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Our face has become a bigger class marker than any other beauty choice. Today, the aspirational face is one that looks “untouched” while requiring more invasive work than before. Celebrities are repositioning these procedures as feminism tools for empowerment and progress.
This isn’t new, taboo procedures have always relied on powerful women normalizing them and making them desirable. The problem is that today that loop is starting earlier: injectables for teenagers grew 75% in 4 years, which makes sense for a generation raised on AI and editing tools showing them what the “perfect” face should look like.
So what kind of face do you think is a status symbol?
#beauty #botox #culture #marketing #genz
Transcript
Our faces have officially become class signals. I saw this viral New Yorker article talking about how the aspirational face has evolved over the last decade. Ten years ago, the most aspirational faces looked like this, and it was called Instagram rank. Visible Botox and fillers to give a highly contoured appearance. Today, the most aspirational face is one that looks untouched while still requiring more invasive work than before. Celebrities like Kylie and Kris Jenner are repositioning these procedures as tools for female empowerment, and this isn't new. Injectables have always relied on powerful women normalizing them. In the nineteen twenties, Suzanne Noel explicitly framed the face lift as a feminist tool to tackle ageism, work longer, and maintain their financial independence. Tier twenty ten's rappers popularized BBLs reframed as investments and under the illusion of body positivity, and each aesthetic follows the same pattern. Powerful women normalize it through the language of empowerment. It becomes aspirational, gets democratized, and when it does, the elite move on from the visible codes to the invisible codes of wealth. Because while noticeable work requires money, inconspicuous work requires money and access. Today, the loop is starting earlier. Injectables for teenagers grew 75% in four years. So the question is what part of the female body gets commoditized next?
