"This acceptance of the value of cosmetic work is not limited to zoomers. When I brought up this story... hands flew to necks, foreheads and eyes."

"Fingers pinched at sags, wrinkles and droops. Their owners — people in their late 20s to their 50s, mostly women, but some men, too — made clear-eyed assertions about all the things they planned to change as they got older or when they had more money and time to spare. At no point in these conversations did anyone suggest that we were fine the way we were, or that aging was a privilege instead of a humiliating process of degradation that is to be resisted at all costs. These were, as [one Gen Z influencer] puts it, 'supportive' conversations: We were supporting each other’s aesthetic aspirations. Supporting our bodily autonomy. Supporting our right to use our time and money to bend reality to our will."

Writes Madeleine Aggeler at "Gen Z has had work done — and they’ll tell you all about it/Plastic surgery used to be hush-hush. Now it’s good content" (WaPo). 

And yet, for all our enthusiasm about cosmetic procedures, Americans still seem confused about how to discuss their relative philosophical merits: It’s empowering to do what you want with your body, but it’s not empowering to feel the need to conform to conventional beauty standards; no one owes anyone information about their body and medical history, but don’t lie about what you’ve had done; and you should love yourself just as you are, unless you don’t, then you should change it. Gen Z is perhaps even more tangled up in this discourse than any other generation.... 

They were told to accept themselves just as they are, then shown all the ways in which they should change.... Transparency... serves as a loophole of sorts: a way to comply with cultural beauty standards while at the same time undermining them.... 

How does it undermine beauty standards to be willing to go through so much pain and bother and expense to pursue them? That you're not ashamed of your effort or trying to pass yourself off as a natural exemplar of conventional beauty?

Anyway, the main point here is that Gen Zers are making TikTok videos about all the work they're having done.

Even the most complex, potentially dangerous procedures look easy, breezy and fast when they’re collapsed into a 30-second time-lapse video set to Kay P’s “Never Dat!” — a popular accompaniment to breast augmentation videos. (Lyrics: “She ain’t like her titties, f--- it, get her new boobs.”) In her boobaversary video, [TikTok star Alix] Earle said she was surprised at just how surgical breast augmentation turned out to be. “No one tells you that they’re just going to like walk you into this cold, refrigerated room, and there’s like a table, and then next to it is just, like, a tray with like knives and slicers. And you’re sitting there, just like, ‘Oh my God, I’m about to get cut open.’... This is also not me convincing anyone to get a boob job. You should love yourself. But if there is something you want do for yourself, then do it.”...

It seems key to believe that the reason you are doing all this is for yourself. Does that mean that you want large breasts because the real you is a large-breasted woman and you want to become the person with whom you truly identify? Or does it mean you understand the effect of large breasts on others and you want what you can get from others for yourself? (That's also for yourself.)

In 1991, Canadian feminist philosopher Kathryn Pauly Morgan published a paper titled “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies.” In it, she wrote that elective cosmetic surgery “is becoming the norm.” She posited that, as a result, women who elect not to go under the knife would “increasingly be stigmatized and seen as deviant.” A little melodramatic.... 

Is it?