HOLLY WAINWRIGHT: Why you suddenly feel bad about… eyelids.

This article will appear in Holly Wainwright's Substack, Holly Out Loud, tomorrow at 6am. Sign up here.

I would like someone to invent a jab that turns off face noise.

I would like it because this morning, I leant into the bathroom mirror and I lifted my eyelids maybe half a centimetre with my fingers and I thought: Yup, that's the one.

And then I raised my brows and observed the rate of forehead corrugation and I thought: Hmmmm.

And then I lowered my chin and watched my jawline disappear and I decided: Yuck.

I examined the skin between my brows and deemed it had become too "textured" a word I had never really associated with skin until… I don't know, May?

And I ran my fingers under the purple-blackish scoops beneath my eyes and I thought: Tired old bag.

Watch more on this here. Post continues after video.

Obviously, that's where I had to stop. Because I am a woman of the Internet, and the Internet tells me that morning negative self-talk is no way to rise and thrive. Calling yourself names in the mirror is NOT the ideal kick off to seizing the day.

But the Internet is also the place that's showing me all the faces that don't look like mine, at any age — the movie stars with the snappy new facelifts, the smooth foreheads of Instagram influencers, the snatched jawlines of the whittled-down popstars.

So it's certainly a confusing and unhelpful place to look for face reassurance: Love yourself, hate yourself. You are enough, but your wrinkles are altogether Too Much.

The relentless scrutiny feels… normal now?

This morning's empowering mirror routine started with eyelids because this week, the Internet has decided that they're over. Eyelids, that is. Done. Outdated. Finished.

If you haven't had a bleph — the shortened, cutesy word for an eyelid lift, or blepharoplasty — you're really not on trend. Your eyelids are embarrassing you, really, drooping all over the place as nature intended.

Articles on cool culture sites, TikTok Before and Afters, newsletters on this very platform and yes, our episode of Mamamia Out Loud this Wednesday, have all been prosecuting the state of eyelids in 2025, and what this 'Says About Us'.

Listen to Wednesday's episode of Mamamia Out Loud, where Jessie, Amelia and I discuss eyelids and essays here. Post continues after audio.

What this 'Says About Us' is that we can't have even a centimetre of face or body that we're allowed to feel okay about. Not when there's money to be made from making us question them. Are my eyelids making me look old? Tired? Uncool? YES, is the answer. A few grand and a week of downtime should sort that for you.

Also on Mamamia Out Loud we discussed, as well as everyone's very wide-awake looking red-carpet eyes, a long and impressive essay about the great con that is the mainstreaming of cosmetic procedures.

The piece, called The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read, by a writer who calls themselves father_karine, argues that it's time we called out that all this jabbing and trimming and lifting is not "normal". And that not saying so, and being unable to talk about women's faces and the things they do to them, is playing right into the hands of the unreachable beauty-standard overlords.

The essay stated that the wishy-washy position of not publicly judging (and mocking? And shunning?) women who have done stuff to their faces means we're all pretending it's totally okay. That we've all been convinced we are awfully ugly and old-looking unless we have "intervened" in our face's inevitable weathering and ultimate collapse.

It's a complicated argument, because the cry of "we're not allowed to talk about women's faces" ignores the fact that all "we" do is talk about women's faces.

Jennifer Lawrence makes a confronting movie about motherhood and mental health and the headlines are about facelifts. Emma Stone makes another completely batsh*t work of creative genius with Yorgos Lanthimos and we all get out a digital red pen and circle (yes) her eyelids.

A group of women make a TV show (the women are interchangeable — the Sex And The City ensemble, Aniston and Witherspoon, Kim Kardashian and Naomi Watts in a car-crash Ryan Murphy hit, Kidman wrapped in a cashmere cardie on a windswept cliff) and the dominant conversation is about whether there are tiny scars near their ears. Whether they've inhibited their acting abilities with too much forehead freezing. Whether they've dealt with their jawlines. How much eyelid is on visible display to our naked (hooded) eye.

And the celebrities are talking about their faces, too, now. Savvy A-listers have stopped pretending that their lineless skin is because of water and vegetables. They're sharing their surgeon's numbers (Kris Jenner) and telling everyone what's on their future procedural Wishlist (Jennifer Lawrence). Because they know that the message has successfully got out — fiddling with your face used to be the territory of the suer-rich, but now a quarter of millennial Australians have had a cosmetic procedure, a third are planning on it, and Gen Z have solidly embraced the idea of "preventative" anti-ageing, in their early-20s.

If this is not talking about women's faces, I'm unclear what talking about them looks like.

But it is absolutely true that if there was ever a battle over whether it's "okay" to have an ageing face in a public place, it's settled. The eyelids have lost.

For those of us who are taking a really long time deciding whether we want to step onto the battlefield in the first place, because we're not entirely sure it's ideal to forget what a human face was once 'meant' to look like, or we're a little disturbed at this blanket acceptance that "older = worse" is good for us, or just because we can't justify the time and money involved in this level of maintenance? Well, we're just left with the noise.

And our reflections, with our sticky fingers all over them — hoisting this, smoothing that — wondering: If we're not talking about women's faces, why does mine feel so completely wrong right now?

It must be my eyelids.

Listen to Mamamia Out Loud back in your ears on Monday.

Feature image: Getty/Canva.