SHOULD I…GET LIP FILLER?

A question I asked myself almost everyday last month—twice that when I was around my girlfriends.

“I want something natural,” I’d say, pictures of random practitioners’ results at the ready to show them. “You see—like this. Flat, and natural.”

My friends would nod their heads in agreement. “Send that picture to me.”

Because that’s the whole point of lip filler, isn’t it? To take what you already (kind of) have and elevate it. Your lips but better.

It’s honestly a little frightening how consumed I was by the thought of perfecting my facial proportions. I wasn’t careless about it either—no, I was mathematical. Up at night taking pictures of my face from various angles, with various expressions, and plugging those into photoshop apps to configure the best possible shape of my lips to even-out the rest of my face. At one point, I had returned to searching ‘Best Lip Filler In London’ so often that if I typed the word ‘Best’, Google would automatically make it the first suggestion.

But it’s a right of passage for any twenty year old, right? When you start to grow into your features and realise that this will be the face in those future photo albums—pictures of you travelling, working, living life—all in your twenties. This is the face that will stare back at you while the grandkids try to figure out what the hell happened.

If that’s the case, why shouldn’t I try to optimise how my face looks right now? I’m talking the Golden Ratio, the filters on social media. If I can tweak just this one part of my face, rather harmlessly, who’s it going to hurt?

Well—me, evidently.

There’s a certain set of vocabulary that I strongly believe no one should ever have in their brains. Some words include (though are not limited to): philtrum, interocular distance, Juvederm and Restylane. Unless you are a medical professional, or someone who has consulted a medical professional, these words should not be something you can figure out through constant messaging on the internet telling you that it determines any part of your attractiveness. Surely we were never meant to look at ourselves THIS much.

Listen, I’m all for enhancements that make people feel confident and like their best selves. If the decision has been well thought out, or even if it hasn’t, it truly is none of my business. What is my business, however, is how I tricked myself into thinking that getting my lips done was some kind of reward. If I finish my coursework this Friday, I’ll get my first 0.5ml. If I workout every day this week, I’ll get 0.5ml. Hell, if I lock in for the next 6 months, eating clean and staying disciplined, I might even let myself splurge on 0.75ml!

How…dystopian.

And then recently I came across this one clip on YouTube. It was of this random reality show that I’ve never seen before, and a bunch of girls popped up on screen at once. They were all sitting around a lush living room, chatting and laughing away. All of the girls were gorgeous—perfect, actually. Not a single flaw. And as stunning as they were, or perhaps because of the fact, I realised something—I could not tell a single one apart.

They were all so beautiful that it was almost as if every single one had morphed into a collective kind of beautiful. And that’s when I realised that I don’t want to be beautiful. I want to be striking.

I want to be the kind of striking that you see once in a coffee shop and you remember forever. The one that is imperfect, a little odd. Maybe her eyes are a little too far apart or her nose is a bit big for her face and she could really do with some lip filler to plump out those m-shaped lips. But you’ll never forget her, and when you think back at the moment you saw her, attractiveness was the last thing on your mind. I want to be a bit unique and strange and unlike anything someone else has seen before. And in order to do that, I can’t be perfect, and I can’t be beautiful as beautiful demands from me at this moment in history.

Who knows? Maybe one day I’ll get that 0.5ml when I am in the right space to do so—when I’m doing it for me, and not for a version of me that believes she would be more worthy with than without it. But for now, I think I want to be unmistakable. Offensively so.