10 points against the Botox/filler industry

Preface

I made a promise to myself in my twenties that I would never use botox or fillers (or do cosmetic surgery), and I intend to keep it. I’m soon 40, and in recent years, this has become more present for me, as I’m constantly bombarded with advertisements and social media content trying to pull me into the botox/filler wheel. 

But that’s not all – everywhere I go, whether it’s the supermarket, the pub, or the library, I see women who are already caught in that wheel. Their faces feel alienating to me; honestly, it’s hurtful to see women injecting themselves with toxins and, by doing so, communicating to others that just being yourself is not enough. The whole culture saddens me, and feels so foreign.

Am I completely outside a culture obsessed with youth, altering appearances, and spending time and money on looks? No, I’m not a hypocrite – but I do my best to balance it and avoid as much of it as I can. I don’t follow influencers, I have almost entirely stopped wearing makeup, I try not to compare my looks to other women, and I spend very little on clothes and hair, and so on. But note, I do not want to place the majority of the responsibility on individual women – this is a capitalist culture rooted in strong patriarchal norms, and it is these systems and structures that should be held accountable.

I have given the botox/filler culture and industry a lot of thought over the last couple of years, and my old promise to stay away keeps growing stronger with every intellectual thought I formulate on the matter.

With this zine, I might make your promise also grow stronger.

What is it? 

Botox: Botox is a powerful neurotoxin (botulinumtoxin) produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. It paralyzes muscles by partially blocking nerve impulses. Used to reduce wrinkles. Needs to be repeated every 4-5 months. 

Dermal fillers: Injectable substance, usually made of hyaluronic acid. Used to restore volume, smooth lines, fill and plump for instance lips and cheeks, and enhance facial contours. Popular substances are Juvederm and Restylane. Needs to be repeated every 6-9 months. The substance stays in the body for 10+ years, science haven’t concluded exactly how long. 

Disclaimer

There are people who undergo Botox or cosmetic surgery for medical reasons. These procedures are performed by professionals to help the person live a healthy, functional life from both a medical and physical perspective. This is not what I am critiquing in this zine.

1. Expands the capitalist machinery and agenda

First and foremost: This is a capitalist machinery with a capitalist agenda. It’s not about some wonderful ”free choice” culture where people (mainly women) today just magically and simultaneously decide to fill their faces and bodies with neurotoxins and hyaluronic acid. 

No. Beauty is an industry. The beauty industry feeds the capitalist class with profit. It monetizes women’s bodies and takes advantage of insecurities produced by a patriarchal society – one where women are socialized from the beginning, and constantly told, that they’re ugly, fat, not enough, and should be this or that. 

Women make up 85-97 % of the Botox/filler industry. This is like an intersection – patriarchy hates women where capitalism loves women. Because capitalists eat the profits straight off our bodies – bodies that we continue to mold, change, alter, and pour money into. 

2. Creates a dissatisfied,  restless culture 

As with capitalism in general, there is a constant restlessness. Here, in the alteration of the body and appearance within “capitalist youth culture.” The sense is that no woman is ever good enough; there are always things to change and fix. Women are caught in a constant, shifting movement – they can never rest. 

Aging inevitably brings new wrinkles, lines, or features to adjust, remove, or conceal. And aging is not the only thing: dissatisfaction can also target facial features that’s not ”good enough” – a nose, lips, cheeks, chin, eyebrows, skin, freckles, even lashes and hair. Women’s bodies are in constant adjustment! 

The Botox/filler industry fuels this culture of dissatisfaction, where the pursuit of change never ends. Even after one “issue” is fixed, another suddenly appears. The act of fixing itself creates a spiral of further fixes: one small change becomes the gateway to a thousand more. 

Think of a time when you thought: “If only I had…” Maybe it was a different hairstyle, losing weight, a new pair of jeans, or something else. And after you got that, I’m sure something else soon took its place. This is capitalism feeding us the constant chase of change and fixing.

3. Pushes a monoculture 

Capitalism, in its essence, is monistic. It’s a capital-accumulative, mono-driven logic. It pushes companies, people, and consumer goods in the same direction. Why do you think we have like 5,400 “different” toothpastes that all look and feel basically the same? Because the companies that produce them figure out what sells, and then keep selling it to make more and more profit – resulting in a whole lot of the same shit.

The same goes for clothing, shampoos, fast-food restaurants (I mean, how many Notello Rolls or Starbucks-alike cafés can there be?), and so on. And when it comes to nature (e.g. forests) under capitalist agriculture and industrialization, I’m sure you’ve heard the term “monoculture” too.

