No Filter: Book Review of Aesthetica and The Emerging Trend of Reversing Plastic Surgery

Allie Rowbottom’s new fiction novel Aesthetica is quickly becoming reality

Jun 26, 2023

Disclosure: copy was sent as an ARC via NetGalley

A Haunting Glimpse into the Influencer Culture: Allie Rowbottom's 'Aesthetica' Delivers

For a few years in the mid-2010s, the concept of a girl who was still in her teens getting preventative injectables became totally normalized overnight. It suddenly became a mundane occurrence to see your favorite beauty guru posting an Instagram story in selfie mode as a long needle enters their swollen lips. In 2017, a record number of 21,000 botox syringes were injected into the faces of patients aged 13-19.* In that same year, Botox injection procedures were up 876% from 2010, and 94% of all Botox procedures in the US were done on women.

*It’s important to note that Botox injections are an effective treatment for chronic migraines, including in children. However, in the study referenced, the 21,000 botox procedures performed on patients ages 13-19 were separated from medically necessary procedures.

Allie Rowbottom’s new novel Aesthetica predicts the trend with sharp accuracy. The story follows ‘annawrey’, a fictional influencer living in Los Angeles. The narrative flits between past and present, with present being Anna in her 30s, preparing for a new and risky surgery called Aesthetica™, which aims to reverse all former plastic surgery the patient has. The surgery claims to include natural aging along with procedure reversal. If you’ve had botox to prevent wrinkles, you would leave surgery with the aging those injectables were supposed to prevent.

Aesthetica poses a question that is difficult to tackle, perhaps impossible to answer: is the act of reversing plastic surgery just another makeover? However, a deeper look at Anna Wrey’s story in the book poses a more important question:

Is social media and the endless pursuit of beauty just a distraction from the deeper things nagging at us?

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This book is a haunting reminder of how fiction can often become reality. It tells a story of what could be and serves as a stark warning of how quickly the impossible can become inevitable. It's a gripping exploration of how present-day events can shape our future, and how the events of today will shape the years to come.

This book shook me to my core - I haven't seen any other examples of writing that represents the influencer experience accurately. The author also wrote with gut-wrenching honesty about body dysmorphia, eating disorders, addiction, and sexual assault in a way that makes it obvious she's been through those things herself. I know, because I have, too.

Aesthetica by Allie Rowbottom touches on every aspect of the female experience, without flinching at the monsters in the shadows. Through the narrative, I questioned my own experience in a new way. Why, when I was a teenager, was I so goddamn angry at my mother all the time? Why do I find the ineptitude of my elders on social media so infuriating, even humiliating?

As a former influencer myself, Aesthetica rattled the remnants of pressure, shame, and exhaustion from that lifestyle. I tapped out before I got anywhere near the size of Anna’s audience, and my content wasn’t as outward facing as hers, but I can relate to the confusing experience of being both loved and hated by an audience I was told to be grateful for. As a beauty blogger in 2017 - 2019, I’m no stranger to the amount of plastic surgery that was normalized for the children who consumed beauty guru content. I would be lying if I said I never thought about freezing my forehead or filling my lips. As I scrolled through filtered and facetuned selfies, it became hard to recognize what was real and what was fake.

During those years, I often thought about the speed of trends, how “instagram face” wouldn’t be in vogue forever, despite the permanent alterations people were getting to achieve it. In the year 2000, there were about 5 million procedures involving Botox or fillers. In 2018, there were 16 million and rising. By 2019, the Plastic Surgery industry was raking in $16.9 billion dollars, a record high.

Post-Pandemic Trends in Plastic Surgery Powered by Zoom

Here we are in 2023 - if you’re reading this, you survived a global pandemic that left the world broken with grief and loneliness. The social media feeds are feeling a lot like a dead mall these days - the lights are on, but nobody’s home. The isolation of the pandemic brought us goblin mode, where we collectively abandoned hygiene, fashion, and beauty and opted for sweatpants and cheese-its for dinner instead.

During the Covid-19 pandemic itself, elective surgeries were halted in the United States. Hospitals were packed, and having non-lifesaving surgery left patients vulnerable to catching, spreading, or dying from the virus. Was it lip fillers and BBLs as normal once vaccines were rolled out? Not exactly.

While instagram face seems to be a thing of the past, the pandemic has made way for a new set of aesthetic concerns. Apparently, staring at your own face on Zoom for hours a day causes you to notice things you may not have cared about before. The normalization of wearing masks has allowed people to heal their nose and lip procedures discreetly. Many of us work from home now, so there’s more time to recover from surgery without it impeding on daily life. Some have said that the inability to travel has caused people to spend more money on things like elective cosmetic surgeries.

Why am I saying all this? Instagram face, also referred to as ‘Snapchat dysphoria’ by psychiatrists, may have caused a massive surge in elective plastic surgery, especially with injectables. However, when we look at the history of trends and their impact on aesthetic procedures, it’s obvious that instagram was not the only influence.

Some blame the Kardashians for the overwhelming growth of the Brazilian Butt Lift, the plastic surgery procedure with the highest mortality rate. In this New York Times article, Jessica Rabbit is cited as an inspiration for a BBL, a cartoon rabbit who’s been tantalizing viewers since 1981. Is Pamela Anderson to blame for the rise in boob jobs in the late 80s? If you watched her recent documentary, “Pamela, a Love Story”, you’d know that she herself was a victim of the aesthetics trends of the time.

How much have filters impacted our self image?

