Gossip columns don’t feature Jia Tolentino. She doesn’t use Instagram Stories to document procedures or share filtered selfies. By all standards, she is not a participant in the discussion about cosmetic surgery. She is more unsettling than that; she is the one who observes everything and documents it with such accuracy that readers come away from her essays feeling somewhat connected to something they weren’t entirely aware they had agreed to.
Her 2019 essay “The Age of Instagram Face” appeared in the New Yorker at a specific cultural moment, right before the pandemic accelerated screen time, Zoom anxiety, and a documented increase in cosmetic procedures. It described with unsettling clarity what was already happening to professional beauty. The appearance she described featured a small nose, cat-shaped eyes, high cheekbones, plump lips, and poreless skin. Drawing from Native American cheek structure, black lip fullness, South Asian brow shapes, and a Caucasian nose, it was clearly white but ambiguously ethnic, she wrote. Colby Smith, a makeup artist, referred to it as “an unrealistic sculpture.” Loudness on loudness. A face that appears to be composed of clay. The description was accurate and humorous, which is usually the most unsettling combination.
Tolentino revisited the topic seven years later. In her July 2026 essay, “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare,” which was reprinted in The New Yorker, she discovered that things had gone more as she had feared than as she had hoped. According to a recent survey, the number of facial procedures would rise by 19%. Of plastic surgeons, 57% said they saw more patients under the age of thirty. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons counted close to 50,000 Botox and filler procedures on patients under the age of twenty in 2024 alone. These figures are not insignificant. If anything, they are more difficult to directly observe than the faces they depict.
Tolentino’s writing on this topic is intriguing and genuinely hard to ignore because she isn’t presenting a straightforward moral case regarding conceit or self-destruction. Compared to that, the framing is more accurate and concerning. She is explaining what happens when a platform based on visual performance imbues human faces with particular standards, and when the technology to actually alter those faces becomes affordable, widely available, and socially imperceptible. Nowadays, the most expensive work hardly leaves a trace. After a surgeon cuts the ligaments under the cheek, “the features on top move freely and in one piece, like a Halloween mask,” according to a writer who observed a deep-plane facelift for the essay. She points out that a 65-year-old woman underwent nine procedures in a single six-hour session, according to People magazine. The reader is affected by the accumulation of those details.
Reading Tolentino’s work on this gives me the impression that she is capturing a collective dissociation that most people are too close to notice. She has argued that people are reframed as commodities and stripped for parts by the internet, and that this process has only recently been applied so specifically to the face, which is “traditionally thought of as a portal to our humanity.” It’s an odd statement. Strange because it’s true, and strange because the process she’s describing now includes a twenty-year-old getting attention for striking himself in the jaw with a hammer in an attempt to have a more attractive face, and teenagers asking strangers on the internet if getting a facelift is their only option.
Tolentino, a Filipino-American woman, writes about a beauty standard that appropriates features from different racial groups while still focusing on a fundamentally Eurocentric template. This tension permeates her work without being the main focus. As is frequently the case with the best criticism, it’s possible that the personal dimension influences the analytical one in ways that aren’t always expressed explicitly. She doesn’t present herself as immune to the pressures she discusses in her writing. She simply observes them more steadily than most.
It’s really unclear if any of this makes a difference. The number of procedures keeps growing. The filters remain in place. The face continues to move away from the person beneath it.
