I was brainwashed into getting Botox – until I realised the grubby truth

Booking my first-ever appointment for under-eye filler felt as casual as booking my next haircut. It would only take a matter of minutes, there would be no downtime, and I would mildly dread it for weeks. Like my no-nonsense hairdresser who tells me every six months that cutting at least three inches off is absolutely necessary to stop my hair from breaking, a brusque cosmetic surgeon had told me that injecting synthetic gel into my tired and hollowing tear troughs was unfortunately the only thing for them. Or else, she implied, my 33-year-old face would be broken too. I was suffering, like so many women, with a self-diagnosed case of “facial dysmorphia”: a disconnect from your own face as a result of years seeing it reflected in mirrors, on Zoom, in my phone camera, and feeling like it no longer looked “right”. That is to say, it no longer looked like the smooth, poreless and perfectly proportioned faces I was seeing on Instagram: ageless and glowing, oval shape, fox eyes, wide, plump lips, high, arched brows, a softly rounded chin, tanned skin, and long, wavy hair. Everyone looked beautiful, but they also looked the same, and strangely surreal, manipulated and filtered through popular face-editing apps like Facetune or Meta’s own editing tools. American beauty writer Jessica DeFino was one of the pioneers of the term “Instagram Face” in 2019, describing the frictionless experience of not knowing whether you “just scrolled past a selfie of Emily Ratajkowski or Bella Hadid”. It was only a matter of time before people realised they could recreate that perfect face in real life, through cosmetic procedures. Over the last few years, surgeons have revealed a rise in the number of younger patients – one industry survey of women aged 18 to 55 found over half of patients are now under 35 – who want to look better in selfies or look like their filtered photos. More recently, they have noted a rise in patients who want to look like AI. These astonishingly beautiful, artificial women have been walking across my phone screen lately too. The other night, as I scrolled through Instagram before bed, I paused to consider a woman smiling and winking from the big screen of a baseball game, the camera having panned to the stalls. She looked so perfect I assumed she must be famous, and clicked on her page to see more. It took at least a minute before I realised she was AI, her profile filled with beach selfies and a picture of her holding a birthday cake, alongside a caption about turning 27. I felt some kind of comfort – no one can be that perfect – but then confusion, because actually, the reason I thought she was human to start with is because so many influencers and celebrities no longer look human. After 37-year-old Emma Stone was pictured at the Oscars earlier this year, her face impossibly taut and eyes drawn upwards, I thought I was staring at the kind of AI-modified images I’d seen circulating on Instagram of Margot Robbie during her Barbie press tour (when the TikTok hashtag #BarbieBotox also reached 9.4 million views). When I was considering whether to book my filler appointment last month, I canvassed women I knew on what I should do. Over half of them had either dabbled or routinely booked cosmetic treatments (usually Botox), and almost all of them encouraged me to do “whatever feels right for me”. We spoke in reassuringly feminist terms, couched in self-care and empowerment: I was doing it to feel “more like myself”, to “look more rested” and “get a little confidence boost”. Our liberal values mean we have become so wary of judging each other’s life choices or policing each other’s bodies – God knows there are enough people who want to do that for us – that we resist summoning any kind of personal accountability. Instead, we united in a cursory lament on the injustice of women feeling required to stop ageing as if it were an infectious disease, but agreed that, short of dismantling the patriarchy, there wasn’t much we could do about it. Well, other than to freeze and fill our faces and hope they don’t break. Besides, if everyone else seemed to be doing it, why should we get left behind? In the days leading up to my appointment, the mild dread turned into panic. I had become fixated on “horror stories” circulating on Reddit about migrating filler that “ruined” their faces, or the regret they felt after seeing a reflection that felt no longer theirs. I had also become aware of the fact that, since deciding to “fix” my under-eyes, other things suddenly looked like they needed fixing too. When, during my consultation with the cosmetic surgeon, she told me I’d also “probably need a lower bleph” in five years, I’d rolled my eyes. Yet after taking my make-up off one evening, I found myself looking up the price. I felt, like Jia Tolentino describes in her recent New Yorker essay Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, as if “the face is separating from the person, and the person is separating from the soul”. Forty-eight hours before my appointment, I cancelled it. Almost immediately, I felt immense relief, as if I had fumigated my own mind of something poisonous. My younger sister, who looks like me, told me she was also relieved – the fact I’d wanted to change my face had made her think she needed to change hers. I have stopped consuming all those before and after write-ups from women’s magazines promising we can upgrade our lives one tweakment at a time, realising that, actually, “everyone” is not altering themselves – contrary to my distorted online echo chamber, 81 per cent of Britons have never tried a cosmetic treatment at all. In the weeks since, I deleted Instagram, re-downloading it only when I need it for work, and have, somewhat unconsciously, spent less time in front of the mirror. Perhaps it’s a nice coincidence, but I have spent a lot more time reading – thinking about real, human faces other than my own.