What remains shocking about ‘Instagram face’ and the impact it had on fictional influencer Anna Wrey, the actual influencers she was based on, as well as their audiences, is the magnitude of its impact and the age of who was impacted. Every year, the average age of a plastic surgery patient goes down, while the number of minors getting elective plastic surgery increases. It’s important to note that minors require a parent or guardian to sign off on plastic surgery, which means that more parents are signing off on their underage kid’s procedures than ever before.

For years now, we’ve recited words like “it’s preventative!” like mantras in response to criticism towards younger people getting injectables. From a personal perspective, I’ve always been non-critical of plastic surgery as a feminist who loves makeup, pretty dresses, and everything else Alicia Silverstone enjoys in the movie “Clueless”. If plastic surgery made someone happy, than who was I to opine? It seemed like mind-your-own-business territory to me.

Then, in college, one of my closest friends almost died getting a procedure done in her home country, the Dominican Republic, at the same place her mother and aunt got their surgeries done. As I listened to her traumatic experience, she made it clear that her mother and aunt had pushed the surgery on her from a young age. They treated it like a right-of-passage to womanhood.

By the time I graduated college in 2016, the Instagram wave had become a tsunami. The all-powerful beauty guru was on the rise. For the first time, I began to find the normalization of plastic surgery unsettling. Jeffrey Star vlogged his plastic surgeries with click-bait titles like “I Got Botched... Fixing My Deformed Lips”, sharing the video to his millions of followers with a plethora of 💉emojis. James Charles filmed and shared his lip filler and botox procedures to his audience, which was comprised mostly of Gen-Z kids under the age of 16. In a 2020 interview, he stated, “"I have lip filler. I have Botox. I'm very open about it. I don't have too much of it, but for me, my dad has literally the worst forehead wrinkles you could literally imagine on anybody ever. So, for me, my Botox was very much just preventative, because my dad and I have a very, very similar face."

Perhaps the strangest part of all of this for me was the lack of criticism. In contrast, there was a celebratory response to the influencers sharing their procedures with their millions of followers. Fans applauded Nikki Tutorials for sharing her botox story. When Carli Bybel talked about a party she went to where beauty gurus on the invite list were treated to a buffet of Botox and lip fillers, the comments lauded Carli for being so relatable and relaxing to watch.

I remember thinking to myself, guys… Carli Bybel just revealed that high-profile beauty influencers are invited to parties where they’re served botox, filler, and wine… in one place… and we’re not gonna say anything about it? We’re not, at the very least, going to chat about how CRAZY that is???

The Make-Under: A New Trend Identical to Aesthetica

In some reviews of Aesthetica, some have called the fictional instagram comments, influencer events, and lifestyle of LA based social media-lites dramatic. As someone who was a part of the beauty industry from 2017-2022, I assure you, it was very accurate. Aesthetica mirrored the downfall of the influencer era, and like in the book, the bubble of Juvederm® was bound to pop.

In 2022, real-life influencer Jaclyn Hill posted a video titled “DISSOLVING ALL OF MY LIP FILLER…”, eerily similar to the premise of Aesthetica.

Many fellow beauty gurus of instagram feeds past are following suite. A new term has emerged: “The Make-Under”

Amy Schumer said in an instagram post, “I tried getting fillers. Turns out I was already full. Thank God you can dissolve them. I looked like Maleficient.”

Crystal Hefner recently declared on Instagram that she has “removed everything fake,” mirroring the fictional procedure from the book with the same name as the title. It seems like the future Allie Rowbottom wrote about in Aesthetica has arrived. TikTok videos documenting the process of lip filler removal and the shocking amount of swelling that comes with it are racking up millions of views.

@nikiiiavraam What they dont show you..

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Where do we go from here?

One article about the surge in Make-Under's claims that 2022 was the year of the ‘natural influencer.’ If young women are getting procedures done to reverse their former procedures from a former social media trend, is that any better than the previous surgical influence? Is reversing a past trend just another trap to fall into? Are we paying the same plastic surgeons that filled our faces in the first place?

In Aesthetica, the main character Anna Wrey follows all the “rules”, gets all the surgeries, loses all the weight, to become the perfect influencer for that moment in time. In a way, she achieves her goal - fame, influence, collabs with big brands, a fellow influencer manager boyfriend, money, and the Los Angeles life of her dreams. But like many of us who have fallen into this trap, she can’t avoid the shadow side of this fantasy.

The influencer boyfriend turns out to be a predator who introduces her to other predatory men, who dangle fame and followers in front of Anna to lure her into cycles of abuse. She becomes alienated from her best friend Leah, who suffers from an eating disorder - a product of the impossible beauty standards fabricated by monoliths like Anna’s instagram alter-ago. Her most important relationships become hollow. During her mother’s battle with cancer, Anna battles with what she should and shouldn’t post. The line between reality and constructed social media content becomes blurry, and in that distraction, removes Anna from the experience of grief and loss. She becomes an audience member of her own life, constructing her own experiences through the viewer’s lens.

Will more procedures solve these problems?

No makeover or make-under will quiet the critical, nagging voices that live in our heads. We have to find out where they came from, and examine those voices. Where, in our pursuit of beauty, are we falling in to Euro-centric standards of beauty? How will altering ourselves empower us, and when is that just another intricate lie produced by the very same people who benefit from misogyny?

Why do so many of us hold the belief that changing our physical appearance will solve our problems? When that doesn’t work - will changing ourselves back to the way we were before solve those same problems?