Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Tonya Mosley** (0:16)
This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley.
Something strange is happening to the human face. Plastic surgery in the US 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 Jia 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, Tolentino 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. Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the best-selling author of the essay collection Trick Mirror. Seven years ago, she coined the phrase, Instagram face, capturing the beauty ideal of the social media era. Her new essay asks, what that face has become? And Jia Tolentino, welcome back to Fresh Air.

**Jia Tolentino** (2:14)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Tonya Mosley** (2:16)
Okay, as I mentioned to you, this piece has hit a nerve, and so much of the reaction is basically, yes, we are seeing this, we are feeling this.
What can we actually do about it? And the same thing actually happened seven years ago when you coined this term, Instagram face. And so I thought before we actually get into your latest piece, remind us what Instagram face is or was.

**Jia Tolentino** (2:43)
Right. So sometime last decade, if you were on Instagram, you probably noticed that most of the most prominent, most highly visible faces who generally all belonged to white female influencers, they started to kind of converge on a singular face. I remember someone, a makeup artist, described it as a sexy baby tiger.
It was the kind of Kim Kardashian looks like Kendall Jenner, looks like Bella Hadid, looks like Emily Ratajkowski. There was this kind of convergence of the face towards a certain mean that seemed to me to be very overtly shaped by the algorithm. The face looked like the beauty filters that Snapchat and Instagram provided to kind of lift your cheeks and clump your lips and make your eyes bigger and make your chin a little more heart shaped. And you could press a button or you could use Facetune to digitally alter your face to fit this kind of algorithmically approved beauty standard. And I think this was a face that the algorithm liked. If your face looked like this, you would get more views on your pictures. And then, you know, concurrently, there were these technologies. This was kind of the rise of injectables, Botox, filler, these little tweaks that you could do in real life to match the tweaks that you could do digitally. And I wanted to write about it then because it just seemed interesting that faces were becoming the same, that these highly visible faces were becoming the same, and the incentives didn't necessarily seem to be coming from within. They seemed to be coming from without. And I wondered what is going to happen in the future, and now we're kind of living in it.

**Tonya Mosley** (4:28)
Right, so for those who aren't maybe online enough to really pick up the changes over the last seven years, paint a picture for us. What is coming out of this new era on our screens?
Not just on our screens too, but also in real life. What are we actually seeing? What does this new aesthetic actually look like?

**Jia Tolentino** (4:51)
So this began as kind of niche behavior among the professionally beautiful, the wealthy and famous.
But the desire trickles down because those faces are necessarily visually overrepresented. And what those women do trickles down into the desire for the general population. And in the nearly, let's say, decade that has elapsed, when I was starting to research this piece, I started just Googling cities in the United States. I started Googling midsize cities everywhere outside the coasts to check, you know, how widespread is this behavior, actually? There are some proxies, like the Reddit for R slash plastic surgery, it has almost as many weekly visitors as the Reddit forum for R slash running. You know, so there are some proxies where you can tell this is becoming a quite generalized interest. If you are on social media, you see the way that people's faces have become uncanny. The foreheads are freezing, the lips are plump. Instagram face has kind of trickled down to the general population. You can get it at your local strip mall basically anywhere you are in the US and people certainly do.