We also see this with looks. You might’ve been one of the people that said: “Omg, the celebrities all look the same nowadays!” And they do. They all get the same fucking fillers, follow the same fucking trends, to look the same fucking way.  

That conformity we’re seeing is deeply political – rooted in capitalist youth/hustle/mainstream culture. Capitalism pushes a mono-culture – it’s fucking boring, and embarrassing.

I know I swear a lot. I’m mad.

4. Destroying people’s emotional lives

One of the things that bothers me the most is its impact on women’s – and others’ – emotional lives. The face is our best communicator; it allows us to express a wide range of nuanced feelings. But women are impairing this on a grand scale. When women’s faces become increasingly stiff due to neurotoxins such as Botox, it becomes harder to express emotions.

Research has shown that mothers who have undergone Botox treatments might experience weakened attachment to their babies.

This is because 1) the baby can’t interpret the mother’s stiff face (”Is she sad? Happy? Angry?”), and may also struggle to mimic the mother’s expressions simply because there is less movement to mimic.

And 2) the mother may struggle to mimic the baby’s facial expressions – mirroring the baby’s emotions – which can impair the empathizing ability. Women have to rely a lot on verbal expression, when the face can’t communicate effectively, and as we know babies don’t really speak fluently... I believe this to be applicable with an intimate partner/friend too. Think about how and how often you let your face communicate feelings.

Research has shown increased depression scores after Botox treatment. Part of it probably because of the reasons I write about in chapter 2, 6, 7, 8 and 10. And part of it might be because emotions are embodied, and when she can’t laugh fully and expressively, she may actually feel less happy. Botox treatment has sadly also been correlated with decreased sexual function, with orgasms becoming harder to achieve and less satisfying. 

The Botox/filler industry is destroying people’s emotional lives.

5. Destroys women and nature through plastification

Ecofeminists taught me how to expand my feminist thinking and my critique of capitalism: to see the intersection between the capitalist exploitation of women and of nature. They helped me understand how the destruction of women and their knowledge (for example witch hunts) was also the destruction of knowledge about nature – herbs, medicine, ecosystems, plants, the earth, the stars, and more.

These capitalist processes violently displaced and enclosed communities around the world between the 1500s and 1800s. And even today, we continue the destruction of human knowledge production and of nature’s ecosystems.

This is also a lens through which to view the Botox/filler industry. It is a chemical and toxic industry that harms women (by putting toxins into their bodies), harms nature (through the exploitation of natural resources and industrial waste), and harms animals (through animal testing and the destruction of their home). 

In a sense, it is a plastification of nature and of humans – a chemical, Western industry.

I am certain that the ecofeminists who taught me about deep ecology and the ecosystems of nature and the earth would kill the Botox/filler industry right away.

6. Feeds an anti-aging culture 

Everyone knows that an aging woman is, secretly, an empowered woman. She no longer tolerates any bullshit, she is knowledgeable and competent, goes her own way, upholds her integrity, and moves beyond the male gaze (many women have shared their experiences of becoming “invisible” to the male gaze around the age of 40, and that with shift came greater mental clarity and confidence).

That is why capitalist culture fuels an obsession with female youth: because female youth represents disempowerment. It is non-threatening to power, to men, to society. Youth is framed as childlike, naive, and gullible. But an aging woman is in reality none of these things – and society knows it. That is why we are continually fed the narrative that an aging woman is undesirable, ugly, a spinster, a witch, and ultimately without value. As you can see, anti-aging culture is about maintaining patriarchal power and disempowering women.

Collagen in the skin remains largely unchanged until roughly age 25; before then, there are typically no lines or wrinkles to paralyze with Botox injections. Capitalists can’t have that! They have to hunt profits in all female age groups. So now corporations have invented what they call “Baby Botox”, a Botox injection you get to prevent future wrinkles and lines. You get smaller doses of the neurotoxin injected in places people usually develop wrinkles, with the ”hope” that the nerves and muscles will become so numb that no lines can form on the face. It’s a kind of killing yourself while alive – making the body and face stiff, numb, paralyzed, dead. It’s such a privilege to be alive, and we are urging women to fucking kill themselves – all while capitalism calls this “keeping their youth.” What utter bullshit.

7. Drives an anti-intellectual culture among women

What would you do if you had three extra hours a day? What would you engage in? What would you think about? And you can’t answer clothing, looks, beauty, makeup, hair, or any of that.

