As a former Vogue editor and long-time beauty editor, I’ve always been fascinated by the world of beauty products and procedures. I've watched as invasive cosmetic procedures and surgeries have become as normal as having a facial or buying a new handbag, where young people scarcely out of their teens are having their perfectly lovely natural lips and cheeks filled and their unlined faces frozen with Botox. A journey of self-improvement is one thing, the quest for homogeneous perfection another entirely and it’s not unreasonable to ask whether we are all going to look alike in the future.
Are we morphing ourselves into the AI version of supposed perfect human symmetry, and saying goodbye to individuality? My formative years in magazines were in the late 80s supermodel era, when Cindy Crawford, Naomi Campbell, Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer reigned supreme. These young women were great beauties, each with their own unique features, selling us fashion, cosmetics and fragrances. We loved looking at them, but we weren't altering ourselves surgically to look like them.
Facelifts in the 80s were expensive, and results were wildly different and frequently botched. Cosmetic surgery, facelifts, nose jobs and breast enlargements were very much the domain of the rich and famous, the ladies that lunched and the Hollywood elite. No one admitted to having one, no one really discussed it.
But when injectable collagen started becoming available in the late 80s, and the muscle rela.