The Many Things That Are Wrong With Your Face

And what you should do about it

It’s Sunday. I’m sitting next to Ben on the couch, and we’re talking about our move to North Carolina.

“Well, that closet,” I say, looking over my left shoulder at the wooden door, “is going to be terrible,” and as he responds with, “Yes. Totally,” I notice a delay.

A pause.

The tiniest pause that you only notice when you’ve known someone so deeply, and when your brain, over so many interactions, has created an expectation of how quickly and in what form you expect them to react to something you do or say.

And then they don’t.

And now you’re off-script.

And something is wrong, either with you, or them, or both.

“What was that?” I ask.

“What was what?” he says.

“What. Was. That.”

He squirms. “What do you mean?”

“Why did you just do that. What were you thinking about one second ago.”

“Nothing I wasn’t thinking about anything I was just answering yo—“

“—No, that’s not…” I say, realizing that his eyes hadn’t met mine where I thought they would, like they were looking at my cheekbones or maybe my— “—oh my god,” I say.

“What?”

“You were looking at my nasolabial folds thinking about how I need a SMAS lift.”

He was. And he’s right.

Maybe not today, maybe not next year, but one day, I will need one.

Ben learned about Superficial Musculoponeurotic System (SMAS) at a ‘here’s all the happenings in cosmetic plastic surgery’ conference a few weeks ago, while I was sitting at home on a Zoom call presenting my sales numbers to my team.

A text on my screen: You need a SMAS lift! LOVE YOU!

If you look in the mirror right now, which you should do, you might realize that you, too, could benefit from a SMAS lift on your nasolabial folds, which are the half circles running from your nostrils to your chin; parentheses around your mouth that make you look old.

In my 20s, I never cared about such things.

I wasn’t meant to.

We’re all not meant to.

20-year-olds are meant to do drugs and stay up late and have sex and frolic in the sun and then you hit 30 and your hair recedes and the fat from your face dissolves causing your skin to fall in on itself, each wrinkle loosely tied to some formula of Xnights of sub-optimal sleep + Yhours in direct sun + Zlines of coke and sometimes, when I’m alone, I count them, especially the ones under my eyes. Today it was fourteen. Fourteen tally marks on a prison wall from someone stuck in a decaying body. Fourteen etchings reminding me of how long I’ve been and how long I have left — each newcomer fine line closer in proximity to the last, like rings on a dying tree.

“It’s just,” he says, pinching the excess skin on the back part of my cheek and pulling it towards my ear, “there,” he sighs, a sense of calm washing over him as if he’s just transmuted me from Frog.

It’s not good to be Frog, by the way.

Beautiful and alluring gets you more clients.

It gets you promoted, you sell your script, you raise more money, you get discounted gym memberships — at 10 pm when you get to the ice cream store that just closed, the hourly worker will let you get ice cream anyway and they’ll scoop it for you and as you walk over to the point of sale system they’ll say that “it’s already logged out for the night but don’t worry about it,” and when they hand you your free ice cream, they’ll look at your attractive face, and though they say “here you go,” what they really mean is “thank you.”

I want that — or at least, as close as I can get to that for as long as possible.

In college, I had a friend named Erica Stewart who had it.

I remember being 19 years old with her, on a trip through Europe. We walked through the Madrid airport, her golden blonde hair floating in the wind above bright blue eyes on a symmetrical face atop perky tits and a tiny waist.

That’s what they all saw.

At first.

And then, like being on a video call and noticing a weird darkness in the blur of someone’s background, they’d become aware of me, her mediocre-looking, maybe-gay cousin who was probably on his final tour of Europe before he’d fall victim to whatever disorder was causing the already sunkenness under what-should-have-been healthy-looking 19-year-old eyes. Maybe leukemia.

Regardless, I loved it.

I loved clinging, all week, to the side of Erica’s cup, catching stray drops of attention-rooted pity, and establishing a baseline to which I would, from that point forward, compare the attention I’d receive in any given moment since.

Now, as a 36-year-old with visible neck kyphosis and unshakable hip fat, it feels like I currently attract 7-8x less attention than I did then, and though, on a daily basis, I do my best to believe that this temporary state must be my seductive rock-bottom, I know that that’s not how aging works, and that the best I can do is try to slow the decay or start hanging out with people who have taken worse care of themselves than I, hoping that when I stand next to them, that one of them will relatively assume my formerly designated position as Frog.

I feel like this is a newer phenomenon, especially as a man.

Like all of us have suddenly realized that our handsomeness declines faster than we’ve been told.

