Highly filtered images of highly perfected faces

Here I am, stuck in a tech dystopia with you

Dear GFPs, this week I want to talk to you about a weird habit I’ve developed recently: I’ve started collecting women. Not literally, obviously, I’m not Hugh Grant in Heretic. No, my collection is strictly metaphorical. Still, I hang on to these women increasingly tightly, clucking over my rarified horde like a feminist Gollum, fearful that one of them could fly the coop at any moment, going AWOL and leaving me and my beleaguered troop even lower in numbers and morale than we already are.

The first member of my unwilling collective was Keira Knightley. I collected her about a year ago, probably about ten minutes into watching Black Doves, which was a surprise to me, since I’ve never actually been a massive Knightley fan — really through no fault of her own, I just can’t forgive her for playing Lizzie Bennet when Jennifer Ehle’s definitive version already existed.

And now we break for a brief but extremely important digression:

WHY are they remaking P&P again? If we must keep re-making Austen could we at least have a stab at Persuasion which does not yet have a definitive version? I shall, of course, be boycotting this new upstart P&P just as I boycotted Knightley’s. In the words of the definitive Lady Catherine de Bourgh:

But to return to the matter at hand, Keira Knightley in Black Doves. Specifically, Keira Knightley’s face in Black Doves. Her beautiful, expressive, mobile face. A face with a forehead that shows lines all the way across it when she raises her eyebrows (which, crucially, she can do). A face with eyes that crease when she smiles, and a mouth that puckers when she frowns. A face that has under-eye bags, that has skin that doesn’t look like it’s made of glass but instead has, you know, pores and just generally very normal skin texture. A face in short, that looks kind of like mine. I mean, yes a preternaturally beautiful face, so not like mine at all, but still. A face that looks like the face of a woman in, as Knightley was at the time this was filmed, her late thirties. And I was absolutely obsessed with it.

Keira Knightley’s face made me at once happy and sad. Happy, because I got to see what the face of a woman in her late thirties actually looks like and realise that my face, with own its creases and lines and marks and eye-bags was not in fact in a state of advanced decay, but arguably pretty normal. And sad because it made me realise quite how inured I had become to seeing faces made ageless by nips and tucks and tweaks and jabs. Sad because such faces have become so normalised that the face of an actress that has not (to my knowledge and please say she doesn’t just have an incredible cosmetic surgeon) been nipped and tucked and tweaked and jabbed seemed by contrast so noteworthy, so unusual, so damn refreshing. Sad that I felt so grateful to Knightley for letting us see her (still extremely beautiful) face like this. In a time when it feels like everyone is getting injectables (or filtering their face on social media so it looks like they’ve got injectables), seeing Knightley’s apparently unmodified face went some way towards making me feel like less of a freakish old crone at the grand age of (at the time) forty.

Since my Knightleyception (allow it) I have gone on to collect a few more faces, most recently Emma Thompson’s (😍😍😍) in Down Cemetery Road, but it has to be said, the pickings have been slim. Indeed, such is the ubiquity of artificially youthified faces that when an older actress came on screen in a show recently, a friend I was watching it with commented on how much older this actress looked than her age — and I wondered, does she really though? Or have we just completely lost sight of what a woman in her sixties looks like?

The rapidity of the rise of facial “rejuvenation” treatments over the past few years has been astonishing. Since pretty much everyone from your Harley Street plastic surgeon to your local high street beautician is handing out Botox these days, there is no central tweakments database, which means that we don’t have firm data on exactly how many people are getting their faces done. Still, we do know enough to say that it’s happening a lot more than it used to. The International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (IASPS), for example, reports that 15,286,878 people globally had anti-ageing injectables last year — an increase of 98% since 2015. And bear in mind, this is only procedures carried out by accredited plastic surgeons, which by no means accounts for the total. In the UK only 32% of those offering injectables are doctors and of that 32% only 41% were on the specialist register — and of that 41% only 37% were plastic surgeons. Indeed, while the IASPS reports 3,183,878 total injectables in the US last year, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (which despite its name does not restrict itself to plastic surgeons when tallying figures on injectables) reports that its clinicians helped “almost 10 million patients smooth fine lines in 2024” (so public spirited of them 🥰) - and that’s just with Botox. The total ASPS figures for injectables in the US last year reached nearly 20 million.

