In the early 00s with the lingering energy of heroin chic still in the air, and the reigning it-girls being Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, the worst thing a woman could be is fat. There was of course pressure to look young as well, as there always has been, but ultimately aging was inevitable and in the eyes of 00s tabloids gaining weight was not. And they made sure everyone knew it. I remember Jessica Simpson being one of the most prominent martyrs of the 00s tabloids. Nowadays we wince when we look back on Jessica Simpson being maliciously fat shamed, for daring to be a size 6. The cruelty and bluntness of these ever pervasive tabloids seems almost foreign to us now. Headlines are still often cruel though they now do so with a passive aggressive subtly of a high school mean girl giggling and pointing with her friends behind your back rather than the domineering mother archetype who just says you’re ugly to your face to “build character”.
I grew up with those early 00s tabloids. I hardly knew what they meant when I was a little girl accompanying my mom to the grocery store and glancing at the magazine that called a different female celebrity fat every week. So it’s no surprise that my weight was something I was conscious of from a very young age. As soon as I hit puberty and my hips widened, and my thighs grew ever so slightly bigger I began to hate my body. As early as elementary school my best friend and I would weigh ourselves using the scale in her grandmother's bathroom between playing with our Bratz dolls. And only a couple years later we would count our calories together. I remember when I was 13 I looked back on a photo of myself from the summer before, when I was 12, and noticed how slender my prepubescent body was. How narrow my hips were, I was quickly envious of that version of myself. I would spend the entirety of my teen years trying to attain the narrow hips and slender thighs of my 12 year old self. That summer I started doing YouTube pilates in my bedroom and going on runs before school. Soon after that I was doing HIIT cardio every night until I was crying on the floor from exhaustion. My first modeling agency was quick to confirm my insecurity by persistently referring to my teenage hips as my “problem area”.
As a pre-teen and early teen I wasn’t really that into skincare yet, as many girls weren’t prior to the current generation. I of course seared off my skin barrier with a series of Clean and Clear acne preventative products, but aside from that my skincare routine was very simple as an adolescent. This was because the culture wasn’t as fixated on skin-care as it is now. My unhealthy self-image manifested in workout routines and restrictive diets that were especially alarming for someone so young to be participating in because that was the culture I grew up in.
Despite being in a post body-positivity-world there is still an expectation and a pressure to remain slim, of course. Though now it’s a more unspoken pressure, it persists in the silent slipping of an ozempic pill and subtle body-checking on TikTok. However, even still when we hear of people taking ozempic, or speculate they may be taking the pill, one of the alleged “giveaways” that one is cheating to remain slender is the dreaded “Ozempic face” and this so-called “Ozempic face” is one of the main criticisms used against people taking the pill. Every deal with the devil has a catch, and apparently ozempic’s is that it will give you the slender frame you desire though at the cost of your face supposedly looking gaunt and aged. I see Instagram comments on a celebrities instagram post, a celebrity that has recently shed pounds off of her frame, there will inevitably be a comment that reads something along the lines of “she’s clearly on ozempic, she has ozempic face, sure she's skinny but just look at how old she looks.”
The other morning I woke up to a text from my friend Miyo that read “the aging obsession is the new 00s fat obsession” This text came at a time when the internet was filled with discourse surrounding the overwhelming presence of children at local Sephora’s. Many people confused as to why 9 year old girls are adopting lengthy anti-aging skincare routines seemingly out of a dystopian fever dream. People are shocked and confused as to why these 9 year old girls have a growing obsession with retinol.
Criticism of the Sephora kids came within the same week that Kylie Jenner made an appearance to the Jean Paul Gautier Spring/Summer 2024 show. Kylie looked great, her hair and makeup more natural than her usual perfectly sculpted beat we are accustomed to. I thought she looked fresh faced and beautiful. Though people were quick to nit-pick at perceived flaws, this time focusing on her seemingly newly formed smile lines. One commenter writing “she looks good for a 50 year old woman!” another chimes in “she looks so old here.” and another “Such a beautiful 45 year old lady.” each of these comments amassing over 1,000 likes each. It wasn’t long before the Tik Tok analysts stampeded in theorizing what has caused her supposedly premature aging. What has aged her? The filler? The ozempic? The botox? People often act as if Kylie Jenner, her sisters, or other celebrities are fair game to make fun of, degrade, and belittle because of their status as celebrities who have created impossible standards of beauty to attain. Everyone’s a “girl’s girl” until you bring up the Kardashians. I get it. But the problem with belittling Kylie about her smile lines is that you’re not just pointing out Kylie’s flaw and saying she looks haggard. You are sending a message to every woman or girl with smile lines. That she is haggard, and therefore valued less. In the same way I read and internalized the messaging of tabloid magazines criticizing celebrities for their weight as a child, messaging I am still unlearning as an adult. One of my friends posted a photo of Kylie and the comments she was receiving, “I have smile lines just like hers…” she wrote on her instagram story. I worked with a young girl a few years back who was freshly 18, she was half-Filipino and had olive skin, long brown hair, and beautiful, big, brown eyes though people would often compare her to “before Kylie Jenner” and because of persistent mocking of Kylie’s “before” photos online, she took this as an insult. At the time she was balancing University and working at the restaurant. I remember her looking at me with her tired bambi-eyes describing in detail the plastic surgery she was desperately saving for.
