Diary of a Gen Z Student: 25 - a great age to start Botox, apparently

"I remember being 14 and hearing girls talk about the plastic surgery they would love to get. Rhinoplasties, lip filler, cheek filler, Botox, breast augmentation"

Jane Cowan is a student in Trinity College Dublin, where she is in her second year, studying English.

Apparently, I’m supposed to start thinking about getting Botox. 

25 is a great age to start, so I’ve been told. It’s preventative! Preventing signs of ageing. And I’m disappointed by that in some ways. 

Why is ageing something to prevent? Despite what social media would have you believe, it will happen to us all, if we’re lucky.

As a young woman, and someone who went through her teens with Instagram, I understand the pressure of image. 

Everyone my age grew up with so much to compare ourselves to. And I think it’s clear to see, that comparison has taken a toll. 

I remember being a young teen, maybe 14 and hearing girls talk about the plastic surgery they would love to get. Rhinoplasties, lip filler, cheek filler, Botox, breast augmentation. 

And looking back, I find it really upsetting to think of those young girls disliking their appearance so intensely. Especially when that dislike was born from comparison. Comparison to edited and filtered images of fully grown women.

Their 14-year-old body was never the problem – being told that there is something wrong with them was. 

And I think that young girls get this message that they’re deficient in some way so easily. It’s on Instagram and TikTok. It’s in ads for cosmetics. It’s in magazines, on runways, in shopfronts. It’s not surprising that so many people feel a need to alter their appearance. 

We have a clear image of ‘perfect’. But if you differ from that image, which we all do, you have a problem that needs to be fixed. 

And while so many women – and I’m going to say women, because it is more common for women to get plastic surgery – say that plastic surgery is just enhancing something, I can’t help but think that the human body doesn’t need enhancement. They were never deficient in anything, to begin with.

I wonder how this will all look in future. 

Children will be consuming these filtered images, at even earlier ages than my generation did. How much pressure they’ll feel. And the pressure is already immense. 

I’m nineteen. At my age, so many girls have lip filler. And there is something so upsetting about that. It’s not uncommon for girls to get lip filler or Botox as gifts. 

In the run-up to Christmas, I wonder how many people will buy these gifts for their child, and how many people will profit off the insecurities of others. 

Because in the midst of all of this insecurity, there are people making a lot of money from it. 

No one is producing lip filler out of medical necessity. And social media companies thrive off of our obsession with filtered images.

If I’m being honest, I wish I hadn’t grown up with Instagram. It skews your perception of reality so heavily. 

Everyone is perfect. They look perfect all of the time. No one wakes up with unbrushed hair. Images are edited to the high heavens. But the scary part is, I often forget that detail. 

I forget that this isn’t reality. But if I take notice of how people I see in real life look, I’m happy to be reminded that they do in fact look human. That’s a joyful reminder. 

And I’m not trying to blame people who do get plastic surgery. But it is also important to remember, it’s okay to look like regular, imperfect people.

Because I love to think that the person sitting across from me on the train has the same nose as their uncle, or the same smile as their granny. 

Their face is like a map of where they’ve come from, sketched out in laugh lines and imperfect shapes. And I like to remember that no child is born thinking that there is something wrong with their appearance. 

There’s so much to celebrate in how we look. I know that in years to come I’ll probably have a wrinkle between my eyebrows, because I furrow my eyebrow when I read. 

And I want to look like a 70-year-old, when I’m 70. Not everyone gets to make it to that age. Not everyone gets to have their smile lines etched into their face. 

So, I think I’ll consider myself very lucky, if I get to an age where you can see the shape of my smile from the lines on my face. 

Looking like I’ve aged isn’t something that I want to prevent. Maybe we should rethink our ideas of beauty. Is the reality of how we look not enough?