When I was in high school, I remember two girls in my school having "nose jobs." Both of them did have rather large noses, and both were from "monied" families. Or at least my definition of being "monied," which basically meant you lived in a parish with colonial and tudor homes, and no mingy little ranch or puny Cape Cod homes, let alone three deckers.
They had their surgeries during school vacation weeks, and came back with large bandages across their noses and the remnants of black eyes.
At the time, I thought the idea of having a nose job was weird. Sure, both S and P had large noses (what would have been referred to as "schnozzes," but I never could understand why it mattered all that much. Their noses weren't disfiguring. They were just, well, large.
But I always was slow on the uptake when it came to understanding all the judgement calls about certain physical attributes (mostly of women).
Having big feet? Huh? A big knock on Jackie Kennedy was that she wore a size 10 shoe. Sure, the fact that her foot was narrow - 2A - somewhat mitigated the insult to mankind that was a size 10. But big feet: heavens forbid! (By the time I was in eighth grade, I also wore a size 10. 4A. Even narrower than Jackie's! Even harder to find shoes that fit. Still: big feet! What a terrible curse, even if cool shoes were available in your size.
But big feet were the least of my sins against beauty.
It was bad to be short-waisted. And I was short-waisted. I was an adult before I realized that short-waisted pretty much equalled long-legged, which was a good thing. (Cue up the wolf-whistles.) And even though this revelation got me off the hook as far as beeing a lesser woman because I was short-waisted, I never truly got what the big deal was.
Wearing glasses? Men seldom make passes, etc. Glasses were for the best friend of the pretty girl, not for the pretty girl who was going to get the cute fella. (Needless to say, I wore glasses, and did so until I was 17 and spent a lot of my summer earnings from the shoe factory on contact lenses.)
And thin lips? Forget about it? You are just so not invited to the beauty club! I've never been all that much of a makeup wearer, but - other when it was required when I was a Big Boy waitress, I've never worn lipstick. Spend time trying to draw an upper lip? What a waste of time!
At least I didn't wear braces which, in my circle were only for those who had some sort of dental deformity that was going to impede you from eating normally My brother Tom had a front tooth that came in almost perpendicular to the rest of his teeth. He was the only one in our family who wore braces. Today, we all would have been likely candidates due to crowded lower teeth and oddly spaced top front teeth.
Anyway, when I was growing up, it almost seemed as if not being conventionally pretty (and petite, and dainty, and had perfect eyesight and perfect lips, and average sized feet) was an offense against nature. Or at least the swath of nature that men comprised.
To be considered the perfect embodiment of womenhood you had to be pretty. Even as a kid, I thought it was dumb that pretty always seemed to trump intelligence, kindness, and good humor when women were beeing weighe and found wanting.
Then there was plastic surgery, which was something you heard about occasionally. Something rich folk. Something Hollywood. Mostly it meant a face lift, something that aging actresses had when they got a bit jowly and/or wrinkly.
Who could blame movie stars for wanting to stay pretty? But normal, everyday people didn't get any plastic surgery beyond a nose job.
Then fast forward a few decades and all sorts of people were having all sorts of work done. Sometimes a face lift to get rid of the saggy-baggy look, sometimes a boob job in which sacks of goop that turned out to be not so great for you were inserted in your breats to augment them.
A lot what was going on, cosmetic enhancment-wise, didn't mean going under the knife. It meant getting jabbed by a needle and having something that wasn't there before get stuff injected in.
Botox freezes your skin so that your frown lines and crows' feet don't show.
And then fillers became the thing. Lips, cheeks, hands, noses...Whever it looked like you could use some sculpting, some plumper-upping, some boost. Fillers have been around for quite a while. In the late 1800's there were paraffin was injected. (Didn't work very well.) And each decade seemed to bring with it a new advance. But it was when hyaluronic acid became the filler around the turn of this century, fillers really took off. And took off among the younger set who wanted the sort of facial perfection they saw from beauty influencers online.
So the fill 'er up culture took off.
But now what's increasingly in demand are filler rerversals.
Seems that while fillers were supposed to disolve, they didn't always do so, or did so only partially. After years of getting fillers, and having them repeatedly topped off, folks were noticing that they had all that gel-like crud accumulating in their noses, lips, chins, or wherevers. And it didn't look all that good.
Ashely Stobart is a beauty influence. (Sorry, Ashley, but it's absurd enough typing the words beauty influcence, let alone actually being one.) After years of fillers, her face was looking puffy and "off."
She decided to get her fillers reversed, but dissolving more than a decade's worth of substances she had in her face left her with sagging skin. So she opted to get a face-lift at age 34.
She's not alone. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons said that while the overwhelming majority of facelifts are still among people over 50, their members have observed an increase among people in their 40s and younger. (Source: ABC News)
Here was someone who started playing around with getting injected with foreign substances in her 20's - when she probably looked perfectly fine, or imperfectly fine anyway - looking for a reversal in her 30's. Which turned out to be something of a nightmare.
Even though Stobart had some of her fillers removed already, she said the face-lift surgery was grueling.
"They found a lot of hyaluronic acid, or remnants of some injectable at some point that I had had. They were pushing it out for hours," she told ABC News. "I was in surgery for 9.5 hours in total. That wasn't anticipated because when he opened everything up, it turned out there was still a lot left in there."
But, just like fillers turned out to be, facelifts are there own sort of slippery slope. They only last about 7-10 years or so, 15 years max, and you need to keep having them to keep natural aging at bay. And so you can end up with a frozen face where you don't have any normal expression, and can't even crack a smile. Or, worse, end up like the "Catwoman" Jocelyn Wildenstein (shown in the pictures above) who went from a beautiful young woman to a creature from the beyond who looked god-awful.
I feel bad for these young women who feel like they have to be perpetually pursuing some (false) notion of beauty perfection. Maybe there'll be all sorts of "new and improved" by the time they get older, so they won't end up looking like the Catwoman.
What's wrong with a big nose? Thin lips? Laugh lines?
Is it such a crime to not be beautiful? (Is it such a crime to just let yourself get old?)
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