Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’
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Public media is no longer federally funded, but the NPR network remains yours in service to and powered by you. Keep public media public with a donation today at donate.npr.org and thank you. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. Something strange is happening to the human face. Plastic surgery in the U.S.
is increasingly designed to be invisible and it's working. Faces are being lifted, filled, and reshaped to look naturally youthful and at the same time unnatural. My guest today, writer Gia Tolentino, says this new era of cosmetic enhancement is quietly changing the way people think about aging and what we believe a real face should look like. In her latest New Yorker piece, Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare, Dolantino reports that cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular for teenagers, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under 30. Some are even posting photos online asking strangers whether a facelift is their only hope.
One influencer got famous by striking his jawline with a hammer as part of the online movement known as looks maxing. Other young men followed suit, and artificial intelligence trained on millions of these new faces is generating new beauty standards. Tolentino argues that what's changing isn't just our appearance, it's our relationship to reality. Her argument is that when every face can be optimized, filtered, or surgically refined, the face itself begins to lose its status as evidence of a life lived. She argues that the thing we've long treated as a window into another person is becoming less human and more like a product.
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