The Art of Botox

The internet has conscripted us into the construction and manipulation of our own images, so that the idea of wearing some kind of mask — whether through plastic surgery, Instagram filter, online avatar or cloak of irony — no longer reads as unnatural, but rather as broadly relatable. The internet has made plastic surgery more accessible through social media. On Instagram, a range of accounts hypnotically reveal their effects, and on TikTok, aestheticians have cast themselves as plucky ambassadors for injectable self-improvement, staging unfunny but self-effacing skits: “This is Botox crying face, when you can’t make ugly crying face due to Botox,” the plastic surgeon Anthony Youn explains in one.

Botox is less a terrifying habit than a relatable vulnerability in this land of influencers. Botox is also a self-esteem booster, and a tool for self-invention. Botox was a good sport in recruiting Yuhua Hamasaki, a drag queen, for one of its ads. Botox may be seen as conformity and compliance among the Orange County’s wealthy white women, but drag redefines femininity as creative, individualistic, and individualistic. Hamasaki suggests in the spot that Botox is, like makeup or wigs. It’s a tool for escaping from the gender binary, and not policing.

However, this sympathetic turn is not unlimited. Kidman has been savagely mocked for her appearance in the trailer for “Being the Ricardos,” a film set in the 1950s where she plays Lucille Ball, a woman known for her facial expressiveness. The procedure is still considered taboo even among Hollywood actors. It has darker connotations elsewhere. In “Botox,” a bleak Iranian-Canadian film that’s been circulating at festivals this year, it becomes a profound metonym for self-delusion. The film is about two sisters reeling from their brother’s horrifying disappearance, and how they come to rationalize the event, even forget it. When the sisters are not in physical distress — they spend much of the film hauling, shoveling and grunting — they are languishing in a medical spa where one of them works. One scene shows an aesthetician pitching Botox to a client. “Botox means youth, eternity, to keep dreams forever,” she says. She adds, absurdly, that it “has roots in an Eastern Rite in Tibet and Mayan tribes in Latin America that believe death is the only way to become eternal.”

Even in commercials promoting Botox there is a shadowy presence. The Errol Morris ads have a funereal aspect. Soft lighting and somber music suggest that the subjects are suffering from a terminal illness — which I suppose is true, as aging eventually leads to death. Botox has been ridiculed for years, but it has not been eradicated from people’s foreheads. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans spent nearly $2.5 Billion on the procedure in 2019. We are now left to navigate the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, and acceptance.

It strikes me that wrinkles on women are not only stigmatized because they make them seem old, but because they make them look angry, sad, surprised, distressed — they make them look alive. Botox is now a way station for women who are at risk of being evicted from Hollywood. It serves as a stark reminder of what has gone. Instead of being buried after a certain age, female movie stars have their bodies embalmed. The new Botox tagline is “Still you,” but it could be “Still here.”