Many women spend countless hours, energy, and money on their appearance every day. Wake up, go through a 40-step skincare routine, put on makeup, style the hair with who knows what, and so on. Each month brings microbladed eyebrows, lip fillers, new acrylic nails, lash refills, and more.

I don’t even dare to count how much time, energy, and money women spend on all that. Time and energy that could instead be spent on intellectual work, hobbies, thinking, making art, writing, learning a language, being outside, moving, loving others, cooking, experiencing the world, diving into one’s own mind – and the minds of others. Things that make you grow.

Instead, women – in a patriarchal, capitalist society – often feel obligated to shrink. To shrink their minds, their bodies, their lives. Keep occupied with the material, and with anything surface level.

When I die, I hope I won’t feel that I spent too much time and energy on my looks. Time and energy that I could have, and hopefully will have, spent on growing my character and intellectual being instead.

8. Creates a marketization and reification of the body

Reification, a process described by marxists theorists, is when human life, relationships, and bodies are turned into objects, into things. Things to own, modify, throw away, buy and sell. 

The Botox/filler industry is in fact doing this exact thing: turning subjects into objects. And as a consequence, women are treating themselves not as living beings, but as dead objects that need constant modification and change. 

This modification is something that is bought – bought from big corporations that profit from this very process, where women are both marketized and reified. 

We also know that the first step toward violence is the dehumanization and objectification of a human being. When we start seeing someone as something, that’s when violence take place. Think then about the consequences for women who are reified within the Botox/filler industry.

The way this industry treats women, and as an extention women then treat themselves, is horrendous. It’s such a misogynist, and hating industry with no humanism, care, or empathy.

9. Women’s bodies are injected with poison and toxins 

What really scares me is the lack of long-term research on these toxins. We simply don’t know what they will look like, feel like, or do to our bodies 20, 30, 50 years from now.

How do we know that the inflammations and diseases women suffer from aren’t linked to neurotoxins and other foreign substances injected into their bodies? The short answer is: we don’t. There is barely any research, and almost none of it is long-term.

Researchers have discovered that fillers don’t magically leave the body – they migrate. They move around inside the body. The same goes for Botox: it doesn’t just vanish. It is a neurotoxin that impacts both mind and body, for decades, maybe a lifetime.

It saddens me tremendously that women put dangerous poisons and toxins into their healthy, functioning bodies. They poison themselves in the name of beauty standards. 

In what fucking culture would this be allowed to happen to anyone? Yet with Botox/filler culture, it has become normalized – neutralized into the capitalist mode of living.

10. It’s fucking alienating

I want to end this zine with focusing on the personal realm. 

Isn’t it fucking alienating to turn yourself into a stranger to yourself? Isn’t it fucking alienating to alter the way you actually look – giving yourself new features: nose, jawline, lips, eyes, forehead, cheeks, chin, and so on? This culture is alienating in its true sense – because it actually deforms oneself, turning a person into something else, someone else. 

You know the phenomenon ”phantom pain”? In some sense I think that people always have their core sense of self, even if the face is altered. Seeing something other than yourself in the mirror then becomes alienating. Looking in the mirror and seeing new features – a new face – strips women of their sense of self, which we know fosters deep-rooted mental health issues. The old self becomes the phantom, the core self not present any longer. So the alienation in capitalism isn’t only the one happening between us – but in oneself, to oneself.

But beyond that, it deprives women of their identity and uniqueness. This makes me so fucking sad! That women can’t simply be allowed to be unique, weird, and different. Be themselves. That they constantly have to mold themselves into pre-fixed looks and categories deemed acceptable or desirable by society (i.e. patriarchy and capitalism).

The Botox/fotox culture is fucking alienating and everyone knows it.

Please stop.

Isn’t tattoos and piercings also altering the body and appearance? 

Yes, tattoos and piercings also alter the body and appearance. But they are expressions rooted in alternative subcultures such as punk, rock, and political movements – used to express uniqueness and personality (just think of all the thousands of ways that tattoos represent, symbolize, or expresses something). I am not arguing against personal expressions of the body, face, hair, skin, clothes, or any of that. On the contrary, I wish women (especially) could express their uniqueness and big personalities in every way they want! 

The botox/filler culture, however, is the opposite of that, as this zine has explained. That industry and those alterations are about mono-culture, about the mainstream, about pushing women to strive for the exact same look – which is not rooted in any political or subculture whatsoever. Or wait, let me rephrase: it’s rooted in a capitalist (hustle/mainstream/youth) culture!