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 relaxant Botox was approved by the US Food and Drug Administration in 1989, there was a certain democratization of beauty as prices became more affordable and procedures more safe and accessible. As Vogue's then beauty editor, I was the first to sign up for the 'Paris Lip' — a dermal technique used to sculpture the lips with the aim of creating a pouty, well-defined voluptuous set of lips. I was also the first to sign up for Botox injections, even though I was in my late 20’s and my skin was pretty good.
My lips were okay too, to be honest. I don’t mind having thin lips and I don’t think that a trout pout makes you look better or younger. But 'preventative' beauty was the key message, so off I went.
Over the next two decades, I had numerous Botox sessions, lip line injections, laser peels, painful radio frequency treatments that felt like being punched in the jaw, and one scary session when my skin was lasered raw (while I was out of it on Endone) with fat extracted from my thighs and pressed into my face, causing it to scab and swell to the size of a lion. My family were horrified. I was horrified.
It was time for me to confront how I wanted to age, and at what point I was prepared to accept reality. The rise of the high-maintenance, high-profile, highly filtered Kardashians and Jenners has been a significant contributor to promoting and normalising cosmetic enhancements, especially as we watched the youngest, Kylie Jenner swiftly morph from being a regular-looking teenager to a pillow-lipped Jessica Rabbit over a few short years. No one cares if you weren’t born with it.
You can buy it. It's fashion. Social media targets us all, at every age.
A couple of procedures and an AI filter can have you looking like an Instagram model. Scrolling through photos of Kim Kardashian, Beyonce and Selena Gomez it’s sometimes hard to tell who is who. It begs the question of whether will we need living, breathing models if AI has decided the weird avatar hybrid we should look all like.
We are eliminating our differences, imperfections and also, the magic of our uniqueness. At around age 50 I went to visit yet another injector, and she told it to me straight. “Your skin is great for your age.
You’ve done the best you can do with filler and Botox," she said. She then suggested blepharoplasty — an operation to remove excess skin and fat from your eyelids — and after that I should call it a day. I appreciated her honesty.
I want to be that older woman who has made peace with how she looks, the one who knows she earned the lines and wrinkles and saggy skin. I don’t lie about my age, and you have to ask who are you kidding anyway with the constant and costly procedures. I think it’s a folly to think that lots of injectables will make you look younger, although I am a big fan of laser skin treatments to improve texture and give you a healthy glow.
But I see reality show stars in their 20s with so much cosmetic work they look years older, and mature actresses who have obliterated their features with so much work that you can’t recognise them. It is not for me to judge; everything is of course up to the individual and what makes them happy, whether it’s a skin peel or a radical surgical transformation. It seems it is the rare person who sees beauty in ageing, and who accepts imperfection.
AI certainly doesn’t. But I’m trying. Share facebook twitter instagram youtube Insight is Australia's leading forum for debate and powerful first-person stories offering a unique perspective on the way we live.
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