I’m 29 – should I get Botox?

The received wisdom is not to mess with what Mother Nature gave you, but all of my fresh-faced friends are dabbling with hairline tugs, fish pouts and fillers, writes Olivia Petter. Am I resisting to feel worthy – or to save my wallet?

“Promise me, girls, don’t do anything to your faces.” These are words I’ve heard time and time again, often from older relatives, since entering into my 20s. And, for a long time, I ignored them. Because I really had no intention of doing anything to my face. Now, I’m not so sure. Because when I heard them from a friend’s mother last weekend, I bristled.

At 29, not having done anything to my face puts me in the minority among my friends. Almost every woman I know my age has had either Botox, fillers, buccal fat removal, or a combination of all three. They inject it in their foreheads, around their eyes and sometimes near their mouths. They get their lips puffed up and the fat drained from their cheeks, often for thousands of pounds a pop.

Don’t get me wrong, they look great, particularly the ones who’ve paid extortionate amounts of money to get the best doctors out there that fiddle with faces. One was recently told they looked like they’d just been on holiday for three weeks and had 12 hours of sleep a night. But given how many of them are getting it done, it has made me start to question the strict instructions I’ve always been given.

What if I want to do something to my face? Should I feel ashamed if I do? And if everyone else I know is doing it, aren’t I going to start to look a little haggard by comparison?

This really wasn’t something I’d have even considered as recently as two years ago. But now, I often find myself staring back at my face each morning, and pulling and twisting it in different directions to see how I look. A hairline tug here to iron out the slowly forming wrinkles, a fish pout there to make my cheekbones bulge like Bella Hadid’s.

I’ve also started toying with Instagram filters that offer you surgical enhancements. There’s one that gives you the “perfect nose”, for example, and another that gives you a filler-enhanced pout. I screenshot all of these and look back at them alongside regular photos of my face. They do make me look better, I have to admit, particularly when I’m feeling a little run down. An instant ego boost. God, it’s tempting.

I’m not the only one. The other few remaining women I know who’ve not had anything done are all contemplating it on a regular basis. It’s a question we’re constantly told to ask ourselves: what more can I do to better the way I look? Should I spend money on this treatment or that product? Am I beautiful enough?

In 2023, rigid female beauty standards are as alive as ever. Yes, despite all the #bodypositivity you might find on TikTok, a lot of it feels fairly meaningless when it comes to the way we feel about ourselves. Or maybe that’s just me. Whenever I’m browsing female celebrity accounts on Instagram, I can’t help but study their faces. They all look the same.

This was an observation made by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino back in 2019 when she wrote about the rise of a “single, cyborgian look”. Citing Emily Ratajkowski and Kendall Jenner as references, Tolentino notes how this face “has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips”. Whether the women mentioned have had surgery or “tweakments” in order to look the way they do is fundamentally irrelevant: theirs is the face that people are taking into consultation rooms.

Can you blame me if I’m tempted to do the same? There have been many low moments over the past few months when, seeking a quick fix, I’ve googled prices for everything from Botox to rhinoplasty. A few years ago, I would have turned my (real, and slightly pointy) nose up and judged anyone who’d had anything done to their face. But now, I completely understand the appeal. And to be completely honest, if it wasn’t so damn expensive, I’d probably have done it by now.

The only other thing stopping me is fear. Fear of something going wrong that leaves me permanently disfigured (see Linda Evangelista). Fear of disliking the way it has changed my face and wanting it reversed (see Kylie Jenner). And fear of getting hooked on it, and winding up looking like… well, I don’t need to give you any specific references here.

But as I get older, and the crumples on my face deepen while everyone else’s continue to magically vanish, who knows whether this will change? What I do know is that all this reflects something rotten about the way we view female beauty. Instead of being something we can appreciate in its organic form, it has become a mask we must twist and tug at until it fits into a societal mold, one that is constantly mutating. It’s exhausting. Eyebag removal, anyone?