The Beauty Epidemic: What Are We Teaching Our Daughters?
I need to say something, and I want to say it without judgment — because I understand the pressure more than I'd like to admit.
Lately I notice botox and lip fillers everywhere, even if it's not the norm in my own circle. Plenty of the people around me have chosen not to. But zoom out and the direction is unmistakable — so many faces all changing in the samedirection. Even one or two people I never in a million years would have expected to go under the needle have quietly done it. And I don't say this to point fingers. I say it because I've felt the pressure myself, even without ever wanting the needle: what if I'm the only one left growing into my wrinkles? What if choosing to age gracefully just reads as choosing to be unattractive?
I haven't given in to it. I won't. But I understand that pressure completely — and that's exactly why I'm writing this.
We are living through a beauty epidemic
That's not an exaggeration. When smoothing your face becomes so normalized that the people around you doing it stops surprising you, something has shifted at a cultural level, not just an individual one.
Our ancestors would not recognize this. For most of human history, a lined face wasn't a problem to solve — it was evidence. Evidence of laughter, of grief survived, of decades lived. We've inherited none of that reverence. We've replaced it with a standard that asks women, specifically, to keep working on themselves indefinitely — never allowed to just settle into the age they actually are.
Why is it always women?
Men are allowed to age. A man's lines get called character. A woman's get called tired. Nobody tells a fifty-year-old man he "doesn't age as well as women." But we say it about women constantly, and we've said it long enough that many of us now say it about ourselves, in the mirror, without anyone else in the room.
That's the part that worries me most. This isn't only an industry imposing a standard from the outside anymore. It's internalized. It's a woman alone in her bathroom deciding her own face isn't acceptable as it is — not because anyone said so out loud, but because the culture has been saying so quietly, everywhere, for years.
In my work as a coach, I see this kind of conditioning constantly, even outside conversations about appearance specifically — the quiet, inherited belief that we're not enough as we are, running underneath so much of what people carry into a room. I'd imagine that same pressure is there for many of my clients too, somewhere underneath — a story about aging and worth, absorbed so early and so thoroughly that it no longer registers as a story at all. Aging is just one more place that conditioning finds to live.
The lip filler contradiction nobody wants to talk about
Here's where it gets even more uncomfortable. For decades, Black women have been mocked, stereotyped, and othered for having full, natural lips — treated as a "big feature" to be self-conscious about. White culture made Black women feel they should be ashamed of a feature they were simply born with. Not that they should have been — they were made to feel that way because the beauty standard at the time was built around white features, and simply never made room for theirs.
Now those similar features are being surgically purchased by women who were never on the receiving end of that mockery in the first place, with none of the acknowledgment of where this standard actually came from, and none of the history that put Black women through decades of being told the opposite about the very same feature.
This is what makes it appropriation rather than appreciation: the feature gets separated from the women it was taken from — praised on one face, mocked on another, sometimes in the very same decade. The lips travel. The history doesn't. And the women who were shamed for having them naturally rarely get any credit, or any apology, once those same lips become desirable on someone else.
You could call it appreciation. I'd call it something closer to extraction — taking the aesthetic without taking on any of what it cost the women who originated it.
This isn't just about vanity — it's about safety
There's another piece of this that doesn't get talked about enough: we don't actually know what we're doing to ourselves long-term. Dermal fillers are still relatively new, and the substances being injected into our faces haven't been tracked for decades the way real safety would require. We're the test group, in real time.
And the cost may not only be physical. A growing body of research on the "facial feedback hypothesis" has found that paralyzing the muscles behind a frown with Botox doesn't just freeze the face — it can dampen the brain's own processing of emotion. Studies using brain imaging have found measurable changes in the amygdala, the brain's emotional processing center, after Botox treatment, and some research has found people become slightly less accurate at reading other people's emotions once their own expressive muscles are frozen. The theory is simple: our brains use our own facial movements as part of how we register and recognize emotion, in ourselves and in others. Freeze the face, and you may be dulling something more than a wrinkle.
This is genuinely concerning. We do need to stop treating these procedures as purely cosmetic, no-risk choices, when the honest answer is that we don't yet know everything they're doing to us.
What we're teaching the next generation
This is the part that actually breaks my heart. Every time we choose the syringe over the crease, we're not just making a private choice about our own face — we're casting a vote on what a girl growing up right now should believe a woman is supposed to look like. We're telling her, without saying a word, that her face has an expiration date. We're telling a boy watching, too, that a woman's worth is tied to how well she resists time.
I'm not writing this to shame anyone who has made that choice. I understand the pull. I'm writing this for the people who have felt it — the ones staring at a new line, weighing whether to smooth it away, wondering if it would really be so bad.
It wouldn't be bad. It's your face and your choice. But I want you to know, before you decide, that the crease isn't the problem. The story we've all been sold about what that crease means — that's the problem. And the more of us who buy into it, the harder it becomes for any of us to opt out.
Our ancestors wore their lines like a record of a life fully lived. I'd like to believe we can still choose to do the same.
