I Really Hope That Cosmetic Surgery Goes Out of Style One Day
I really hope that botox and cosmetic surgery goes out of style one day.
The prepackaged “glow-up” looks awful 99% of the time, and to me it is a sign of body dysmorphia.
Not to get overly clinical but I say dysmorphia because...if you prefer this cookie-cutter face to what you previously had—you’re obviously not seeing yourself in the mirror correctly. It’s one of the most extreme examples of fixing what’s not broken.
I get frustrated seeing some of the most gorgeous women destroy their natural beauty with these procedures.
It’s not purely aesthetic, either. When it’s a woman who I felt like had a strong sense of self, to me it sadly reveals that she hasn’t been feeling very good about herself lately.
Every ruined face feels like they’ve been captured by an invisible army.
I just take off my hat like, “Damn. They got you too?!”
And if I had found the woman exceptionally beautiful, my heart feels extra heavy.
Nerissa Irving has always been one of the most gorgeous women I have ever laid eyes on. Her long luxurious locs inspired me when I first started growing mine in 2009. I admired her as a figure of natural beauty in a time when I was learning how to embrace mine.
Nerissa’s uniquely ethnic features helped her carve out a niche as a model, which opened the door for entrepreneurship. Every few months or so I would check on her Instagram page to admire her photos and see what had been up to.
But when I visited her page a few months ago, I looked at her face and something felt off. I couldn’t quite place it at first, but her face just looked weird…like it had lost its flavor.
After comparing her old photos to the new ones, I eventually realized she got a nose job. The typical kind that non-white women get, to make her nose look narrower, pointier, and more up-turned. Her lips looked weird too.
Nerissa’s original nose had a very slight hook, reminiscent of mixed African and Arabic features. It was literally the perfect nose…for her. It was cute and well-proportioned. Perfect for her lips. Perfect for her face.
Perfect, period.
She literally looked like a Kemetic Princess. But she has demolished her blessings by carving it into some poor imitation of a white girl.
Her beautiful, distinct, perfectly God-given nose—gone. Gone forever.
I wondered—who told her that she needed to change? Was the spotlight too much? Has her husband been mistreating her? What happened?!
My heart sank, and I felt angry. Something about it felt like a real loss to me.
And the biggest loss was not her nose. It was knowing that all this while, she didn’t even know just how beautiful she was.
It’s knowing that deep down she thought she was ugly enough to need fixing.
I know some people will look at this and say it’s just looks, and looks don’t matter. We shouldn’t value women by their looks, women shouldn’t care about how they look. It’s all about “what’s inside”, blah blah BLAH blah blah….
No. It matters.
Beauty matters. There is nothing wrong with a woman enjoying, cultivating, and maintaining her natural beauty.
There is nothing wrong with admiring and valuing women’s physical beauty.
Just like you would admire a sunset, a peacock, or any other stunning force of nature.
Beautiful women are works of art.
Where we fuck it up is by tampering with nature.
We fuck it up, by creating factory-farmed versions of “beauty” in labs, and framing it as aspirational.
We fuck it up by selling our souls to a culture of extreme vanity.
We fuck it up by creating insecurities that don’t need to exist, and manufacturing unnecessary solutions.
I’ve noticed a lot of female influencers like to flaunt a “live and let live” attitude towards cosmetic surgery. They don’t want to appear judgmental.
They want to act like it’s nobody’s business what someone else chooses to do with their body.
But in reality, it’s that they don’t want to get attacked for stepping on toes.
They want to make the “wrong and strong” crowd feel comfortable.
We enable all types of self-destructive bullshit by donning this faux “non-judgmental” attitude. We pretend as if our choices exist in a vacuum, without influence from society, and without any impact on others.
My stance is not coming from a place of “judgment” in the sense that I turn my nose up at women who do cosmetic procedures.
After all, I’ve been there. I used to do a bunch of harmful things to my hair and body in an effort to fit beauty standards. I too, used to want to erase my unique features.
I have compassion and understanding for why they do it…but I also condemn it.
And while some women might like the results, I don’t believe it will ever make them feel good about themselves on any deep level.
In exchange for superficial confidence, it chips at your self-esteem. It’ll never really scratch that itch. The insecurities will always be there, squirming beneath the surface of your skin.
It’s just an endless hamster wheel of procedures until the day you die.
And the hamster wheel doesn’t stay the same pace, either. It gets faster and more exhausting as you struggle to keep up with the aging process.
You become a slave to the false idol of beauty.
Personally, I believe this is bad karma to bring with you to the grave.
Who wants to be working that shit out in the next lifetime?!
Lately I have been thinking about how I would like to approach my own process of graceful aging, and enjoying my natural beauty as I grow older. I will probably write about it more in the future.
But today, after being slapped in the face with yet another naturally gorgeous celebrity with cheek filler that made her look like the crypt-keeper…I had a thought.
Hollywood is toxic as fuck, and I never want to be part of it.
But really what it is—is that I never want to internalize the messaging that “the culture” promotes: that I need to mutilate my face to resemble a pre-packaged nightmare in order to be beautiful.
Or that—I need to look as young as possible, even if it means dowsing my hair in harsh chemicals, and treating my skin like open heart surgery.
I don’t want to surround myself with people who think this way, either.
I am trying to move towards wholeness and freedom, and I rebuke anything that stands in the way, even if others judge me for it.
I like "I hope it goes out of style one day." Often anyone saying anything negative about plastic surgery gets stampeded by a herd announcing how hard they would never dare impinge upon the freedoms of consenting adults to do what they want with their bodies blah blah blah ...
But where is there within the space of consenting adult freedoms blah blah blah ... where you still wish more could simply choose to NOT?
And not JUST for yourself (in my case, sounds like you too) but because the more you see folks getting "procedures" you imagine their salesmen are the ones getting the most out of them.
Telling anyone she should save her money and avoid risking her health might be considered "hateful" as well because you're not "affirming" her self-concept as actually needing all that. Or something?
Many years ago, I thought about pursuing an acting career. I did musical theatre in high school and while I didn’t study drama in college, I took various acting classes while in school in NYC. I got head shots done at that time as a result. The make up artist who did my make up for the shoot casually said the following to me: “You’re a pretty girl and you have a good look, you can probably get a lot of work. But you might want to rethink the nose. Your nose is quite “ethnic”. I remembered it verbatim to this day because I was so shocked by her directness. I was young at the time and it was the ‘80’s so people didn’t think twice about saying something like this to someone, particularly women and girls. I am of mixed ethnicity but I am very proud of my Italian heritage (which is where I got the nose). I said to her: “Sophia Loren has a big nose and she is beautiful and she works.” Not sure where I got the courage to say that at the time but she looked at me like I had three heads.
I am proud to say I never changed my nose or any other body part. Wound up never pursuing a career in the “business”. Given how it chewed up and spit out girls/women on a regular basis, can’t say I regret my decision.
Times have changed since then. Unfortunately the mindset for an organized crowd to judge what the standard of beauty should be hasn’t unfortunately.