It was 2018, and I was 28, lying there in a darkened hotel room, paying a backstreet Botox doctor in cash to knock out the wrinkles on my forehead. Two weeks later this botch-job would set in, and my flatmate would look at me with worry.
“Are you okay?” they asked.
“Yes, why?” I replied.
“You just look so… sad?”
I looked at my face in the mirror, my right eyelid drooped slightly and my forehead looked oddly like sliced cheese, I had done what only 85-year-old Upper East Side women are supposed to do and I’d botched my face. For weeks following I’d be told I looked “kinda gormless”, “unwell”, “very very shiny?”
And yet I didn’t feel ugly like I had in the past, despite my face looking completely different to how it should. And that’s because something like Botox, or any intervention against ugliness, or ageing, or weight gain – whatever you wish to call it – is seen as more morally commendable than accepting your body as it is.
For much of my life, I’ve been unable to put my finger on what exactly it feels like to feel ugly. But I’ve also noticed that I have been congratulated when I’m doing something to change my appearance toward a more accepted beauty standard. Whether it was being put on a strict diet by my doctor at 14 and being applauded by a group of women at Weight Watchers every week when I lost a pound, or whether it was the remark a friend’s mum made at a wedding when she told me she was so glad I started being good to my skin. The last time she saw me, she said, I was “looking unwell”.
Attempting to change one’s own appearance is so often falsely placed on a kind of morality scale. And my feelings of ugliness, when I was perhaps less enlightened about the systems at play which police unruly bodies, have often been most vivid when I do something to my body that I have been told is “bad”. Like smoking, eating fast food, drinking too much, skipping exercise. And so I’ve made strange choices in the name of this false goodness: wild diets, impossible gym routines, binging and purging, backstreet Botox.
I was reminded of these impossible decisions last month when a friend of mine took his second dose of Ozempic. He messaged me the following: “Would you rather be thin and have vertigo, or fat and able to walk without wanting to pass out?” And it became an actual debate, one which on the surface sounds easy to answer in this world of self-love at any weight. But the toxic parts of us were forced into a spiral.
“A year of dizziness for a lifetime of thinness?” I asked.
“Ah, yes but there’s no guarantee you’d keep the weight off,” he replied.
We went round and round deciding that what we really want is to not think about food and weight and desire and morality all the time. And there is no drug for that. When he eventually called his doctor about the dizziness, the doctor said: “Great that the weight is coming off!”
Just last week at a very chic gallery opening, I was telling the story of my backstreet botched Botox drama to a model and her stylish friend. And they both told me that it’s fine to have no answers, to go through the motions of the ugly-not-ugly roundabout because “everyone is ugly at 28”.
They were joking about the age, but they also kind of weren’t. Everyone is kind of ugly at 28. Or 38. Or at some point in their life when their sense of self-worth is sunken by the feelings of inadequacy or the idea that you’ve been treating your body “badly”. This might come when you’re particularly hungover, when you’ve eaten nothing but fries for an entire week, or when you’ve done something actually not so nice like bitching about a friend behind their back.
This new distance between yourself and your reflection, put there by whatever moral compass you live by and however you’ve breached it, is the feeling they were talking about. There are some shitty things we do that make us feel shitty about ourselves, which might spill over into the way we feel about how we look. So you sent a nude to your best friend’s ex? That’s bad. You walked out of an independent restaurant and you know they forgot to put the mains on the check? Not great.
But in terms of how we treat our body, an attempt at moral purity is both impossible and useless. It was the conundrum of my twenties to care about fat positivity and also understand the realities of life when it comes to my aching knees. It’s still a conundrum to me now. And when it comes to matters of the body in society there is no morally pure way to be.
There’s no failsafe way to stop feeling ugly at 28. But you might try to embrace the understanding that the bad parts of society win when we internalise a moral code or a beauty standard that is designed to make us fail. To make us miserable. To make us work constantly to not loathe our bodies, so we don’t look up and loathe the things that actually matter like… the government, climate change, or the attack on LGBTQIA+ rights that’s ramping up globally.
You’re gonna feel ugly, and you’re gonna feel better. Even supermodels have an “ugly” year. I had 28 of them. But as I’ve grown up and have watched my face change (now that the Botox has worn off, thank God), I’m realising that drinking lots of water, having good sex, taking whatever exercise I can manage, and forgiving myself are real good beauty tips. It’s, as anyone who really knows will tell you, what’s inside that counts.
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