Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’
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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. Something strange is happening to the human face. Plastic surgery in the U.S. is increasingly designed to be invisible, and it's working. Faces are being lifted, filled, and reshaped to look naturally youthful and at the same time unnatural. My guest today, writer Gia Tolentino, says this new era of cosmetic enhancement is quietly changing the way people think about aging and what we believe a real face should look like. In her latest New Yorker piece, Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, Tolentino reports that cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular for teenagers, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under 30.
Some are even posting photos online asking strangers whether a facelift is their only hope. One influencer got famous by striking his jawline with a hammer as part of the online movement known as looks maxing. Other young men followed suit, and artificial intelligence trained on millions of these new faces is generating new beauty standards. Tolentino argues that what's changing isn't just our appearance, it's our relationship to reality. Her argument is that when every face can be optimized, filtered, or surgically refined, the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived. She argues that the thing we've long treated as a window into another person is becoming less human and more like a product.
Gia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Seven years ago, she coined the phrase Instagram face, capturing the beauty ideal of the social media era. Her new essay asks what that face has become. And Gia Tolentino, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you so much for having me. Okay. As I mentioned to you, this piece has hit a nerve. And so much of the reaction is basically, yes, we are seeing this. We are feeling this. What can we actually do about it? And the same thing actually happened seven years ago when you coined this term Instagram face. And so I thought before we actually get into your latest piece, remind us what Instagram face is or was.
Right. So sometime last decade, if you were on Instagram, you probably noticed that most of the most prominent, most highly visible faces who generally all belong to white female influencers, they started to kind of converge on a singular face. I remember someone, a makeup artist, described it as a sexy baby tiger. You know, it was the kind of... Kim Kardashian looks like Kendall Jenner, looks like Bella Hadid, looks like Emily Ratajkowski. There was this kind of convergence of the face towards a certain mean that seemed to me to be very overtly shaped by the algorithm. The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to kind of lift your cheeks and plump your lips and make your eyes bigger and make your chin a little more heart-shaped.
And you could press a button or you could use Facetune to digitally alter your face to fit this kind of algorithmically approved beauty standard. This was a face that the algorithm liked. If your face looked like this, you would get more views on your pictures. And then concurrently, There were these technologies. This was kind of the rise of injectables, Botox, filler, these little tweaks that you could do in real life to match the tweaks that you could do digitally. And I wanted to write about it then because it just seemed interesting that faces... were becoming the same, that these highly visible faces were becoming the same. And the incentives didn't necessarily seem to be coming from within.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–15:28
2
What is ‘Instagram face’ and how did Gia Tolentino define it seven years ago?
15:28–26:09
3
How has Instagram face trickled down from influencers to everyday cosmetic procedures?
26:09–32:43
4
What does ‘invisible’ or undetectable plastic surgery look like today?
32:43–49:56
Speakers
7 identifiedMore from Fresh Air
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