My father had plastic surgery. Now he wants me and my mother to get work done
Hi Ugly,
My father is falling down a plastic surgery rabbit hole and trying to drag everyone around him down with it. He’s in his late 50s and, in the past year, he got his first cosmetic surgery and made a whole fuss about the results. I personally can’t see any difference whatsoever, but he brags about it constantly to anyone and everyone!
After this “success”, he’s been telling my mom to get Botox and microneedling for her wrinkles and telling me to get a weird, expensive acne laser treatment and urging me to see his cosmetic dermatologist for my acne scars. I feel very uncomfortable with this – I previously did Accutane and a million other things for my acne, which is, cough cough, genetic! – and any suggestion that my mid-50s mother needs to stop ageing.
How do I navigate my father’s maddening descent into plastic surgery culture?
- Sad, Acne-Scarred Daughter
I understand your dad completely.
When I was 11, I forced layers of sparkly eyeshadow on my four-year-old sister. My friends and I passed soda-flavored Lip Smackers around our middle school classrooms like notes. Upon discovering Urban Decay Big Fatty Mascara in my teens, I told every girl I knew she had to buy a tube (or 10).
Girls are born into beauty culture, which teaches us that appearance is a key measure of our worth. It’s communal! Social! Fun! Feminine beauty ideals are modeled by the dolls we play with. (Hi, Barbie.) The rules are passed down in games and stories. (Remember Pretty Pretty Princess?) Products become portals to friendship and connection. We learn to self-surveil and to surveil others, often subconsciously, as a way to gauge our personal success and help our loved ones succeed, too.
Some of us eventually reckon with this, and realize the urge to embody beauty standards isn’t a harmless hobby so much as a harmful obligation. But that can take time.
Your father, freshly exposed to beauty culture in his 50s, isn’t there yet. He still has the mindset of an adolescent. And he’s far from alone!
The cosmetics industry has been reeling men into its multibillion-dollar empire in recent years. Call it inclusivity: the media hailed singer Joe Jonas’s 2022 endorsement of Xeomin, a Botox alternative, as “genderless self-care”. Call it capitalism: Pharrell, Machine Gun Kelly, Harry Styles and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson all cashed in on the celebrity beauty brand boom by launching their own lines. Call it contagion: an increasingly virtual world is an increasingly visual world, and the pressure to prioritize aesthetics is reaching parents, children and even pets.
Whatever you call it, it’s working.
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons reports that in the US, men’s Botox use increased 5.5% between 2022 and 2023, and the number of men undergoing cosmetic procedures grew 8%. Today, 52% of American men use skincare products – a 68% jump from 2022. Men are breaking their legs to get taller, shaving their teeth to get veneers, and flying to Turkey to get hair plugs. The global men’s cosmetic market is worth $90bn dollars and is projected to grow to $115.3bn by 2028.
“Anecdotally, I’m seeing this [shift] in more than half the dads I know,” says Chris Danton, co-founder of the In Good Co consultancy and author of the newsletter Good Thinking. “It’s a multi-generational phenomenon.”
In an ideal world, cis, straight men’s growing interest in a traditionally female- and queer-focused category might inspire them to question arbitrary gender norms – to free themselves from the trap of toxic masculinity! Alas, that’s not what’s happening.
Instead, men have recast cosmetics as power tools for alphas, reinforcing sexist stereotypes and promoting ageist, classist, oppressive appearance ideals. Beautification has been rebranded as “looksmaxxing” and perfume as “scentmaxxing”. Swallowing skincare supplements is referred to as “biohacking” and anti-ageing as “longevity”. Don’t Die: The Man Who Wants To Live Forever, a new Netflix documentary on the 47-year-old tech entrepreneur Bryan Johnson’s obsession with living forever and looking like a teenager, might give you some insight into your dad’s mental state.
The best insight might come from reflecting on your own childhood experiences, though, since modern men’s beauty culture draws from the same old playbook: ideals are inspired by Marvel action figures. Gamified fitness trackers enforce the rules. Instead of Pretty Pretty Princess, they have brawny, billionaire broligarchs modeling money, power and makeovers.
You say your dad is “dragging everyone around him down” with him. But my guess is, like a kid with a shiny new toy, he thinks he’s sharing. It’d be sweet if we were talking about, say, scented nail polish. But he’s starting with scalpels.
I think you should sit your father down for a heart-to-heart. Tell him you understand he’s just discovered the beauty industry, and that changing his looks with the wave of a Botulinum Toxin Type A-filled wand seems like magic. But you and your mother are, by default, authorities on beauty culture – and there’s a reason neither of you are interested in his aesthetic adventures. You’ve lived! You’ve learned! And you’ve got a thing or two to teach him.
To help your dad understand what’s happening to him – and how it’s affecting the women in his life – I suggest what I’d suggest to any Sephora tween on the cusp of critical thinking: feminism.
He needs to grasp that beauty culture is “always actually prescribing behaviour and not appearance”, as Naomi Wolf writes in 1990’s The Beauty Myth. He needs to recontextualize beauty as capital, the way Tressie McMillan Cottom does in Thick: And Other Essays: “[It] costs money and demands money. It colonizes. It hurts. It is painful. It can never be fully satisfied.”
He can learn how to value the unmodified body (Intact by Clare Chambers), understand the mental health effects of our cultural obsession with appearance (Beauty Sick by Renee Engeln), clock how aesthetic ideals function as ethical ideals (Perfect Me by Heather Widdows), consider the vilification of ugliness (Ugliness by Moshtari Hilal) and parse gender theory (Females by Andrea Long Chu).
I can see you rolling your eyes at the thought of your dad reading foundational feminist texts, and I get it. My father would never! For less idealistic advice, I tapped Dr Pooja Lakshmin, a board-certified psychiatrist and the author of the book Real Self-Care.
“It sounds like this dad is scared to death of the fact that he is getting towards the end of his life, and he’s projecting that fear on everybody around him in an incredibly chauvinistic way,” Lakshmin says.
More from Jessica DeFino’s Ask Ugly:
Photos of myself make me shudder in horror. Does that mean I’m hideous?
I want to ignore beauty culture. But I’ll never get anywhere if I don’t look a certain way
He’s making a very common and very human mistake, she continues. He’s attempting to solve an existential issue with a purely external change. “We want to believe there’s some sort of magic, easy solution” to the problem of being human, Lakshmin explains. “But that’s a childish fantasy.” In most use cases, cosmetic commodities such as lasers and microneedles are not tools of care, she says, but control – particularly when pushed on other (unwilling!) people. That control is illusory, even counterproductive. A study from Yale showed that those with a negative outlook on ageing die seven and a half years earlier than others, likely due to the effects of internalizing “societally sanctioned denigration of the aged”.
The question now is: is he open to accepting the fact that he’s wrong?
Older men tend to be set in their ways, Lakshmin notes. She would encourage a patient in your situation to weigh the likelihood that their father is capable of change. It’s important to understand that his obsession with aesthetic perfection is about him, not you or your mother, she says. Can you hold on to that if he mentions Botox again?
The next step, if you are indeed at your limit, is to let him know that his comments are hurtful, Lakshmin suggests, and set some boundaries around your relationship.
If it were me – not a professional, not capable of subtlety – I’d try something like this: “I understand that you want me to look good because you believe it will make me feel good. But your suggestions are having the opposite effect: they’re making me feel bad about myself. Do you care more about how I look or how I feel?”
If it’s the former, tell him you have good news: he’ll be seeing your acne-scarred face a lot less. I think he’ll get it.
After all, it’s in his best interest to keep you close. Studies show that people with strong social networks – ones built on deep care, not surface-level control – live longer.
