear that resemblance, too. In these kinds of moments shared with loved ones I am affirmed and I bask in the glow of having appeased the ancestral gaze. As I continue to reinforce my self-esteem for these increasingly superficial standards, my latest challenge has been avoiding the use of deceptive photo/app filters as I will no longer be ashamed of this Uniqueness, for better or worse, and I’ll be even less ashamed of resembling my ancestors more with each passing year. To hell with all the internet artifice, these tricks included!
Women are constantly asked to or will feel obligated to change this and that, to look younger, be thinner, comply - conform - homogenize toward a pornified beauty ideal. Question this sacrifice, my sister. For, what is beauty? We’ve been regressing toward a glamourous veneer that has degraded the female face altogether, evidenced by the popular market of youtube tutorials that teach women to use theatrical-grade makeup techniques: pancaking foundation, bold contouring, and highlighting trickery to achieve an everyday look. The freedom of living an authentic life in the skin we are in and finding contentment in what we have to offer as human beings is an inaccessible luxury for women. Living in our own No Man’s Land, even Lesbians are asked to sacrifice an offering or another to men: our appearance, our expression, our spaces, and our social status as female-loving-females has been largely usurped by paraphilic public fetishists who would call themselves “trans lesbians” and appropriate our reality to mock our existence. For the rest of the brethren, makeup, negligee, stilts, and a cheerful disposition that prove her best effort will suffice because it is in their nature to ask for more than they’re willing to give. They’ll have us forsake each fragment that is left of our wild, unspoiled femininity like it’s always been theirs to MANipulate and do what they want with but I tell you that they won’t take that from me, they’ll not modify me to meet their product standards and I’ll continue to do my part by not submitting, by invalidating and continuously canceling yet another system of sexist control.