And something doesn’t add up in my mind. It just shortens somewhere.
Social networks are full of posts that we are all beautiful, regardless of how old we are. Actress Pamela Anderson received a new wave of popularity when she stopped dyeing and showed her wrinkles to the whole world. Even in advertisements, which we have become accustomed to blaming for creating unrealistic standards of beauty, models of various ages appear.
Criticizing appearance is poor tone, body shaming. We promote body positivity – we love ourselves with all the wrinkles! Is that so? Isn’t it?
I am 36 years old. I don’t remember when I saw a woman of my age with a wrinkled forehead in Vilnius. Until recently, I thought Botox was something only Cher could do. Now it is allowed by project managers who do not earn even 2,000 euros per month. I’m talking to the office administrator, trying not to stare at her forehead, so hard you could drive a nail in it.
“You know, with us, if you’re over 30 years old, then everyone is probably already going,” says a friend who works in a public relations agency.
This is ours body positivitywhich made the whole internet cry.
Injections are no longer something exclusive, and for some women it is simply hygiene, like dyeing the roots of the hair or a long-term manicure.
Some cognitive dissonance. In one ear they whisper how you should accept yourself, and in the other you hear a proposal to inject a toxin into your forehead, because the consequences are easy to predict: if you don’t inject yourself, you’ll be the only old one millennial in the whole world – everyone else’s foreheads will be hard, but yours will not.
I tried botulinum a couple of times myself. Now I think I did it not because of a wrinkle in my forehead, but because of what was in my mind at the time. My mood was bad, I felt exhausted and exhausted. I wanted to fix something in myself quickly, so I fixed a wrinkle. After the procedure, I watched to see if the wrinkle was really disappearing, and then I forgot about it. Most of the time I don’t think about it, in general, I’m not one to cry a lot about my appearance. But another year passes and the thought comes up again: damn, everything is so fucked up, maybe you should at least inject yourself with Botox? Promotion, 70 euros per fold, isn’t that a lot for youth?
At the beauty clinic, I met an intelligent woman I know, who, when she saw me, burst into tears as if she was going to have hymen reconstruction surgery, although she had only come for a routine botulinum injection. Only influencers promoting clinics boast that they regularly use botulinum.
The topic of self-acceptance is already so boring, it seems that everything has been said, and when you look more closely, you see that the further you go, the less clear it is. More precisely, it has never been as unclear as it is now. We are already talking more boldly about exhausting diets and nutritional disorders. I have no doubt that we will soon talk about psychological dependence on botulinum. The Americans and the British are already talking, they will come to us soon. There have already been several studies showing that botulinum can be addictive: the effect is temporary, meaning you’ll want it again afterwards. Yes, there are many psychological nuances here. Not all beauty procedures give the desired result. This is followed by disappointment and even more dissatisfaction with yourself, about which there is no one to talk to, because you don’t want to say that you dreamed of turning into a twenty-year-old beauty, but you turned into a forty-year-old lizard.
I have no argument as to why botulinum is bad until medical professionals say otherwise. I don’t even promise that I will never use it myself. Only sometimes you get the feeling that half of the women in Vilnius are walking around photoshopped, and then it starts to seem like you need that photoshop too. We gradually get used to more beautiful faces, and in what way they are so beautiful, it doesn’t seem to matter anymore. Maybe in the near future we will keep botulinum in our bathroom next to the toothbrush container?
You and your friends have probably already been surprised at how old our grandmothers look in the photos, who were only fifty or sixty years old at the time. With ruffles, gray, wrinkled – cute, but admit it – old. Again, not all of them, but that’s the trend. It’s obvious that we millennials look younger than our parents, or even more so, our grandparents, did at that age. We live healthier, we dress nicer, we see more of the world, all this is reflected in our appearance, but the pressure to not have wrinkles is somehow too great. I just feel it myself. You don’t?
I wonder where this will all go, how this huge boom in botulinum will look in time. We are living through a huge cultural phenomenon, which is reflected publicly only when an influencer is paralyzed in the chin after an injection.
#Akvilė #Kavaliauskaitė #botulinum #forehead #contents #Culture
