beauty

Should laugh lines like Toni Collette’s be erased with fillers and botox?

Do you think botox and fillers are empowering? I’m not sure that I do. In the same way that I don’t really think corsets are empowering. Or foot binding (I’m joking about that last one – OK half).

In her column last week on the Huffington Post website disputing the fact that women are less happy today than they were in previous generations, former editor and 40-something Bonnie Fuller argued that life is not tougher on a woman’s self-esteem than in previous decades as some have suggested.

Bonnie wrote….

“….As for the idea that there are more pressures on women today to be more physically beautiful than ever before — that’s ridiculous. In the 50s and 60s the ideal of female beauty was far more prescribed and rigid than today. Blonde, perky or sexy, Debbie Reynolds or Marilyn Monroe types were It. And God forbid, when a woman hit 40 — she was tossed on the scrapheap.

Today, our eyes appreciate the beauty of a Michelle Obama or Kim Kardashian as much as a Charlize Theron or Scarlet Johansson. And as for aging — that’s a whole lot more under our control, too, now that Botox, laser resurfacing and fillers are becoming as common at the dermatologist’s office as treatments for acne. And hey, why shouldn’t we view aging like acne — as a treatable skin condition.”

Wow. That’s a strong argument and one I have some trouble with. Acne is a skin condition that causes impermanent blemishes. Wrinkles are a result of the natural aging process and – while I’m all in favour of using creams and staying out of the sun – I don’t know if I would call wrinkles ‘blemishes’. The idea that aging is somehow ‘in our control’ by virtue of the fact that we can inject things into our faces to freeze them or un-naturally plump out every line? Really?

I think Toni Collette looks beautiful in this photo from the Emmy red carpet. She is 36 and her laugh lines enhance her face immeasurably in my opinion. Compared to other celebrities who “control” the aging process with syringes and scalpels, I think she looks approximately a million times better than those other female celebrities.

What do you think? Is it empowering to ‘take control’ of the aging process with botox etc?