Aesthetica Quotes

“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;”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Natural is better than prosthetic. Natural is moral. Natural connotes a certain kind of woman, a peaceful wise-woman, a woman like my mother.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I just want to look like myself, my true self, stripped of time and the violence of past mistakes.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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 Her version of feminism was outdated, too rigid to work in the real, digital world where I was in control of my body, my content, and smart to leverage the short blush of my youth for what was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:”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“the more I wondered if image alteration might actually be empowering. For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies?”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Today there’s a sort of contentment to invisibility, even if I suspect it won’t last. I suspect I’ll recover, return, and sometimes the wanting will, too: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved and never left. Desire like that isn’t a failure, or a girlhood flight of fancy. It’s a fact of every life.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I am neither lost nor found, lucky nor cursed, and no fairy Godmother is coming to save me.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Yes, it outraged me to see how they’d lied. It entranced me, what they truly looked like versus what they shared.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“It’s up to me to look upon myself the way I imagine she would: with love. Maybe that’s the wisest approach to the life left for me to move through, age into. It’s a privilege, to age, I see that now.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I’m old enough to know that this is how true transformation works, in increments so small you don’t notice until one day you wake up and realize you’ve changed.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I had heard it before. A month before I left for LA, my mother had made an appointment with a new naturopath. “The ache,” she’d said, “it’s deeper lately,” and asked me to drive her. The office was on the seedy side of South Houston, manned by a woman with chin hair, a binder of prescriptive herbs. “You harbor hatred,” she told my mom. “It’s a toxic place to come from.” She suggested tinctures, meditation, a retreat she hosted in a Sedona vortex. Three thousand for the weekend. “Toxicity blocks a body,” she warned. “Tumors, artery clogs. You need to cleanse.” “Three thousand isn’t feasible,” my mother”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Into thick Texas heat, I emerged. I had acclimated to LA’s embalmed air, the wind leached dry and dangerous. But humidity, Houston, my every gland, pore, hair follicle opened to absorb them.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“There’s something wrong with me, like inside.” She waved her fork. “I have all these crazy symptoms, and the doctor says it’s nothing, and I know it’s not, so I’m thinking it’s maybe dietary, I don’t know, we’ll see.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“She looked like money, lean and round in only the right places, with a gap between her two front teeth she said she’d had filed by a cosmetic dentist in Beverly Hills. “Guys lose their shit over it,” she said, which, when I followed her on Instagram and scrolled her likes and comments, seemed to be true.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” —Marguerite Duras, The Lover”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“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”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Ativan helps you forget your anxiety but takes with it everything else you wanted to remember.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica