When Nora Ephron wrote the words “I feel bad about my neck” it was a rallying cry for women everywhere. Yes, they thought. Finally! A woman widely considered an intellectual had come clean about the fact that no matter your deep and worldly concerns, your keen understanding of the beauty industrial complex’s choke hold, or your desire to be free of it, you will—at some point or another—realize that you are aging, and you won’t like it. Nora was a beloved friend and mentor, but it took me a long time to understand what she was talking about.
I have been test-driving beauty trends at Vogue for over a decade. In my tenure I’ve done everything from microblading to lash extensions, red lipstick to red hair, tooth whitening to mob-wife nails—and even a foray into the Gen Z trend of face glazing. Some have been informative (wow, tooth whitening isn’t as cut-and-dried as I’d thought) and others life-changing (my microbladed brows won friends and influenced people, and my face remains glazed), but none threw me into an existential tailspin quite like this assignment on face tape—how suddenly you can hardly open a social media app without being offered some form of tape that is not Scotch or duct, but is instead meant to delay the inevitable, to offer you sweet sleep that will leave you bright-eyed and youthful, or even rejigger your visage before your very eyes.
Fear of aging is, after all, about more than just the resultant wrinkles, the sagging in places you never knew could sag, the literal thinning of your skin. It’s about more than libido waxing and waning, or your role as an object of desire moving—at least in certain settings—to the background, as your crone status takes foreground (crone, a word that feminism tried to reclaim but could not give a proper makeover). We fear aging because we fear death, and we fear death because we don’t understand it. And so we control what we can—some of us exfoliate and slap on serums, others exercise until our muscles burn. We dye our hair and divvy up our food into smaller and smaller portions. Unless we make the decision to age with radical acceptance—a practice that offers few mainstream role models, existing as we do in a culture that celebrates women for doing things as basic as letting their curls spring into gray around their deep-plane facelifts. To see a woman going gently into that good night without any intervention, you may have to hop a plane to an organic farm in the Pacific Northwest.
My editors at Vogue started me with a range of tapes, more than any one woman could reasonably use—so many that I had to outsource testing to the girls in my office. The mouth tape—a TikTok trend run amok as far as I was concerned, intended to promote better sleep by forcing you to breathe through your nose—lasted about a half hour before I ripped it off, desperate to tell my husband something of absolutely no consequence. It was as if by taping my mouth, I was suddenly powerfully moved to speak gibberish. So I offered two kinds to my assistant Mia—VIO2 Unscented Mouth Tape, a clinical blue strip shaped like a T-bar, and Skin Gym’s millennial pink offering, molded into a cheeky kiss. Mia swore it caused her to drift off faster than she could say “I have something to tell you,” but later admitted she always sleeps like a baby. Ah, to be 28 again.
Face taping may be all the rage right now—whether it’s the mouth, the kinesiology tape that promises to stop wrinkles before they start, or the complex sets that create a temporary lift by pulling from the sides and joining at the back of the head with something resembling a ponytail holder. But tape has a rich history in Hollywood, dating back to the golden age when Joan Crawford used surgical tape hidden beneath a wig to create a temporarily snatched visage that would make even Kris Jenner—she of the viral facelift—jealous. It’s remained a trick of the trade, something savvy makeup artists use on clients who either don’t want to go under the knife or whose results are starting to loosen. But in an age when no beauty secret stays secret for long, it’s only natural it would emerge from the dark of the soundstage and become one of 2025’s most talked about trends.
I will admit here that I have always thought I was a no-interventions type of gal. Save for a not-very-effective (but alarmingly painful) shot of Kybella into my chin, I’ve forgone the kinds of tweakments that are barely considered unnatural anymore. I was proud of this stance, perhaps even a little cocky. I was also in my 20s. As I age—sped up by a very sexy case of early menopause—I am forced to reckon with the reality of having my face age with me. Yes, you gain wisdom and peace. But it’s impossible—especially when confronted with constant photographic evidence of tighter, younger versions of you—not to stare, terrified, into the mirror, wondering what the next injustice will be. I could handle the witchy gray hairs that sprouted from my head, then my chin. I wasn’t too shaken by the stretch marks that grew across the top of my chest, like a purply network of tree roots. Even my one breast bidding adieu to her sister, making a run for my belly button, I survived with good humor (although Hollywood tape tricks can do wonders for that too). It’s the face that gets me, every time.
And so, I decided I would devote a week to Skin Gym’s face tape, which purports to fix the facial muscles, preventing them from scrunching, squinching, or squooshing in the night. My best friend Russell is an acupuncturist, and seemed like the perfect person to place my tape, slapping it on my frown lines, crow’s-feet, and nasolabial folds. He seemed, at the very least, to be taking the job seriously, and when the tape was on—lovely rose-colored Band-Aids, easy to apply and rather adorable to look at—we both agreed that the sensation was one of relaxation. Our faces, usually animated with shock, awe, or rage, were forced into stasis. We put on a documentary about murder aboard a cruise ship and endeavored to just chill. It had not even been an hour when he asked, “Does your face feel…insane?”
