Liz Moody

Because again, status comes from scarcity.

We can get fillers to make our lips fuller, to make our face more symmetrical.

We can get Botox to smooth fine lines.

We can get nose jobs and upper blepharoplasties.

And we know about all of these procedures in a way that we absolutely did not used to.

I do not think anybody 10 years ago, anybody outside of a very small group of people who are really into plastic surgery could have told you what an upper blepharoplasty is.

But now because of social media and the amplification of all of this information, many more of us both know that this exists and then more and more people because of that knowledge are doing it, which then we see those results and it creates this vicious cycle.

You have entire social media accounts devoted to all the different things that Hollywood stars are doing.

Like, oh, here's their veneers.

Here's the secret plastic surgeries that they're getting that we didn't know about.

And the result is, interestingly, that it decreases the status that these things hold.

You might have seen comments in comment sections like, oh, I'm not ugly, I'm just poor.

But there is this idea that if you can purchase beauty, it loses some of its value because the scarcity was the thing that gave it value in the first place.

And another really interesting, terrible side effect of that is that the bar keeps moving because anybody can become thinner now.

So people are getting thinner and thinner and thinner because we haven't figured out what a good body means in a world where what has been the societal standard of a good body is available widely.

People are getting more surgeries, more filler, more Botox, doing more skincare, trying to have even glassier skin because the bar keeps moving.

The more widely available these things get, the more you need to do to be in that little sliver of the scarcity that actually signals the value on the subconscious level.

And I think that's the beginning of where it starts to tip.

It's gone so far in this direction of people doing multi-hour long beauty rituals or people's bodies disappearing or people younger and younger and younger performing this beauty.

The 26-year-olds being appalled that they missed out on their Botox and doing all these laser treatments and all these different things.