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Someone named Kylie Jenner—not sure if you’ve heard of her—went to Paris last week to attend the couture shows and, controversially, she brought her face with her.
Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard politicians discuss the need for a 500,000-strong citizen army to mobilize against Russia; learned, via Facebook post, that Mark Zuckerberg is sinking billions into making the Terminator franchise a reality; and been informed that global warming might be about to unleash a pandemic of “Arctic zombie viruses” from Siberia’s permafrost.
You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking the internet might have directed the bulk of its rage towards something other than an influencer’s “festoons,” which—as everyone knows—means swollen under-eye bags. But no. Let the Doomsday Glacier melt and Western society collapse into a nuclear hellscape populated by hermit crabs in plastic “shells,” but a woman looking faintly tired after a long-haul flight without being dragged to hell for it? Not on our watch! French X users, in particular, took it upon themselves to prove in 280 characters or less that Paris is categorically not always a good idea, declaring they were positively put off their croissants by the fact that Kylie looked—quelle horreur—“dans la quarantaine.”
Women, am I right? One day, you’re starting a Reddit countdown to their 16th birthdays, the next they’re a witch from Macbeth. The urgent need to call them out on this egregious failing in increasingly degrading ways is a burden as old as Methuselah himself. (Kylie might be maturing too quickly for the likes of X users @CallMeIncel, @InternalisedMisogyny2004, and @WhatWouldRushLimbaughDo, but the patriarchy? It’s ageless.) But when it comes to the youngest of the Kar-Jenners, of course, there’s another element at play beyond bog-standard sexism and ageism, a strain of discourse more toxic than a leaking PIP implant.
If Jia Tolentino labelled Kim Kardashian “patient zero” of the millennial “Instagram Face” phenomenon, Kylie is the viral vector that’s introduced it into Gen-Z’s very DNA. This is a person who, despite being four years shy of her 30th birthday, has been famous since before Bush left office, and has, over the course of 6,946 Instagram posts and counting, morphed from a tweenager with a normal amount of buccal fat into King Kylie the Kontoured, Arch-Influencer of the Filler Generation.
Inevitably, as a Birkin-toting cypher of American capitalism-gone-mad with a carbon footprint roughly the size of Burundi’s, her every misstep sends another shudder of schadenfreude through the internet. Kylie’s worn a faux lion head to Schiaparelli? Boris Johnson’s wife Carrie, smugly secure in the knowledge that everyone she’s legally bound to is morally unimpeachable, feels within her rights to call it “grim.” Kylie’s taken a 17-minute private flight to Camarillo? Allow us to create an X shitstorm about it, generating enough ad revenue to keep Elon Musk’s own jet in the air for years to come.
This sort of digi-lantism is not exactly effective, of course (hard to imagine Kylie not rushing to share packets of Southwest Airlines peanuts with the hoi polloi after they’ve called her the worst thing to happen to air quality since Chernobyl). It’s nowhere near as bad, though, as the TikToks and tweets describing her (objectively gorgeous) face as “a cautionary tale” about the danger of fillers, particularly their aging potential. Some of these evangelical musings, I would argue, are misdirected explosions of “eat-the-rich” fury, but others—written by people whose medical knowledge amounts to dressing as a sexy nurse for Halloweekend 2006—genuinely imply that, by taking a virtual cheese grater to someone’s sense of self-worth, they’re providing some sort of… public service?
But it was her choice to get fillers, they will cry! What sort of example is she setting for a vulnerable younger generation?! To which I can only say: Let’s turn the LED ring light onto our own good selves for a second, shall we? Dissecting someone’s face and body with all the relish of a Beverly Hills surgeon accomplishes nothing beyond re-entrenching the idea that someone’s personal appearance is up for public debate. (You know who’s long espoused that view? The adult paparazzi who used to call a 16-year-old Kylie “ugly” on the streets of LA, which—and I’m reaching here—might have had something to do with her feeling insecure about her looks in the first place.) As for the implication that looking older than your natural age is a cardinal sin: It doesn’t take a sociology degree to draw a line between that sort of dross and nine-year-olds asking for retinol creams from Father Christmas. Do take a moment to savor this moral victory while standing in line with a pre-teen army at Sephora.
Which isn’t to say that I think Kylie should be wholly excepted from criticism, or that we shouldn’t be thinking long and hard about what the rise of tweakment culture means. When you get filler, or surgery, or anything of that ilk, you are, on some level, casting a vote for a world in which youth and beauty (whether God-given or doctor-bought) continues to confer a disproportionate amount of privilege. You can be frustrated by this, of course—you can and should rage against a cottage industry built on stoking women’s sense of inadequacy. But laying into an individual who, though apparently poreless, is very much human? That isn’t going to move the Botox needle one bit.