Are female celebrities feeding a culture of secrecy around tweakments?
No woman deserves to be scrutinised over her appearance, least of all when she’s just 21. And yet, this is something Millie Bobby Brown has been forced to contend with ever since the age of 12 when she first shot to stardom thanks to her role as Eleven in Stranger Things. Recently, though, things have taken a darker turn, with the actor facing such a tirade of criticisms following red carpet appearances that she felt compelled to issue a statement in response.
“I want to take a moment to address something that I think is bigger than just me, something that affects every young woman who grows up under public scrutiny,” Brown began in a video shared on Instagram. “I started in this industry when I was 10 years old. I grew up in front of the world, and for some reason, people can’t seem to grow with me. Instead, they act like I’m supposed to stay frozen in time, like I should still look the way I did on Stranger Things season 1. And because I don’t, I’m now a target.”
She went on to read headlines that described her as “ageing so badly” as well as naming the journalists behind them who were “so desperate to tear young women down”, accusing them of “bullying”. Brown continued: “The fact that adult writers are spending their time dissecting my face, my body, my choices is disturbing. And the fact that some of these articles are written by women makes it even worse.”
All of this is grim, not least because it’s hardly anything new. These fault-finding missions are something almost every young woman in the public eye has faced, with everyone from Kylie Jenner to Selena Gomez having been consistently, and ruthlessly, targeted by those who feel they have the right to dissect and analyse women’s faces and bodies. Nothing guarantees immunity, either. There’s always something somebody will have a problem with; if you’re not beautiful enough you’re probably too beautiful. And so on.
This is the issue Brown is speaking to, and it’s one that me and almost every other woman I know can relate to, regardless of the fact we’re not in the public eye. It’s relentless. It’s wrong. It’s misogyny at its most brazen. But it’s also not as simple as we’d like to believe.
Beauty standards are set by the patriarchy. At least they are according to TikTok and Oliver Bonas mugs emblazoned with #SmashThePatriarchy. This may be true, and the conventions we all feel compelled to live up to are laid out for us through a very male gaze. In reality, though, they’re upheld by famous women. These are the people we see everywhere, the ones fronting advertising campaigns and billboards for luxury brands. The ones whose photographs are splashed all over the internet and social media. The ones many of us aspire to look like.
One photo of Kim Kardashian with blonde hair can set an entire beauty trend for the next six months. Likewise, any other female celebrity with a large social media following. They know this – hence why so many of them are launching brands of their own in a bid to capitalise on their global influence. In this regard, Brown is no different. In 2019, she launched her own Gen Z-focused beauty line, Florence by Mills, which included products designed to treat young skin, such as face mist, under-eye gel pads and skin tint. She was 15.
“I wanted to come into the space because there was a gap in the market for young people,” Brown told Women's Wear Daily at the time. “I guess I could never find anything that I liked to put on my face and it felt good. I’d take off my makeup and boom, another pimple would appear.” Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing but respect for a teenage girl looking for ways to profit off her public profile by launching her own business. And I’ve never tried the products myself, so can’t make a judgement on whether or not they were a worthwhile investment.
That said, I find it hard to grapple with Brown’s decision to enter a market that, at its core, is about exploiting the insecurities of girls who, let’s be real, have no business investing in skincare regimes. Spots are a part of growing up, as is falling asleep in your makeup and waking up with mascara halfway down your cheek. That’s not a problem that needs to be solved. It’s a childhood. And it’s one that we’re quickly seeing being eradicated – consider last year’s craze among children as young as 10 asking for expensive anti-ageing products.
It’s not that this necessarily undermines Brown’s argument; obviously, she still maintains the right not to be torn apart for her appearance. But it does make it challenging to parse. There’s another thing that makes it even more complex, and it’s something that doesn’t just apply to Brown but all young women in the celebrity sphere where cosmetic tweakments, such as filler and botox, are rife. People on social media, along with the tabloid press, are currently comparing her recent appearance to some of those other young female celebs who appear to have had work done.
I started in this industry when I was 10 years old. I grew up in front of the world, and for some reason, people can’t seem to grow with me
Millie Bobby Brown
We don’t know if Brown has had any of these things, nor do I think it’s our right to know. What I do know is that the culture of secrecy we’ve created around who has or hasn’t had cosmetic “work” in the public eye is making things worse for all of us. We know the work is happening – an increasingly standardised Instagram face feels inescapable on both our big and small screens – but no one is talking about it openly, so we’re left to guess and debate it.
Nobody likes admitting to having had a little nip and tuck. Jenner lied about it for years with her lips, and Bella Hadid only came clean about having a nose job fairly recently. I don’t blame them for this, by the way, because they were simply living according to the golden rule of beauty, which is that women must do whatever they can to look beautiful but not tell anyone about what they’re doing because it only counts if it’s natural.
Obviously, the onus shouldn’t fall on the individual to be upfront about every procedure they’ve had done, but given how mainstream this all is now (almost every woman I know in her thirties has had Botox), wouldn’t we all save ourselves a lot of fuss by being honest about it? Otherwise aren’t we all just raising the beauty standards even higher, making them even more impossible to attain for ourselves and others?
I have a lot of empathy for Brown and can’t imagine what it feels like to have the world rip into your appearance like that, particularly at such a young age. But I also worry that, for reasons I think might be out of her control, she’s also contributed to a culture that makes people think they have the right to do just that. Modern-day beauty standards operate around a vicious cycle, one that thrives on our insecurities and compulsions to look and feel a certain way. It’s a beast. Maybe the sad truth is that sometimes we’re the ones feeding it.
