Should you be getting Botox? Welcome to Ask Ugly, our new beauty column!

Hey, Ugly.

It’s happening. I am turning 40 next year and I realized all my friends and acquaintances are getting younger looking. I don’t know if it’s the rigorous food habits, Botox, or what have you – but folks are tightening up. The Indigo Girls have a great line: “Every lesson learned is a line upon your beautiful face.” But also, maybe I should be more proactive about anti-ageing?

– Ageing Indigo Girl

Hello and welcome to the inaugural issue of the Guardian’s new beauty advice column, Ask Ugly! I’m Jessica DeFino, former editor for the official Kardashian-Jenner apps (I’m sorry) turned repentant reporter. These days, I research how glazed doughnut skin is the death drive incarnate and how collagen supplements are contributing to the climate crisis. Oh, and I believe beauty culture is a public health issue. (See? I said I was sorry.)

I’ve been called “the woman the beauty industry fears the most”, but you can call me Ugly. My readers do!

Really. They do. When I critique modern beauty standards – like, for instance, positioning Botox and Xeomin as cutaneous manifestations of ageism – I tend to get one of two dismissive responses: you’re too young and/or beautiful to know what you’re talking about or you’re too old and/or ugly to listen to.

I love it. I crave it. Call me gorgeous! Call me grotesque! Prove my point!

My point being: “beauty” is a culturally constructed illusion, and yet it affects how a person is perceived: what opportunities they are afforded or whether they succeed socially, financially, even politically. It is meaningless, but it matters.

You won’t get suggestions for the best new niacinamide serum from Ask Ugly. Just eat a sandwich. I won’t recommend some celebrity-loved surgery for sucking the fat from your face – it needs fat. Instead, I want to dig into capital-B Beauty here: what it is, what it means, and how it’s been industrialized and assembly-line machine-squeezed into billions of plastic bottles.

But back to your question, Ageing Indigo Girl.

In 2019, Allergan, the pharmaceutical company that produced Botox back then, invited me on an all-expenses paid press trip to the Stagecoach music festival. (A press trip is when a brand takes members of the press on a free vacation in exchange for press coverage. If that sounds unethical, it’s because it is. It’s also how most beauty media operates. Anyway!)

This particular press trip was lavish. Every editor in attendance was gifted VIP concert passes, a private hotel suite, monogrammed pajamas, piles of beauty products … and free Botox and Juvéderm services.

I declined the injectables. I think I was the only one. I spent the weekend staring at everyone’s syringe-smoothed faces and obsessing over my own skin, now so obviously slack and ageing and wrong. I was 29! Working in the beauty industry breaks your brain.

To self-soothe, I went home and wrote a detailed account of exactly how much time, money and effort it takes to maintain the ageless, expressionless “Instagram face” look for Fashionista.com – roughly 16 cosmetic treatments and $17,000 a year. And that’s without 2023 inflation.

Still, understanding that the youth-centric beauty ideal is an algorithmic black hole designed to absorb my brain space didn’t make me feel better. For a long while after, I felt bad.

Who could blame me? The false equivalence “beauty = good” is everywhere: anti-ageing products are laden with religious significance – “holy grail” moisturizers, “miracle” ingredients. Anne Hathaway’s youthful appearance is credited to her “unproblematic” behavior. “You look good for your age” is a common compliment, with good meaning young – a construct designed to keep people consuming, and consumed by, a need to prove their worth.

Of course, Indigo Girl, you know this! Lots of people know this! It’s why so many are set on rebranding conventionally bad, ugly or negative traits as good, beautiful or positive traits. Stretch marks are now “warrior marks” or “earned stripes”. Wrinkles are now “signs of wisdom”. I saw an influencer refer to her forehead line as “a hard-earned mark of enduring and carrying on” the other day, and I’m sorry to her and the Indigo Girls, but I hate it so much! This “reclaiming” is not better than the original fallacy. It still frames the physical body as a marker of worth and assigns a moral value to a slab of flesh that intrinsically has none.

Wrinkles are not morally bad, and they are not morally good. They don’t mean you’re a worthless old hag, and they don’t mean you’re older and wiser. Wrinkles simply are. They happen. They’re human. Think of it this way: I can name quite a few wrinkled old men who don’t seem particularly wise. If you have trouble doing the same, just picture members of the US government. Does the lines-are-lessons-learned thing only apply to women and gender non-conforming people, then?

To answer your question, Indigo Girl, no, I don’t think you should be more proactive about anti-ageing. Not because your crow’s feet are good or beautiful or representative of some deeper wisdom, but because they come with the territory of having a body.

Anti-ageing is a disappointing pursuit. It has been since Ponce de Léon went searching for the Fountain of Youth and found Florida. There is no point at which the anti-ageing will have worked – when you look in the mirror and say, “I’ve done it! I’m anti-aged!” Once you buy into the concept of anti-ageing, you buy in forevermore. It’s expensive, time-consuming and – even though, sure, injectables might make you feel good in the moment – it inspires an unending cycle of age anxiety. A study from Yale showed that those with a negative outlook on ageing die seven and a half years earlier than others. (In that sense, anti-ageing does work!)

Astute readers will say that women participate in anti-ageing because of ageism; appearing younger makes them less vulnerable to age discrimination. That’s partially true! But it’s also true that adhering to beauty standards perpetuates them and their attendant consequences, including appearance-related anxiety, depression, dysmorphia, disordered eating and self-harm.

For what it’s worth, anti-ageing beauty behaviors don’t seem to truly help ageing women, anyway, and rarely make them appear younger so much as altered. Look at the contestants on Golden Bachelor. Almost all have undergone extensive anti-ageing surgeries and procedures. Almost all say they feel “invisible” in society still.

There is an alternative to anti-ageing, critic Susan Sontag wrote in On Women, and this is what I suggest for you: let yourself “age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about ageing”.

Must you make a political stance with your sagging skin? I mean … yes, kind of. No matter what you do – Botox, no Botox – the face of an ageing woman has political implications. Did you know the makers of Botox have donated tens of thousands of dollars to US legislators attempting to enact a national abortion ban? Just a little something I like to keep in mind.

There are many, many areas of life where it’s not possible to opt out of our own oppression; beauty is one area where a lot of us – not all, but lots – can. And it feels really good to do it!

Duality check: it sometimes also feels bad! I never did get injectables, but plenty of people close to me do and being the only fine-lined friend in a sea of sentient Snapchat filters can make me more aware of the fact that I’m getting older and I’m going to die someday and that everyone I love is going to die too and oh, God, is there anything after this? Is my existence some cosmic joke? Do I matter? Why am I here? Would this be easier if my skin seemed somehow … tighter?

Alas, the existential ache is an inescapable part of life. Kind of like wrinkles.

And on that note: whenever the urge to be “proactive about anti-ageing” hits me, as it has you, I remind myself that ageing is another word for living. That isn’t some faux-positive “frown lines are lessons learned” spin; it’s a biological fact. We don’t get to live without looking like it, and – in my wise-beyond-my-wrinkles opinion – we don’t get to live fully if we’re obsessed with not looking like it, either.