It did, I agreed, feel really crazy. The spots where the tape had been applied were both hot and cold, itchy and tingly, a sensation I can only compare to leaving Elmer’s glue to dry on your hand in second grade. We ripped the tape off in a fit of pique and scrubbed ourselves furiously with hot towels. Second tape experiment: a fail.
We also had to admit that the spate of wrinkle-free celebrity faces we had been admiring—Kris Jenner’s among them—were likely not the result of a serious face-tape regimen. At the very least, they were due to what Brits call the Croydon facelift, a.k.a. a ponytail so tight that it stops the forehead from moving at all. At the most—and most likely—they were deep-plane facelifts, a new variation on the tried-and-true nip-tuck that is being sought out by younger and younger patients. Instead of taking loose skin and pulling up and back, a deep-plane facelift involves repositioning the tissues under the skin of the face, so that the entire thing is moved up, as if adjusting a sagging tube top. In layman’s terms, the face—muscles and ligaments included—is pulled to where it once belonged, reducing the taut, catwoman look made famous by Jocelyn Wildenstein and reaching for something more natural and true.
When I was a kid, I got my hands on a before-and-after-plastic-surgery issue of People magazine. It laid out images of celebrities like Cher and Michael Jackson, presurgery and post. I was obsessed, and kept it by my bed for the better part of a year, analyzing just how—and why—these faces had transformed. I did the same thing again with images of deep-plane facelifts, reading testimonials and staring at the results until faces began to blur. Looking at these people—mostly women, many of them barely 40—I tried to understand what had brought them there and how they felt when they left their doctors’ offices. I poked my husband: “Which picture do you think looks better?”
“I can’t tell the difference,” he muttered, acting like straight men throughout history, both unaware of our Herculean efforts and unconcerned about his own march toward middle age. I persisted—“Before, she looks so nice—I’d really trust her with, like, my kid.” (I don’t have a kid.) “After, it’s good—but there’s something uncanny valley, as if she’s looking out of her own death mask.” Did I really think this or did I just want to think it? Was it my truth or my dearest hope that all this effort may not be required simply to live in the world?
The next step, naturally, was to experience the classic face-tape facelift. While celebrities like Doechii and Charli XCX have recently made face tape an explicit style choice—the former sporting tape so often it’s become her signature, the latter hitting the 2023 British Fashion Awards with a slice of yellow duct tape yanking each eye—it’s typically meant to be hidden beneath a cascading tumble of hair. And though my skin may be lax, hair I do currently have, and so I set about snatching my eyes back and tightening my chin(s) with two covertly placed pieces under the jawbone, which I pulled to a close using elastic at the nape of my neck (this too can be yours with the Mark Traynor Face Lift Double Kit). The results were confounding—from one angle, it was the face I once knew so well, returned to me. From another, my cheeks seemed to fold and bubble. Chalk it up to my lack of experience, or maybe just the imperfect art of analog beauty, but the look was anything but red-carpet ready. Even an old-school black-and-white film camera would have taken issue with my approach. When I removed the tape, my peach fuzz came with it, as if to mock my vanity.
I spent the next weekend obsessively googling “med spa near me.” I read about sugar threads that lift skin and stimulate collagen, 45-minute fox-eye procedures, and “subtle and radiant” dermal fillers. I read about units of Botox and recovery time for deep-plane facelifts. I asked my mother whether she thought I should keep my buccal fat. I asked my stylist whether he ever taped anyone’s tits over their shoulders (“I’ve done it all,” he nodded sagely, before telling me he thought that pop stars were regularly taping their nether regions “front to back” to stay tucked into those tiny unitards). I made the mistake of plugging my number into a spa site and started getting regular texts asking if I had tried the new vampire facial. I didn’t know what I was looking for, only that my tape odyssey had given me fears I’d never known enough to have. I wondered whether, by the time I filed this story, I’d have lipoed my cheeks and chin and be visiting the Vogue offices with my face wrapped in ace bandages. Anything seemed possible.
And then I remembered Nora’s book, the one my mother and aunts quoted, which I’d been old enough to appreciate but too young to fully understand. Was it possible that the answer was not in a google for “qualified nurse aesthetician” but in the pages of a book that has sat on my shelf since I was 20?
“We know in one part of our brains that we are all going to die, but on some level we don’t quite believe it,” she wrote. I wish I could tell her that I don’t believe she’s dead, and that when I read her, she isn’t. I wish I could ask her whether I’m too young or too old for Botox. I wish I could explain that every experience she told me would come to pass, did—heartbreak, professional success and failure and success again and maybe more failure, probably more failure. I wish I could tell her that I now, too, feel bad about my neck.
And then she says it: “Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of 35 you will be nostalgic for at the age of 45.” I’m not 35 anymore. I won’t be 45 for a while. I have a moment in which to watch myself change, watch the world respond, and come up with a plan. I’m not ready to have my face lifted back onto my face. It turns out, I’m not good at having my mouth taped shut. I am taut and sagging, wrinkled and smooth, young and growing older every day. I won’t solve it tonight. I don’t have to make any rash decisions.
So I pull my ponytail tight, and I hope for the best.
In this story: hair, Sonny Molina; makeup, Mark Carrasquillo; retouching by Noizblur; manicurist, Honey.
Produced by Ted Jane.