For a long time I couldn’t understand why I felt so angry every time I saw a woman who’d had obvious cosmetic surgery.
Pillow lips. Chipmunk cheeks. Frozen foreheads. Immobilised eyes. Blank stares. That disconcerting overall puffiness that has become so familiar.
Whether I was looking at a celebrity on a red carpet or in a photo, even a stranger standing next to me in a cafe, I could feel the fury rise up and prickle underneath my skin.
It was never a pleasant sensation.
These women didn’t deserve my anger and on an intellectual level I understood that completely. They were simply making personal choices about their faces and bodies which is the basic tenet of feminism. Their choices and their faces were none of my business.
And yet still, I seethed.
For a while, I tried to reshape my anger into empathy. These poor women. How awful to look in the mirror and feel so bad that you’d spend thousands of dollars and get your face injected, plumped up, pulled tauter and paralysed. And for the celebrities, how cruel to have your career indexed to your face and your ability to stay frozen – quite literally – around age 28.
Then I decided my anger was more about the lying; the way celebrities always insist the secret of their youthful good looks is as simple as ‘sunscreen’, ‘luck’ and ‘laughter”. Come on. That’s not playing fair. That’s like saying your hair changed colour in the sun.
Yes, it does irk me when a celebrity insults our intelligence (and our eyesight) by insisting they’re all natural when they’re very obviously not. Or by hiding behind the idea that ‘plastic surgery‘ means a scalpel and that injectibles don’t count as ‘work’. Please.