Jia Tolentino on ‘Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare’
7/22/202646 min
Botox, fillers, facelifts: Plastic surgery is becoming so normalized and undetectable, it's changing our relationship to reality. ‘New Yorker’ staff writer Jia Tolentino considers how beauty standards have dovetailed with AI.
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First 90 secondsSpeaker 10:00
Support for this podcast and the following message come from National Geographic's new series Pompeii: Out of Time with Tom Hiddleston. Premieres Wednesday, July 22nd at 8:00, 7:00 Central on National Geographic and streaming next day on Disney Plus and Hulu.
Tonya Mosley· Host0:15
This is Fresh Air. I'm Tonya Mosley. Something strange is happening to the human face. Plastic surgery in the US is increasingly designed to be invisible, and it's working. Faces are being lifted, filled, and reshaped to look naturally youthful and, at the same time, unnatural. My guest today, writer Jia Tolentino, says this new era of cosmetic enhancement is quietly changing the way people think about aging and what we believe a real face should look like. In her latest New Yorker piece, "Our Plastic Surgery Nightmare," Tolentino reports that cosmetic procedures like Botox and fillers, once associated with middle age, are now becoming popular for teenagers, with plastic surgeons reporting a significant uptick of patients under 30. Some are even posting photos online asking strangers whether a facelift is their only hope. One influencer got famous by striking his jawline with a hammer as part of the online movement known as looksmaxing. Other young men followed suit, and artificial intelligence trained on millions of these new faces is generating new beauty standards. Tolentino