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In a quarter century as a beauty journalist, I have (maybe tiresomely) exhorted my readers—first as a magazine beauty director and now in my Substack newsletter How Not to F*ck Up Your Face—to learn how to see themselves without objectification. What does that mean? It means rejecting the urge, usually learned around the time we begin to recognize ourselves in the mirror, to think of our face as an object to be scanned for flaws and manipulated to be pleasing to someone else (like the male gaze, for example). The manipulation might take many forms, from avoiding certain expressions, to wearing makeup to hide or enhance our features, or, eventually, to aesthetic treatments including plastic surgery. You can reject this unpleasant habit by giving yourself the opportunity to look into your own eyes and letting your feelings come up; the experience is a kind of deep listening, the sort of attention you offer to your dear friends, but in this case you’re doing it for yourself. And if you can practice seeing yourself without objectifying your face, you will come to appreciate your reflection in a fresh way, a more loving way, because your face will simply be a reminder of who you are, the person you want to be, with all your good intentions, unique and self-compassionate.
I thought of this exercise, called mirror meditation or mirror gazing, recently when I saw a well-known actress of a certain age whose face has become distorted by what appear to be various kinds of aesthetic treatments. This actress, in her youth, was beautiful—not in a traditional Hollywood way, but in a sweet-tag-along-little-sister way. And, looking at her, all I could think was how did that happen and who did that to her and how could she not see it and finally, how tragic. I mean not only the work she had done (whatever it was) but her apparent need to do it. And, of course, the terrible, unfair, unremitting pressure on actresses to comply with unrealistic Hollywood beauty standards that nourish that noxious need. That’s hardly a new story, of course, but seeing this woman looking like a caricature of herself made me think about identity and why it’s so deeply unsettling to see someone who has become almost unrecognizable to her younger self. I realized that it isn’t only that this particular actress looks kind of weird—because that’s subjective anyway—but that she looks lost, as if she’d been racing to a crossroads and, suddenly confused, took a wrong turn and wound up where the person she was has been replaced with a fake.
I want to say here that I am not averse to aesthetic procedures, including plastic surgery! My position is: Whatever gets you through the night. Life’s hard enough, and if facial fiddling is music to your ears, have at it. But, when the work is poorly delivered or over-delivered, outcomes can be sadly distorting and distracting. Which leads, inevitably, to more scrutiny and objectification.
Adding insult to injury, many actresses like the one above have taken a lot of crap for how they look, and have been outspoken about how difficult that has been. How could you not feel for them? Who among us wouldn’t be tempted to succumb to the pressures that could enhance or destroy a career? Still: It’s impossible to look at them without their facial work being the first thing you notice.
I wondered if I was going to think the same thing when I saw the new Bridget Jones movie, Mad About the Boy. Renée Zellweger seemed perhaps poised to get similarly lost when she appeared, in 2014, to have had something done to her face that morphed its unique, charming beauty to a more generic, Hollywood starlet look. Her acting chops—at that point she’d already won one of her Oscars, multiple Golden Globes, and more—are undeniable, and so it seemed at the very least unnecessary that she give in to aesthetic pressure to conform. What could that accomplish, except to diminish her originality, her singularity?
Owen Gleiberman wrote in Variety a few months before the release of Bridget Jones’ Baby in 2016: “The most toxic thing about ‘having work done’ is the feeling it can create that someone doesn’t look dramatically different from the way they looked before so much as they look…less. Less vivid, less distinctive, less there. You can’t prove it, but you know it when you see it. Our physiognomies express a great deal of who we are (that’s why we’re so hung up about them), and the redemptive comic spirit of the Bridget Jones films is the passionate drunk-girl-next-door everydayness of Bridget, the way that she’s no better than any of us—a spirit reflected, at least in the first two movies, in the slightly slovenly doughy-cuddly perfection of Renée Zellweger’s face… I just hope it turns out to be a movie that stars Renée Zellweger rather than a victim of ‘Invasion of the Face Snatchers.’ I hope it turns out to be a movie about a gloriously ordinary person rather than someone who looks like she no longer wants to be who she is.”
