The context you need, when you need it

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters — and what to do about it. At Vox, our mission to help you make sense of the world has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own.

We rely on readers like you to fund our journalism. Will you support our work and become a Vox Member today?

How old am I supposed to look?

When bodies and appearances are malleable, what does that mean for the person underneath?

A few months ago, while engaging in one of my more recent pastimes (or compulsions), I verbalized a fear I’d long kept buried, perhaps out of shame or denial or some combination of both. First, the compulsory ritual: Before bed, with the precision of a brain surgeon, I arrange a layer of stickers on my face. The brand is Frownies, and they have been marketed to me as a cheaper, less invasive alternative to Botox. Place these beige patches — offered in unique shapes meant to hug your eyes, caress your forehead, or cradle your mouth — over your wrinkles, and by daybreak, perceptible signs of aging will have vanished. Allegedly.

Which brings me to the admission. No one with any confidence in their face willingly adheres appliques that calcify into what can only be described as a layer of concrete. I perform this routine for a simple reason: I’m visibly aging, and I’m not happy about it. As a woman in her 30s, with years of continued living to look forward to, I don’t want to socially vanish, which is what usually happens to many women of a certain age. I don’t want to become invisible once my face droops a little or when the wrinkles won’t abate with stickers. I want to look not like a puerile being, but some mysterious, age-ambiguous alien. (I do recognize this is a concern for the fortunate, but don’t fret: I also worry about whether I will be able to pay my bills each month. I contain multitudes.)

I’m a product of the early 2000s when magazines and entertainment glorified beauty, youth, and thinness to the highest degree. The trend cycle has worked its way back around and these ideals are in fashion again, only now with the added pressures of social media and the accessibility of cosmetic procedures. At a moment of transition in my life, I wondered whether I should ignore the constant pressure to look perfect — and what it meant for my identity if I did.

The desire to not age is laughable, I’m well aware. We’re all hurtling toward the same inevitable fate. But some people’s journeys to the pearly gates are more poreless than others. Cosmetic procedures like Botox, fillers, and facelifts aren’t new, but their startling ubiquity is. Between 2019 and 2022, the prevalence of Botox and similar neuromodulators increased by 73 percent, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Fillers were second to Botox in terms of the most popular “minimally invasive” procedures in 2024. Since 2017, surgeons have reported a 60 percent increase in facelifts and younger patients are increasingly seeking them out. And although more men are seeking cosmetic procedures, the population who most frequently undergoes these treatments is overwhelmingly female. All told, between 2020 and 2023, aesthetic procedures increased 40 percent globally, according to one study.

People aren’t just modifying their faces, but shrinking their bodies, too. Nearly one in eight American adults said they were taking a GLP-1, according to a 2025 KFF Health Tracking Poll. The term “Ozempic” has become shorthand for the class of drugs that celebrities and everyday people alike utilize for weight loss, helping to reinvigorate the briefly dormant ideal that to be beautiful and desired, you must be small.

Culture reflects society. Get our best explainers on everything from money to entertainment to what everyone is talking about online.

In other words, we now, as a society, have more control over our bodies and appearances than at any point in history. We’re both sculptor and marble, chiseling our images into a version that most aligns with who we are — or who we think we are. But our lives, and our bodies, are constantly changing. We age, we get pregnant, we break bones, we get sick, we grieve, throwing off the balance between how we see ourselves and how the world perceives us. There exists a fear of not recognizing ourselves as we move through these transitions. When bodies and appearances are malleable, what does that mean for the person underneath?

Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am completely average-looking. Never one to have been praised for my beauty or to have profited from pretty privilege, I hardly see my face as central to my status in the world. But it is directly related to how I see myself and how I’d........

© Vox