During an unrelated conversation, my brother once told me that my upper lip was too small.
I grew up with the idea that big lips looked funny. I was a little girl raised in a culture where thin-lipped women were praised for being restrained and effortless. Somewhere between childhood and adolescence, I became aware that my lips sat in an in-between space, neither thin nor full. That awareness arrived early and stayed somewhere. Like every young girl, I found myself inspecting my natural features daily.
Now, everyone, at seemingly every age, carries botox, filler, or some kind of invasive intervention in the back of their minds whether they plan to act on it or not. Since the 2010s and the rise of exaggerated body trends, every time I put myself under a microscope, the same thought echoes back: I don’t see a face that begs to be ‘‘fixed’’. I’m just there. I already didn’t think I was particularly beautiful. And I don’t think that insecurity is something aesthetic procedures could correct. Beauty trends move fast. What used to be satisfied with a bag, a shoe, or a haircut now extends to injections, implants, and entire body types. The need to feel current, up to date and put together has become bodily. That’s what scares me.
Fame used to mean distance. Celebrities were unreachable enough that their faces and bodies could be dismissed as part of another world. Now, with underground clinics, rebranded accessibility, and endless platforms that exploit how visual we are, everyone is caught in a quiet competition for aesthetics, image, and vibe. Everyone knows they have an audience, everyone looks polished, effortless, complete. Everyone has lip filler. And I’m scared.
I’ve spent most of my life interrogating my sense of self, trying to locate a single, stable “me.” Compared to that, my physical appearance has often felt secondary, it didn’t feel an identity. Maybe that’s because I realized early on that I wouldn’t stand out physically in any clear way. I never felt insecure about my body in a way that old-school starvation or control couldn’t solve. My underage brother casually voicing a beauty standard already lodged in his mind was what finally burst the bubble for me.
As a woman, I’m not new to this. I know how beauty standards mutate, how body types climb popularity only to become obsolete overnight, how people who don’t fit are made to feel insufficient. But this time, the expectation of aesthetic intervention has reached my doorstep. It’s no longer abstract to me. It’s not about others anymore.
I’m afraid of how quickly bodies become trends, of how easily these procedures are sold as maintenance and self care, and of how normal it now feels to consider altering yourself.
Everybody’s got lip filler and I’m scared.
