Are Cosmetic Procedures Really About Looking Younger?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Let’s start from the beginning. Not all cosmetic procedures are about looking younger. Breast implants, rhinoplasty, Brazilian butt lifts, lip fillers, etc., etc. are about improving your appearance but not necessarily fighting against the ravages of aging. But a lot of plastic surgery exists to help people maintain a youthful appearance. Face lifts, neck lifts, dermal laser resurfacing, fat transfers, and I’ll include non-surgical methods such as botox in this category.

What prompted this thread was the appearance of Matt Gaetz at the RNC rocking that botox look. He looks like a plastic toy of Butthead licensed from MTV back in the 1990s. i.e. He somehow looks more ridiculous if you can believe it or not. When I saw him my immediate thought wasn’t, “Oh, he looks more youthful and vigorous now.” It was more like, “Bwa ha ha ha ha ha! He looks ridiculous.”

But then I got to thinking, a lot of people who undergo cosmetic procedures look a little ridiculous. I don’t mean the botched jobs or the folks who have body dysmorphia and overdo it on the surgeries, but very often they look unnatural and a little strange to me. But undoubtably there are probably people who have had work done and I’d never know it.

So it it really about looking youthful or is it just conspicuous consumption to tell the rest of the world you can afford to rennovate your face?

2

Losing fat in the face and wrinkled skin are definitely signs of aging, so using fillers, facelifts and botox are certainly ways to try to mask those signs.

But I agree that there are some cosmetic procedures that just seem like weird fads, like using filler to get grotesquely puffy lips.

3

Without the Botox he would look ridiculous sitting across from his dates.

4

I get that. But my point is that they very often don’t look any younger. They just look like they’ve had plastic surgery.

5

Wouldn’t you have to see a direct before-and-after comparison to know for sure that a procedure is ineffective? And isn’t it possible that there are a lot of discreet cosmetic procedures that you’re not even noticing?

6

Usually it’s about either fixing perceived or real flaws in appearance or looking more youthful. Sometimes it’s about getting ridiculous lips to copy the women on TV, movies, and the internet. Those women, I feel very sorry for.

The women I know who’ve had facelifts you’d never know it if they didn’t tell you. Same with fillers. Once people get cheek implants though, they start looking odd.

7

Who, for example?

8

To answer your first question, no. Because very often you can just look at someone and see they’ve had plastic surgery. As for your second question, I’ll point to the OP.

9

Matt Gaetz for one. My company’s employment law attorney. Various women I see when I go shopping during the day in the ritzy supermarkets.

10

Now I curse you for making me look at pictures of him online.

11

Here’s an example: country singer Shania Twain.

This picture is from a 2020 article; given that that was during the pandemic, I’d guess it’s actually from 2018 or 2019. She’s about 53 or 54 in the picture, and while she certainly looks older than she looked at the peak of her career in the 1990s, her facial features are still recognizably “her.”

And this is her from this year. It’s clear that she’s had significant cosmetic surgery done in the intervening years, and to my eye, she looks no younger, but she does look radically different. If I saw this picture without any cue that it was Shania, I would not recognize her.

12

Some procedures don’t age well.

13

Truly I’m doing God’s work.

14

Woah. It looks as though she attempted to look younger, but instead she ust looks “off”. The cheek implants/fillers and fattened lips are supposed to fill out aging thinning lips and sagging or overstretched cheeks from a facelift.

15

It seems to me that a lot of people who undergo surgery do look younger. Whenever I see someone who looks remarkably young for their age or younger than they used to, I assume they had work done.

What seems often noticeable is what they look like as normal ageing continues. And, yes, the fact that they sometimes don’t look quite like themselves.

16

“Will this make me look any younger?”
“No, it will make you look like a 53yo who is taking botox”

(Actual conversation with doctor. Not my doctor, a lady friend’s.)

17

Setting aside celebrities, there is certainly a contingent of well-off folks for whom buying cosmetic surgery is just something they do. It’s simply part of their social mileu and expected. More women than men, but I see plenty of 70-something couples around here both wearing the mask of age 50-ish artificially arrested aging. Which looks just like what it is: artificially arrested portions of aging, while other effects continue on unabated.

So you can recognize some aspects of a face like that which resemble younger skin or face shape or hair or whatever, but the total effect is anything but natural age e.g. 50.


This is very true. E.g. in @kenobi_65’s Twain pix I’m not sure how much more has been done in the later picture versus her simply aging while the old work sits there nearly inert inside a slowly-changing body.

Often subsequent work is done not in a continued effort to retain the look of an e.g. 40yo, but simply to prevent the existing work from looking weirder and weirder as the person ages.

I know a couple of ordinary middle-class means. She is really really cute and a fitness animal, and always has been. Anyhow in her early 50s she invested in some fairly discreet cosmetic surgery and turned back the clock on her face and body a bunch, while still looking complete and consistent. Fast forward 10 years and the same work is starting to look distinctly unnatural. The mask doesn’t fit so well anymore. Another 5-10 years it won’t look natural at all. So while it will be youth-like in some aspects, the total effect won’t be youthful.


My bottom line:
Going back to the OP’s title question:
It’s not necessarily about looking younger. It’s about looking better for whatever socially-defined standard exists now. Greta Garbo never had ducklips, and now they’re almost de rigeur. “Better” is subject to change.

To be sure, in our youth-obsessed society, younger is a decent proxy for better. Cosmetic surgery camouflages some small aspects of aging and, like the magician’s wand, can serve to distract from other aspects. But only a little bit. Meanwhile, like a giant swollen wart on the side of a nose, it can elicit powerful reactions of “Oh, that just ain’t right”.

By the time you get an e.g. 70yo trying to look e.g. 40, what you have is a weird looking 70yo in a strange costume that speaks more to their mental / emotional state than their physical condition.

18

Yes, it’s not clear to me that the two pictures are comparing “before cosmetic treatments” to “after cosmetic treatments” rather than “younger (with cosmetic treatments)” vs. “older (with cosmetic treatments)”.

19

r/Botchedsurgeries is a great place to see before/after pictures.

20

The worst one I’ve seen lately is Sharon Osbourne. I always wonder if when they look in a mirror, do they think they look really good? I just don’t get it.