At the age of 26, Sierra spent weeks with a drooping eye, crying multiple times a day, unable to work or drive, ashamed to go out in public. One night, she walked through California’s Coachella Valley in 100-degree heat in a sweater; she was trying to sweat out the Botox that had been injected into her face. Her eyes were closing more and more every day, until she couldn’t keep them open anymore. Online, she would scroll through stories of women who had the same side effect, known as eyelid ptosis, which affects up to 5 percent of people who get this kind of treatment, and is temporary; some claimed that their faces never went back to normal. Sierra’s face eventually recovered, after two agonizing months of her feeling “angry,” “scared,” and “extremely insecure.”
But when I asked Sierra, now 29, if she would get Botox again someday, she didn’t rule it out. “There’s a part of me that is still interested in the idea of looking young and beautiful longer,” she said. “I compare myself to other women online who have great skin with no fine lines or wrinkles.” The problem, in her mind, wasn’t the Botox, but the context in which she got it. “If I ever did get it again, I would spend lots of time doing research on the best places to go.”
For the past two years, as research for my book GIRLS®, I’ve been looking into the onslaught of beauty routines, skin-care videos, and surgery ads young women see online, and the effect it has on them. But recently there have been signs that some women have had enough: They are removing their breast implants, dissolving their lip filler, and stopping Botox injections. There has been a spike in breast implant removal, and in dermal filler reversals. Influencers are beginning to undo their “Instagram face,” with some vlogging the process for their viewers. Now even the market seems to be responding: One clinic in San Diego advertises “buccal fat restoration” to reverse the once-trendy procedure of sucking fat out of the cheeks.
“If I ever did get it again, I would spend lots of time doing research on the best places to go,” Sierra, 29, said of her plastic surgery.
Some stories are horrifying. Online, women tell them calmly, casually, often while doing their makeup and getting ready for the day. In one TikTok, a woman describes developing sepsis after getting butt filler: She says she began vomiting blood, ended up in a hospital for two weeks, and, soon after being discharged, looked down to see blood and pus “actually pouring out of a hole in my ass.” Others describe their implants rupturing and leaking into their body, or giving them symptoms of what some call “Breast Implant Illness,” like chronic fatigue and hair loss.
But when I started researching this story, I was surprised to find that some of the women I watched on social media, or interviewed—women who had had experiences so painful and traumatic that their implants had to be removed, or their filler dissolved—were considering going back for more. They say they would risk these procedures again, or it’s obvious from their social media feeds that they continue to have work done. One woman describes her “nightmare” appointment getting Botox and chin filler—passing out immediately and suffering a drooping eye for a “long time”—before telling viewers that although she hasn’t had filler since, she has a “new injector” now.
