Love Is Blind Shows the Cost of Beauty Inflation
Why making fun of Chelsea is a symptom of a bigger problem ☹️
The Internet of Things asks us to think more critically about the social media content we consume and analyzes how the Internet has shifted through the years. Subscribe to join the conversation.
"Choice cannot make an unjust or exploitative practice or act somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.” - Heather Windows - “A Perfect Me.”
Inflation has turned our society into its perpetual victim. In 2024, food, housing, and self-esteem are all victims in a world spiraling towards a place we don’t want to be but go along for the ride regardless.
In the age of technology and social media, standardized beauty has become something naturally unachievable. Beautiful has become mid. Mid has become ugly. Ugly is said to be a face without an upturned nose, high cheekbones, a sharp jaw, and pillowy lips.
“People are definitely getting prettier,” Jia Tolentino writes in her essay, The Age of Instagram Face, when she interviewed a celebrity makeup artist, an occupation where experiencing the face, up close, is a daily routine.
Post-pandemic saw an increase in facial surgeries. In 2020, we saw the Zoom Boom that caused an uptick in mini face-lifts, rhinoplasty and under-eye filler. TikTok and Instagram have created such realistic filters that people are trying to replicate the techno-Eurocentric features we’re seeing with buccal fat removal and fox eye lifts.
When something becomes popularized, the discourse starts, and we’re finally seeing creators push back on the plastic surgery propaganda we’ve all been subject to since 2015, when Kylie transformed her face and plastic surgery started to become the norm, no, the expectation.
Beauty has been questioned in the discourse surrounding the newest season of Love Is Blind, a show where contestants are challenged to fall in love without seeing the other physically first. Specifically, people are talking about the love triangle between contestants Chelsea Blackwell and Jimmy Presnell and Jessica Vestal.
In the season, Jimmy has a connection with both Chelsea and Jessica, but in the end, chose Chelsea after having some doubts over Jessica’s strong personality and the fact that she already had a daughter. Plus, Chelsea might have swayed Jimmy when she told him she looked like Meghan Fox (which, as an aside, I agree with).
And herein lies the discourse: Spectators flocked to TikTok to criticize Chelsea’s looks, revealing their unrealistic beauty standards just as Jimmy revealed his when he first saw her.
Netflix 'Love is Blind’
The search term, Chelsea “Megan Fox,” has been trending whenever the two are discussed, where people make videos calling her a liar or saying she’d look like Megan Fox if she tweaked this and this and this; other comments comparing her to another reality star, Natalie Nunn, for her longer chin.
People were also anxiously anticipating the episode where Jimmy finally saw Jessica, a bombshell who fits the current beauty standard: fit, big breasts, pouty lips, high cheekbones, a nose job, and a sharp jawline, and who told Jimmy he’d “need an epi-pen” when he saw what he missed out on after he rejected her in the pods.
Do we realize we’ve gotten to a place where a beautiful woman like Chelsea, pretty eyes, nice lips, but a face that isn’t “plastic-surgery perfect” is no longer beautiful? In the eyes of the viewers and Jimmy, who isn’t that good-looking himself, why have we allowed beauty to translate solely into one homogenized face?
I don't need to go into details on how we got here, I think it's clear what's caused the inflation of beauty: The Kardashians' lip filler and Brazilian butt craze, Instagram Face and the IG influencers who wear it, and the speed by which social media shows us beautiful women on a day to day basis.
But what's shocking to me is how desensitized we've become to celebrities with pillowy lips, cheek fillers, botox brow lifts, and BBLs to celebrities of the same age 20 years ago. Check out the celebrities from the Teen Choice Awards in 2005 to celebrities now and see just how much higher their beauty expectations are.
How have we gotten so far that the standard of beauty has become so doll-like, unnatural, and all for the male gaze? Anyone who thinks it's anti-feminist to say that plastic surgery is for the male gaze isn't honest with themselves on why they get plastic surgery, coming from someone who had their lips done to make myself look sexier to men.
“Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe,” Tolentino writes. And it's true. Beauty standards will continue to shift and morph and raise the bar while women and men desperate to uphold the male gaze or the fashion industry's standards participate in procedures almost akin to body horror.
Although we're in the safest era of plastic surgery, with cutting-edge technology improving doctor's practices year by year, when will we realize it's insane to inject materials into our skin or to have our noses broken to be rebuilt?
Will the cost ever be too high? Victorian women would pour poison into their eyes for a beautifying effect and BBLs are the most dangerous surgery with a mortality rate of more than one in every 4,000 procedures. There were an estimated 60,000 procedures in 2023.
With the cyclical pattern of obtaining beauty at any means necessary, I don’t think that day will ever come.