Just a few days after Kylie’s appearance at the Jean Paul Gautier show I was scrolling on Instagram and landed on a video of Sports Illustrated model Haley Kalil doing one of the slow motion “glambot” shots on the Grammys red carpet. Kalil looked gorgeous in a shiny green gown accompanied by slicked back hair to reveal her perfectly sculpted face evoking a siren-like essence. I opened the comment section, one of the most liked comments, amassing nearly 30,000 likes at the time of writing this, read “she looks 45 years old” written of course by a user without even a profile picture. Another commenter wrote “She looks old here.” and another “Why does she look 40 when she’s in her 20s” Which is amusingly incorrect in this context considering Hayley is actually not in her 20s but in her 30s. The commenter suggesting she looks older… whilst believing she is younger? An almost comedic dichotomy.
I additionally have seen a new TikTok trend going around where women at varying ages (typically 25+) display their skin at its natural state, ie no makeup or filters and often claiming to have no work done with the accompanied caption something along the lines of “This is what the raw face of a 31 year old woman who hasn’t had any work done looks like” these posts are obviously done in an attempt to normalize skin texture, wrinkles, and blemishes in our current cultural climate where smile lines might as well be your ticket to the morgue. Dishearteningly these posts are often met with cruel comments, often from other women. “I’m 34 and I don’t look like you at all.” one user proclaims proudly, alarmingly amassing over 140,000 likes on this comment. “Disagree. You look in your 50s.” another woman writes with 75,000 likes. These women committed the cardinal sin of aging. Of… God forbid, looking… forty. The horror. Susan Sontag wrote in her essay The Double Standard of Aging “The double standard about aging converts the life of women into an inexorable march toward a condition in which they are not just unattractive, but disgusting. The profoundest terror of a woman’s life is the moment represented in a statue by Rodin called Old Age [The Old Courtesan]: a naked old woman, seated, pathetically contemplates her flat, pendulous, ruined body.”
What I find to be additionally alarming is the common internet joke, where one inserts a celebrity, probably a celebrity who isn’t even that old, likely in their 40s at most. One will insert this celebrity, who has glowing skin likely due to treatments, genetics, lifestyle, or a combination of the three and will caption the photo “This is what happens when you are unproblematic” I think I’ve seen this post made most commonly with Anne Hathaway, who has only just entered her 40s. There is something sinister about associating signs of age with corrupt morality, and associating a youthful appearance with moral purity. This is then further solidified by the seemingly moral superiority of those who are so defensive to comment back “Well I’m 34 and I don’t look like you!!!” as if to prove their superior value, morality, their purity in their baby smooth, blemish free skin. And so youth becomes not only a woman’s duty but a prerequisite in ensuring her morality. This is similar to the way in which a higher body weight has been incorrectly corresponded with labels such as “lazy” or a lack of discipline. Under capitalism the worst thing someone can be is lazy. Under puritanical culture the worst thing a woman can be is impure. And in a patriarchal culture informed by pedophilic beauty standards, the worst thing a woman can be is ugly and old. By associating these physical attributes with a woman’s morality and character this becomes a facet in ensuring control over the body’s and live’s of women. Should she not conform to the physical expectations of beauty, she is not only physically ugly but inwardly ugly as these physical characteristics have come to represent a woman’s character long before she even has the chance to open her mouth.