Whatever the real figure, however, it’s safe to say that a lot of people are having stuff injected into their faces. These people are mainly women who still make up the vast majority of the market for injectables, and the age at which they start is getting younger and younger. And look, I get why women do it, I really do. As Susan Sontag put it in her seminal essay The Double Standard of Ageing, while “the prestige of youth afflicts everyone,” it above all afflicts women, because for women, beauty is “identified with youthfulness” in a way it just isn’t in men — and being beautiful is “women’s business in this society” (whereas “the business of men is mainly being and doing, rather than appearing”). This is as true today as it was when Sontag was writing in the seventies. Indeed, the research I’ve done for the menopause section of my new book makes it abundantly clear that ageism hits women both earlier and harder than it does men — not that women really need research to tell us this. As Victoria Smith put it so brilliantly in Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women, “People are dismissive of older women. We know this already, not least because many of us have been dismissive of older women before realising – too late! – that we’d become such creatures ourselves.” No wonder, then, that women are particularly keen to dissemble when it comes to their age, as indeed we have been doing for centuries.

Still, something arguably more insidious has been going on in recent years and that something is, inevitably, social media, where we are exposed on a daily basis to highly filtered images of highly perfected faces (one study found that ninety per cent of women filter their photos before uploading them to social media). The consequences of this widespread normalisation of unrealistic (and outside of medical intervention, largely unattainable) beauty standards are pretty predictable: social media has been shown to be an enormous driver both of body dissatisfaction and an increased willingness to undergo cosmetic treatment — and, of course, the the more time you spend scrolling, the more dissatisfied and willing you become. In fact, the research is pretty clear that cosmetic procedures (and their sneaky cheaper cousin, social media filters) are catching. Filtering begets filtering, tweakments beget tweakments.

Meanwhile, older women seem to be becoming increasingly invisible. This is of course in a way nothing new. Many women have written about feeling that they became personally invisible as they passed into midlife, and there is plenty of research demonstrating that women do indeed get edged out of the workplace on an advanced schedule (most notably when, as I’ve written before, that workplace happens to be in front of a camera). But that’s not exactly what I’m talking about here, because when I say older women are becoming increasingly invisible I’m talking about the 21st century inevitably tech-flavoured twist on this old phenomenon. A recent analysis of 1.4 million images and videos from Google, Wikipedia, IMDb, Flickr and YouTube found that women are consistently “represented as significantly younger than men.” Looking specifically at celebrity image databases (IMDB and Google), they found that the most common age for women is in their twenties, whereas for men the most common ages were between forty and fifty. And naturally AI is compounding the issue as it always does. Readers of Invisible Women may remember that I warned about the dangers of the amplification effect when it came to the female data gap - that an algorithm trained on male biased data doesn’t simply reflect that initial bias it has been fed, but substantially ramps it up. Well, that applies here too: our new large-language-model overlords are being trained on these biased databases, and that means we are basically teaching ChatGPT that older women do not exist.

Which is where me and my face come in.

I don’t post my face on social media very often. Mostly because, as I said in this instagram post, it has NOTHING TO DO WITH MY WORK, although it is also true that I, being human, am not immune from the pressure to conform to social media beauty standards and, frankly, I feel like an absolute mug posting my unfiltered face when apparently everyone else is FaceTuning theirs into oblivion. Indeed, I have even been tempted to get some tweaks myself, because yes, it’s hard to be the scowling (THAT’S JUST MY FACE, OK) injectables refusenik.