‘Brotox’ is a new term I learned on TikTok that I’m embarrassed to have typed, but in 2019, men underwent 118,000 Botox procedures. Last year, that number hit 500,000. Men now account for 15% of the entire cosmetic botox market, with a 13.4% CAGR (compounded annual growth rate), which is a very high number for something that isn’t new.

“I get baby botox,” says a 24-year-old guy on my team.

“Whoa, really?” I say, “but you don’t even have any wrinkles.”

“Yeah,” he responds, “but I don’t want to all of a sudden wake up as some ugly dude in my mid-30s and have it be too late.”

I wait for him to say “No offense.”

I wait forever.

We, the men, used to not care.

Such self-hate or self-awareness used to be reserved for women, while society was meant to run around spouting lies on how we age into our 40s or even 50s, “Like wine.” But it seems that the noticing of how hideous everyone thinks you are has finally crossed the gender rubicon, that ad algorithms are stronger than false senses of security, and as the standards of male beauty have increased, people have come to understand that old-man wine, when left uncorked, actually does stink.

When I was chatting with GPT about this, it had a bunch of reasons why it thinks that’s the case, but, like most things, I think it can be reduced to technology amplifying the social aspects of being human and, more specifically, it’s that short-form content has made men compare themselves to other men at a frequency previously reserved for women, and then it’s combined with facts like how ugly people are more likely to get laid off, earn 9% less, are also more likely to be single and how, on dating apps, one standard deviation in attractiveness not only earns you hotter matches but it also gets you 20% more matches overall.

I’m not saying everyone should just go get their faces sliced up from a plastic surgeon, but in a world where the hotter you are, the less you suffer, it makes sense to at least figure out how feasible it is for you to be on a less suffering-filled path.

Botox, for example, is a good path, and shaves off 5-6 years.

Though I’m sure you can find horror stories, the risks, to me, seem negligible. All it does is reduce the amount of movement in specific facial muscles on the spots where the contraction of that muscle has been causing the skin to fold up on itself — a contraction that creates wrinkles. Think about how the lines on your forehead would go away if you never moved it. Like, if you never looked surprised about anything ever again. How beautiful you’d be.

Filler is a maybe, and can shave off 4-5 years while making you look less sad. Imagine there’s a jelly donut, but there’s no jelly inside and so the donut is falling in on itself. That’s your face. To fix it, you start by deciding which parts are too shallow, and you grab a tube of your favorite hyaluronic acid and you hand it to the injector and they take a needle and go pump pump pump. If they do a good job, you can look great. If they do a bad job, you look swollen and weird.

I could go on and on about blepharoplasties and facial fat transfers, HIFU and microneedling, laser resurfacing and chemical peels and ultherapy, kybella, and salmon sperm, but the only rule that matters is that you must always pass the litmus test of: if someone can tell you did anything at all, then you’ve done too much.

“Good genetics,” must be what they think.

Like you’ve aged so gracefully on a diet of ice baths and pasture-raised eggs, and zinc.

“I just try to reduce my stress,” you must say when they ask.

And you want them to ask.

My spiritual coach, Francee, would tell me that I’m thinking about this the wrong way.

That if you see yourself as attractive, more people will be attracted to you; projecting rizz yieldeth rewards, but I would say that there are limits to self-worth overcoming physical unsightliness. To swimming against the flow of time.

And so maybe that is part of the answer.

Because since everyone gets old and ugly, and being stuck in the uncanny valley of someone who had too much work done is often worse than having done no work at all, maybe it all comes down to the individual preference of whether or not we choose to accept our inevitable ugliness or, instead, spend time and money fighting it, trying to convince ourselves that we’ve somehow slowed down the tsunami of aesthetic decay long enough where we believe the lie we tell ourselves: that no one is noticing us drown.

Because we don’t get to avoid suffering, and our job is simply to look in the mirror and choose from a few options of Frog.

—

• Hey guys! Sorry, I haven’t written in a bit. Work has been nuts. I have a few more pieces coming down the pike shortly, and am going to work on publishing here more often :D

• Questions:

  • A) If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about your physical appearance and there was a 100% chance it looked excellent, what would it be

  • B) Do any of you have a moment in your life when you noticed yourself as a sideline character to a Erica

  • C) Was this piece too much “information about the industry ” or if I write more of these for other industries/topics that are similarly filled with facts and figures (which is the current plan) would that be chill

• Also, congrats to reader Erica Stewart, whom I have never met, for letting me use her name

• If you’re new here, here’s another piece that most people like of mine.