'I Woke Up Like This' Is the Biggest Beauty Myth of All
By Alyx Gorman
Imagine how it must feel to type your name into Google, and have the suggested search term that follows be “plastic surgery.”
That’s the case for Jennifer Hawkins, a 30-year-old former Miss Universe winner from Australia who went on to found a self-tanning empire and work as the host of Australia's Next Top Model. In her home country she’s hugely famous. She’s also accused of getting work done by so many people, so regularly, that in a recent interview with Australian Women’s Weekly she was flat-out asked about it. Her answer neither denied nor confirmed the rumors: “When someone says 'under the knife' I don’t have a reaction. Everyone in the industry gets that. That's fine. I’m cool with that. I'm cool with people having an opinion, but as I said, I am happy with who I am as a person and really just want to live my life. I can’t live my life around what other people say. They just don’t get me, that’s how I take it.”
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Jennifer Hawkins is, of course, not the first woman to be asked about plastic surgery. Jennifer Lopez fields similar queries (and lobs back much more vehement denials) while Kylie Jenner, who is just 16 years old, has been the subject of scrutiny since she started posting Instagram pictures of a very filled-out pout in March of this year.
The media reaction is always instant. Tabloids use dramatically different “before” and “after” photographs to bait their audience into saying what they themselves won’t claim outright: These women are lying. And boy do we take the bait. The things people say on Kylie Jenner’s Instagram alone would have any sane and stable teenager running to the guidance counselor's office.
Here's a confession: I was born with my father’s lips–thin, shapeless, lizardish—and so, a few years ago, I bought my mother’s. Several years of braces didn’t give me a mouth I liked, but a few rounds of Restylane certainly did. I was 22 when I first got injections, but I’d wanted them since I was a teenager. I can wear lipstick now. I can crack a smile in photographs. It's a little bit of financial indulgence, but it’s worth it because I love my lips.
When I tell people this, the immediate reaction is shock. Followed by something along the lines of, “You don’t look like you’ve had work done.“ Because I don’t. Most people who get work done don’t look like they do.
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Of course, no one’s putting an old picture of my face up against a new one and writing in all caps “HAS SHE HAD SURGERY?” If you did that to me (as is often done to celebrities like Kylie Jenner and her sisters) you might think I look like I’ve had work done. Because I have. And I'm fine with admitting it.
There’s an argument to be made that it doesn’t matter what anyone does or doesn't get injected into her face. It’s her choice and people should mind their own business. However, that argument doesn’t fly when you consider that many women in the public eye have jobs that could be fairly described as “ornamental.” What these women do with their appearance is of huge interest to a lot of people.
Hillary Clinton once said, “'If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.” For better or worse (definitely worse), that is the level of interest in well-known women’s appearances. And unlike most public figures who get quizzed about what they eat, wear, and do with their hair, Hillary Clinton is not an actress or model. Beauty regimens, exercise plans, and detailed descriptions of lunch orders are the bread and butter of celebrity interviews. So why should a face be off limits?
And yet I get why celebrities don’t want to talk about what they may or may not do to their faces. The celebrity gossip machine simultaneously applauds women for beauty—above all else—and punishes them for vanity. We’re told our only value is how we look, but that this value is diminished unless we were born this way. Unless we somehow (preposterously) wake up with photo shoot-ready hair and an inky fringe of fat lashes.
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We’ve developed a bizarre double standard when it comes to cosmetic procedures. It's fine to put a kid through two-and-a-half years of braces (involving headaches, torn inner lips, and several thousand dollars of oral suffering) for the sake of a more aesthetically pleasing smile. But a few seconds of stinging and a few hundred bucks for the same outcome? Immoral. Unacceptable. Vain. Vain. Vain.
Using lasers to fry off your pubic hair? Fine. But using facial lasers to flood your face full of collagen? Shame on you and your narcissism.
Yes, celebrities would be clapped into the stocks of public opinion if they came out individually about getting work done. But they should do it anyway.
Because it’s time that women started to own their faces. It's time to admit that looking good costs money. And that yes, sometimes we get a little help from hyaluronic acid and needles.
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We’re so flooded with images of people who have had work done but won’t admit it that we don’t actually know what “work” actually looks like. Plastic surgery can look like whatever you want. Sometimes it can make you slip into the valley of the almost human, and sometimes it just makes you look like a fresher, poutier version of yourself. It all depends on how you calibrate it.
Sure, it's easy for me to come out about getting fillers because I'm not famous. I might be shamed for it, but it's not going to ruin me. No one thinks of me as a role model. No one is going to type “Alyx Gorman before and after” into a Google search.
But if every woman who got work done came out at once, it would look like a scene straight out of Spartacus. There’d be too many admissions to attack individuals. Perhaps then, we could accept it quickly and move on.
I'll go first.
I am Spartacus and this is my face. The part I’m most proud of is the part that I paid for. And if you have an opinion? I’m cool with that. You just don’t get me, and that’s how I'll take it.
Photos: Elle
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