The era of heroine chic casted an ugly shadow, and in it planted the seeds that would bloom the current obsession with skincare and anti-aging. Jia Tolentino explores this in her essay Always Be Optimizing “Feminism has faithfully adhered to this idea of beauty as goodness, if often in very convoluted ways.” she writes “[The] outcry against Photoshop use in ads and on magazine covers, which on the one hand instantly exposed the artificiality and dishonesty of the contemporary beauty standard, and on the other showed enough of a powerful, lingering desire for “real” beauty that it cleared space for ever-heightened expectations. Today, as demonstrated by the cult success of the makeup and skin-care brand Glossier, we idealize beauty that appears to require almost no intervention—women who look poreless and radiant even when bare-faced in front of an iPhone camera, women who are beautiful in almost punishingly natural ways.” In a similar sense that Tolentino expresses here, when we moved away from the thinness craze of the 00s that had an association with a youthful pre-pubescent body, it did not remove us from putting pre-pubescent beauty on a pedestal. Like a virus that needs a host to survive, this pathological pursuit of youth was not exterminated with the body-positivity movement; it merely mutated to survive in the ever shifting cultural host. The pervasive grasping at prepubescent girlhood transcended from body to skin, though the persistent policing of the flesh remains consistent. Susan Sontag wrote in The Double Standard of Aging “For women, only one standard of female beauty is sanctioned: the girl.” This is contrasted against the reality that the “man” and the “boy” exist as two separate standards of beauty for men/boys, whereas, Sontag writes “There is no equivalent of this second standard for women. The single standard of beauty for women dictates that they must go on having clear skin. Every wrinkle, every line, every gray hair, is a defeat. No wonder that no boy minds becoming a man, while even the passage from girlhood to early womanhood is experienced by many women as their downfall, for all women are trained to continue wanting to look like girls.” There is no greater reflection of culture than pre-teen and young teen girls who are desperate to grow up, and appear older. Pre-teen girls are chameleons for the current cultural climate. It is that meme format from Uptown Girls that has been circling, a paradoxical labyrinth of female beauty. The woman claws after the youthful, pristine skin, and narrow hips of the young girl, whilst the young girl, unknowing of this paradox, pursues the same routine though in an attempt to be grown-up like the woman.
As a child I used those tabloid magazines to stare longingly into the mysterious world of adults. I would hide under the kitchen table as I flipped through the pages of Cosmopolitan magazine, trying to unlock the secrets of what it meant to be a woman. Today that seemingly mysterious world is far more accessible with social media sites such as TikTok. Unfortunately with the current climate of the internet, children do not have spaces that are for them anymore. Therefore, we share the online space with people of all ages, and many children and pre-teens have spent the entirety of their lives sharing online spaces with adults, watching how we talk about ourselves and each other. Instead of the tabloids in the grocery store little girls see these TikToks about how haggard women look for having something as normal as smile lines. These girls are watching and internalizing these discussions in the same way we internalized our mother’s discussions about weight.
Laurie Penny states in her book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism “Late capitalism quite literally brands the bodies of women. It sears its seal painfully into our flesh, cauterizing growth and sterilizing dissent. Femininity itself has become a brand, a narrow and shrinking formula of commoditised identity which can be sold back to women…” she writes “From the moment we become old enough to want to own ourselves, the corporate cast of womanhood is stamped into our subconscious, burnt into our brains, reminding us that we are cattle, that we are chattel, that we must strive for conformity, that we can never be free.” This branding takes place in a very physical way. The branding of girlhood exists commonly in the searing off of one's skin barrier or the dysregulated hormones and ravaged state of our metabolisms from crash diets. Laxatives and wrinkle cream rebranded as ozempic and retinol.
When I see the kids online obsessed with skincare I must say my heart breaks a little. Not because they’re different from myself, but because they’re the same. When I look at these little girls talking about the importance of SPF to “avoid aging” I see myself gazing longly at photos of my 12 year old body. When I see baby faces putting retinol on their smooth poreless skin, too young to even get acne, I am reminded of myself stepping on the scale in elementary school and being upset by the number I saw. When I see these little girls on TikTok discuss their lengthy skincare routines I am reminded of the lengthy workout routines and counted calories of my own girlhood.
And so, what I’m saying is… sure, the kids are sick, but so are we. They contracted the illness from us.
I feel so bad for those little “kid influencers “ . Child labor is rearing it’s ugly head whereever it can
I also remember staring at those magazine covers of bone thin celebrities, like Nicole Richie, and the Olsen Twins, and I very soon after that developed an eating disorder. It was very rough in the 2000's. One thing I do think has improved is size variety in clothes. Everything used to run soooo small and there was not really many plus size clothes. I remember thinking I was fat because I wore a size medium at forever 21. (I was not fat at all.) I still think we have a ways to go to making fashion accessible to everyone, but I think it is much better than the early to mid-2000's. As I get older I definitely feel the pressure to look young still.