Anyway, the point is that if I post about my newsletter on instagram at all I will usually just feed the algorithm with a relevant screenshot from the most recent edition. This generally feels kind of pointless and a massive chore — and indeed, shortly after I posted a screengrab of the last edition of this newsletter, a friend messaged me to tell me that Instagram didn’t want my (I maintain fascinating) screengrabs. Instagram, my friend informed me, wanted my face. Oh, ffs, I thought, grumpily (for I am a scowling middle-aged woman), but FINE. Have my face if you’re so desperate for it. And…well, see the difference for yourself.

Screenshot views to the left; grumpy face views to the right; here I am, stuck in a tech dystopia with you

So, lesson learned and I guess everyone’s going to be seeing a lot more of my face from now on. Specifically my unfiltered face, because there was something else I learned from this episode beyond the fact that Instagram does not care for my screenshots about non-traditional heart attacks. As well as getting a whole lot more views and likes, the post of my face also got a lot more comments than my poor little newsletter screenshot that, it turns out, very much couldn’t 🥲. The majority of these comments were telling me that this was the first post of mine they had seen in an extremely long time, and, you know, QED. Some of them, however, called me on my accompanying text about why I don’t generally post my face, my favourite being the comment that started “Surely you can’t be suggesting that you want to be an invisible woman?!” (well played, that account). Several others thanked me for posting my “normal” face, wrinkles and all — and this got me thinking about the little collection of female faces for which I have been so grateful this past year. I wondered how many women are clutching a collection of their own. I wondered how much worse women’s (entirely rational) fear of ageing has been made by the shrinking visibility of women who actually look like they’ve aged past their twenties. And I wondered how many of us actually WANT to pay this female-specific tithe to the church of holy cosmetics — and how many of us are simply being terrified into conformity?

To return to Victoria Smith’s magisterial Hags, she addresses the growing trend for women to get botox not because they think their wrinkles make them look ugly, but because they think they make them look angry or sad. They think their newly lined and sagging face does not reflect who they are on the inside. And, Smith writes, she understands this. She understands “the sense of alienation that comes from suddenly being reminded that you do not look like the person you picture in your head,” and she understands “why attempting to reclaim a ‘truer’ image of oneself can feel like an act of empowerment, a fundamentally human raging against the dying of the light.” But nevertheless, “the ‘true self’ justification for battling the ravages of time,” seems to Smith to be “tied to something far more insidious: the misogynistic message that a woman who matters wouldn’t look like you.” And you know what? I think she’s right.

I have huge admiration for the few women in the public eye who have, to date, withstood the overwhelming pressure to get anti-ageing cosmetic treatments. It means a lot to me, and I believe to many other women, to see female faces of my own age that crease. And if some of the most beautiful women in the world can live with their creases, even under the full glare of the celebrity spotlight, then so can I. I’m not pretending I’m a feminist saint who has managed to transcend caring about beauty standards and I’m not pretending that resistance is easy; more than one woman who is older than I am has also told me to wait until my smug forties-ish face hits the fifties, so I can’t promise I won’t change my mind either. Still, I am going to try to resist medical intervention. I am going to try to continue to leave my accumulating grey hairs undyed, my brow unfrozen, and my lips increasingly looking like I smoke forty a day.

And even though I do still feel like a mug for posting my unfiltered unfillered face on the internet, that is precisely what I am going to continue to do. I want to be part of the movement, however small it may be, that tells women that conformity is not compulsory. You don’t have to use filters. You don’t have to get filler. You don’t have to dye away your greys. You don’t, in fact, have to do ANY of this. You can meet the world with your middle-aged face and insist that, contrary to what it tells us about the worth of women, you do still matter, and you do still have a right to love, to play, to laugh, to live, to exist.

And who knows, as an added bonus, maybe the old algorithm might be listening too.

A recent picture of me that I was horrified to see originally, before reminding myself that I do not in fact look like I’m sixty when I’m in my forties, I am just unused to seeing photos of unfiltered 40-something faces. This is what forty-one looks like for me and that is fine.

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Poppy pic of the week

Here’s a face that needs absolutely nothing done to it because just LOOK AT HER

That’s it! Until next time, my dear GFPs….xoxoxo