Who's Winning the Battle Against Your Face?
The other night, smack-dab in the middle of an insomniac phone jaunt, I found myself scrolling through posts on a plastic surgery chat room.
I can't say I recommend the activity, especially as a way to get back to sleep, but it was certainly enlightening in a sad, startling way.
I'd fallen into an online rabbit hole, not meaning to wind up in that place of great shame, asking myself in a sleepy haze if I needed a $50,000 deep plane facelift and noting with alarm a clinic post that said clients were "presentable in public with makeup after only a couple of weeks."
I briefly pictured what a client must look like for the fortnight during which clinicians judged it unseemly to expose the public to your face, risking terrifying children and those with sensitive stomachs. Better, the experts recommended, to emerge only besheathed in scarves or in the cover of nighttime, like Quasimodo.
Perhaps you're better than I am and have never wondered how far you'd go to escape the gaping black maw of death, but I confront my limits on this question far more often now that I am firmly entrenched in middle age.
No longer can I delude myself into thinking I can be mistaken for a woman of 30 -- even 40 is a stretch. Our society has two clear paths for those of advancing years. You can either accept with grim resignation the march of time over your face and body, or you can fight like hell with every dollar you can spare (and even, in many cases, a few dollars that you cannot).
Beyond the less intrusive methods of antiaging warfare -- your snake oil creams and vitamin supplements -- there are also the freezers and the fillers ready to be called to service via injection.
The last line of defense, or the first line if you have more money than caution, would be surgical interventions.
Posts on the plastic surgery page included testimonials of treatments for serious-sounding ailments like "jowling" and "buccal hollowing." No one wants a prominent nasolabial fold, my friend!
Relief could be had for these age-related defects via pulling, tightening, moving and rejiggering. Sure, there's a risk of numbness, scarring and in one horrifying case, the loss of a nipple (an entire nipple!) after complications from a breast lift. But what do you expect? Some warriors must fall when you're waging war against the passage of time itself.
It's not even always about aging. Maybe you were made wrong.
Another common post was a close-up of a flaw -- a scar, or a wrinkle, a nose tipped down -- with a plea for help.
"What can I do," the afflicted would say, "to solve this problem with my face?"
It was one of those posts that pushed me away from the message board, ending my scrolling. A young woman had uploaded a picture of her mouth, an extreme close-up that showed the area around her nose and lips.
She was 28 years old and miserable with the deep lines there. They were genetic, she explained. Her parents both had them. How could she fix it?
The replies confirmed her worst fears. These were serious wrinkles -- "too advanced for someone of her age," one poster told her solemnly. She should get surgery, of course. Maybe a facelift? Or plastic implants that would push the skin up from underneath.
I wondered if the woman ever looked at her mother and hated what she saw there as much as she hated the reflection in the mirror. Or was her disgust reserved only for herself?
I sighed and put my phone down.
I can't promise that I'll resist the temptation to perfect myself forever, but so far, I have. There have been no needles, no cuts, no prescriptions.
I don't begrudge anyone doing what they must to feel good in their skin. After all, I don't have to live in your body, so who am I to tell you how to be a tenant?
And it's not that I'm too good for it all. I want it all, actually. I want all the treatments and all the surgeries and all the injections. Or I would, anyway, if they worked on the inside as well as they did on the outside.
But I have thus far decided that there are worse things than looking old. Looking weird is certainly one of them. And hating yourself is another.
The battle can wait for another day. These wrinkles aren't going anywhere.
COPYRIGHT 2026 GEORGIA GARVEY
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Copyright 2026 Creators Syndicate Inc.
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