I’ve taken up a new hobby; forehead watching. It recently occurred to me that everyone’s foreheads either don’t move or move justttt enough that you don’t notice they’re not really moving. I engage in my new hobby at home on my couch while I watch TV and in the aisles of Target. The foreheads are frozen onscreen and in person. We’ve reached the era of everyone has botox, and this realization has left me unsettled.

I’ve been moisturizing since my 20th birthday. I developed a skincare routine I adhered to with religious ferocity while my peers were going to bed with full faces of makeup. I understand people not wanting wrinkles – I don’t want them. I’ve always been upfront about this vanity. But I guess the question is, should we always get what we want? Womp… womp. I know, eye roll. Lighten up. It’s just botox… and filler… and a load of other procedures that are becoming accessible and I guess, affordable? (if you have a grand to spare every couple of months).

And now there’s something called Buccal Fat Removal, which removes fat from faces that are thought to be “too round.” Yes, you read that correctly. What was once desirable, a cherubic face is now being traded for an angular and, sometimes satanic-looking, hollow shell. It’s taking Hollywood by storm, and women in their 20s are undergoing this procedure. They’re aging themselves early, which will lead to needing more filler and injections as their remaining buccal fat disintegrates naturally. So Buccal Fat Removal makes women in their 20s look good for ten years, then need twice as much plastic surgery. What a brilliant racket.

We often blame society for our poor self-esteem and unrealistic beauty standards. If we know big lips and smooth foreheads are part of “the male gaze” (Am I using that term right?), then why are so many of us running to get botox and filler? As if we have no agency whatsoever. Is it really to please ourselves? It is ultimately our choice to participate in these procedures. Also, I can’t help but wonder how many of the people getting botox only eat organic grain bowls, sleep on organic cotton sheets, and use organic cosmetics. I can only use organic eyeshadow, but I’ll inject a synthetic foreign substance straight into my eyelids without a second thought. Can we at least just try to be a little honest about it?

I’ll try to be honest. As someone who put a lot of effort into slowing the wrinkles down, I find it utterly annoying that people can just throw money at a problem and recreate 18 years of dutiful commitment to a nightly regimen. I am bitter about this. My plans of looking better than everyone else because I worked so hard, are not panning out the way I intended. It’s another reminder that hard work doesn’t always pay off, but money does. Instead of spending my time moisturizing, I should’ve been figuring out how to make money to eventually get botox and filler.

But you know, to each their own. “I’m all for, whatever makes a woman feel better about herself.” – said every actress who either refuses botox, but doesn’t want to sound judgemental, or any actress who has it. I think this lukewarm take on botox and fillers is exactly why we are where we’re at with our faces. Because again, no one is being honest about why we get plastic surgery. I think people get any type of cosmetic plastic surgery for two reasons:

1: They think they aren’t attractive.

2: They’re afraid they’re no longer attractive.

That’s it. And the people in group number two justify those in group number one. The fading beauties in group number two tell the truth. They say we’ve had such amazing glorious attention for our looks all these years that we’re willing to go under the knife to preserve this attention. Can you really blame the people in group number one for wanting a taste of that? I don’t.

Which is why I don’t have a hardline “no” stance on plastic surgery or injectables. What I’m struggling with, is its acceptability and accessibility. Cosmetic plastic surgery shouldn’t be for the masses. It shouldn’t be so widespread. It shouldn’t be normal. It should be for lack of a better analogy, “rare, safe, and legal.” Instead, we’re “normalizing” not looking normal – frozen, hollow faces, with puffy lips that photograph well but don’t emote well in the real world.

But maybe the real world is changing and my millennial boomer brain can’t handle it? Now the real world is actually the photograph, and the time in between pictures we’re just waiting to exist. We’ve officially entered my favorite Twilight Zone episode “Eye of the Beholder.” The one where everyone has horrific pig faces and the ogre is the girl with the beautiful face. If you don’t have duck lips in ten years, you might be a societal ogre.

Or, perhaps, the opposite will happen. Once everyone can afford duck lips they won’t be that desirable anymore. There’s nothing elite people hate more than commoners coming for their status markers. This is the best-case scenario. Even for a peasant such as myself, the minute anything is trendy it isn’t desirable.

I guess I can’t help but question why I do things. This is the same reason why I never got a tattoo. Whenever I came up with something I thought I wanted, it would be followed by, “Why?” Like why did I need to have an image of a cloud on my body for my remaining days? I did not have a compelling reason. For me, it all seemed to point toward an identity statement or an attempt at something concrete that ended up being another passing phase like my green hair. Thank god hair grows back.

Why are we so afraid of wrinkles? No one wants to be undesirable and therefore invisible… to everyone. I’m not just talking about men. Women don’t care about old people either. And if you can afford these procedures, you can stay visible for a little longer and you can hold on to the feeling that maybe, just maybe you’ll live forever. But ultimately, wrinkles point to death and botox isn’t stopping that. No matter what we do, we’re aging. We’re dying. It’s terrifying. This is living. The end.