Aesthetica

by Allie Rowbottom

They’re cute, but each one needs a tweak to achieve true beauty. Rhinoplasty, I diagnose when I look at one. Brow lift, I silently suggest for another. Buccal fat pad removal.

learned them from YouTube, Instagram, and though my mother said she wanted instruction too, she never stuck with the rituals I prescribed. Contouring and gua sha massage, retinol and ten-step serum routines, all abandoned, as if she thought learning to care for herself would rob her own mom of the chance to rise from the dead and teach her.

opportunity, a new frontier for entrepreneurial youths like me, youths with initiative. College stifled that sort of thing and I had read online that even rich kids were taking gap years to experience the real world. I had read that student debt was shackling my generation, condemning us to the same hardship

Influencers with one hundred thousand followers earned a thousand dollars a post, easy. Two hundred thousand followers equaled paid vacations to five-star resorts. Almost foolish, to want to do anything else.

Yes, it outraged me to see how they’d lied. It entranced me, what they truly looked like versus what they shared.

I dream, as I often do, of meals I didn’t mean to eat, drugs I didn’t mean to swallow, faceless men I didn’t want to fuck. Even in sleep, I open my mouth, and scream.

Objectifying myself could never make me happy, she said, though she was wrong. Her version of feminism was outdated, too rigid to work in the real, digital world where I was in control of my body, my content, and smart to leverage the short blush of my youth for what was permanent and sure:

was the best, most beautiful, sweet and pretty, astonishing and iconic. A victory, that I could be all these things when my mother could not. And a sign of how clueless she was about where power truly lived.

It was always about the women, then. Whether or not I was better than them. Sexier, but not sluttier, my wants smaller, my body smaller, though not too small.

“Get a color all your own,” he’d suggested, neither Kardashian black, nor platinum Playboy blond.

The strippers were just doing their jobs; sex work was a choice and should be decriminalized, normalized. This was the feminism that empowered me, too.

Drugs erase time, age, mistakes; drugs don’t work the way they used to. But they’re better than nothing,

I read recently that long-term benzo use, opioid abuse, leads to early dementia, perpetual forgetting. I read that Botox weakens the forehead; when it wears off, you look older than ever.

I just want to look like myself, my true self, stripped of time and the violence of past mistakes.

a boob job was silly and embarrassing, a job for silly embarrassing women, porn actresses, Real Housewives, Pam Anderson. Girls like me didn’t get breast implants. We didn’t need to be affirmed, or weren’t supposed

Maybe she’s a natural beauty, an untouched beauty. The sales pitch for every powder, cream, procedure. But there’s always a consequence, some side effect that keeps away the promised miracle. Acne from pore-clogging foundation. Asymmetry from filler injected willy-nilly. Body dysmorphia from the asymmetry caused by the filler, which even when dissolved leaves your skin stretched out and floppy. It’s the same with pills: Vicodin cuts the pain, but then you can’t shit;

Ativan helps you forget your anxiety but takes with it everything else you wanted to remember.

“They’re considered offensive in Australia,” she said, and I flared inside, like she thought they weren’t offensive here, too. Like she thought her leaving, her political awakening, college education, had made her wise. “I used to only care about animals,” she said. “But then I realized women are endangered too. The world is so fucked.” “Totally,” I said, “the

Career, money, a blue and black Ferrari, according to Instagram, Dr. Perrault has all that, which for a man, is better than a snatched jawline or a full head of hair.

Six espresso-brown blow outs, six boob jobs, six Botoxed foreheads. Six bodies, made like mine, only better, more beautiful, beautiful like I knew I’d never be.

Natural is better than prosthetic. Natural is moral. Natural connotes a certain kind of woman, a peaceful wise-woman, a woman like my mother.

I look weird, but not for LA, where cosmetic recovery is a status symbol as much as the work itself. Almost as much as beauty itself.

I believed that Instagram, the filtered aesthetic it popularized—Instagram face, we called it—was true. It was how people had always wanted to look, would always want to look: high cheekbones, cut jaw lines, frozen brows, fish lips and perfect symmetry. I thought that was an everlasting ideal. When after some years, it shifted—girls, women, people, going filterless, makeupless, foregoing injectables, drugs, social media

most popular soul belonged to a beautiful girl with a dead father and domineering mom, a girl with a heart-shaped face, a sex tape, reality show, celebrity wedding, and slim, ribless waist, giant ass. When she declared she wanted to be a lawyer, to fight for the rights of the wrongly accused, people said it was impossible. But impossible is what we loved her for, followed and paid her for. It was only when she wanted to be smart, useful, that we wondered if she could.

But even my fantasy of the unfiltered Jake feels glossed over and idealized, absent any evidence of his past, the parties and photo stunts, the moments of violence and betrayal I know he’s responsible for. Maybe that’s why he’s often off hunting, holing up alone in the middle of nowhere.

Have YOU been looking in the mirror your whole life and deluding yourself? the rest of the sales pitch went. Now, for only five hundred dollars, you can own the one True Mirror™ in which you can gaze and know, finally, how you appear to the world.

I had the privileges attached to health and youth and whiteness. And a wide open something I mistook for beauty. I imagine it now as an invisible mark, an absence where a father went, a fear of who I’d be without a mother. She had always been sick, and even when I pushed her away, even as I tried to be different, I knew to fear her loss. I am responsible; I am not at fault.

I am neither lost nor found, lucky nor cursed, and no fairy Godmother is coming to save me.