After the glittery cut creases and shapeshifting contour techniques of the mid-2010s, beauty has swung its ever-oscillating pendulum high, high into the realm of the natural. Instead of showing how comprehensively makeup can transform the canvas of the face, beauty artistry has shifted focus to realism and verisimilitude: cosmetic procedures have become ‘undetectable’; the best kind of makeup is that which looks like you’re wearing nothing at all, mimicking the look of a sun-kissed glow, cheeks flushed like they just got a rush of blood, skin dewy like the sheen of healthy activity. In 2025, beauty in its highest form is effortless and any effort that does go into it, invisible.
Naturally, from the undergrowth of such a popular movement has emerged a path of resistance. “Freeze me!” exclaims a content creator on TikTok to her cosmetic surgeon, who holds a needle poised above her forehead. She is filming their interaction for her audience, in the name of openness and transparency about all the ‘work’ she’s had done. “I don’t want my face to move, like, at all.” Another woman, who has amassed hundreds of thousands of followers over the last two months of her ‘facelift journey’ (she is in her thirties, an age widely regarded as young to undergo the invasive surgical procedure), beats back the commenters who insist that she looks ‘unnatural’ and ‘fake’. “I love it,” she says. “This is the face I’ve always wanted.” These women are the canaries in the coalmine of a perceptible shift, taking place on and offline: against a culture obsessed with imperceptible perfection, a subgroup of women is embracing the visible effects of ‘having work done’: not as a mistake or an overcorrection, but as a statement.
When Jia Tolentino coined the term ‘Instagram Face’, back in 2019, she was writing at the cusp of a phenomenon: “It’s a young face, of course,” she wrote in the New Yorker, describing the sameness of the new beauty standard that was taking over social media feeds and society circles. “[W]ith poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips.” She went on to describe how it was made possible through cosmetic interventions like botox, filler and sometimes more invasive surgical procedures like rhinoplasty, blepharoplasty and face lifts. Tolentino’s description has been quoted and cannibalised countless times in the intervening years, but the defining beauty standard has remained mostly the same—which is eons in the breakneck age of the internet. What happens once ‘Instagram Face’ becomes more common than not (which is increasingly the case in certain circles, especially those in which beauty is valuable currency)? At its peak, where is there to go but down? What comes next?
“For middle-aged suburban housewives, conspicuous plastic surgery-face used to be a form of asserting status, wealth and distinction,” writes Rian Phin. “For young women, completely concealing any evidence of a procedure has often been optimal. Now we arrive at the current beauty paradox of getting procedures that clearly look like you’ve gotten beauty procedures, which are supposed to look like you’re so naturally beautiful and don’t need beauty procedures. It’s confusing.”
“Beauty has always been a matter of status and class, of course,” says Alice Capelle, a gender and beauty analyst and commentator. “We’ve been in the ‘undetectable era’ for a while, so it is only natural that the culture starts to move in another direction.”
For Capelle, who speaks and writes on the way that beauty culture evolves, the embrace of the ‘unnatural’ look—which, in contrast to the ‘Instagram Face’ is defined by hyper-tight skin, which look eerily shiny and polished; ‘frozen’ foreheads, fixed there by neuromodulators; and ultra-feline, lifted eyes—can be seen as an evolution of the status signifier. She references the French theorist Pierre Bourdieu, who writes about the fact that our different aesthetic choices are all distinctions—that is, choices made in opposition to those made by other classes. “It’s like, I don’t want to look like those girls, so I want to look natural.”
“Traditionally, it has been assumed that cosmetic surgery is something people don’t really want to share,” explains Michal Folwarczny, a social academic. “But some of the surgeons I interviewed pointed out that their patients are doing something very weird—they’re being open about it. They’re posting on Instagram, documenting the whole journey. Some people are not shy at all.” It’s a visibility that mimics other forms of luxury. “If you’re not interested in watches, you won’t notice how many people around you are wearing a Rolex or a Patek [Philippe]. But if you’ve bought one yourself, you instantly start seeing them around you. Cosmetic surgery can… be like that. Once you’ve had a rhinoplasty, you can spot other people who also have had it because the result is usually a very specific, symmetric, up-turned shape. The people who are insiders, they just know.”
“In the past, having conspicuous procedures was aligned to ‘bad taste’ or some idea of tackiness,” says Capelle. ‘“But the past few years, all these things have been shaken a little bit. There’s a real appropriation of working class aesthetics. Everything feels more fluid.”
“There’s also the fact that tastes reflect your political beliefs,” she says. Take the rise of the ‘Republican woman’ makeup trend: full-coverage foundation, bold lashes, statement contour. It’s makeup that’s meant to be seen, the labour of beauty on full display. In contrast to the minimalist “clean girl” look—often associated with progressive, normcore femininity—this aesthetic reclaims visible effort as a form of power.
According to Folwarczny, some patients opt for over-outcomes from their cosmetic enhancements as a form of luxury consumption—not just to be beautiful but to make it clear that money and effort were expended in becoming beautiful. As theorist AV Menon notes, cosmetic procedures can be read as investments in one’s economic potential, especially in an era where image is currency. “Patients may elect obvious cosmetic surgery looks as a sign of conspicuous consumption, connoting independent womanhood or savvy economic investment in one’s own earning potential,” he writes. The body, and particularly the face, therefore functions as a branding exercise.
In the 2000s, reality TV star Heidi Montag was derided for going ‘too far’ with cosmetic surgery: she underwent 10 procedures in a day and debuted her results on air to a then-shocked public and her distraught mother. But recently, Montag re-entered the public eye to praise: the very features that were mocked a decade ago—hyper-sculpted cheekbones, shiny, tight skin, ultra-feline eyes—now blend right in. It’s a result of the way that digital consumption has altered our version of beauty even in a short time period: the internet has trained our eyes and shifted our baseline assumptions of what ‘natural’ looks like. “What we think of as natural has shifted a lot in the last twenty years,” says Folwarczny. “And what we will think of as natural in the future will be very different.”
“I think what we’re seeing is a distancing from reality, where people start to lose sense of what is normal, or ‘natural’, or what we expect of ourselves,” reflects Cappelle. “We start to feel like we can control everything, and the baseline moves and moves.”
“The creation of new standards and new insecurities for women,” Capelle observes, “is the capitalist incentive to create a new market by creating a new problem. And then creating a solution for that. It’s crazy.”
Standards emerge, trickle down, saturate the crowd, and then, to stay ahead, the industry creates new ones. And so we arrive at this paradox: the ‘natural-but-not-really’ look and the hyper-‘done’ look are not opposites, but two ends of the same spectrum. Both are responses to the same pressures: hyper-visibility, algorithmic aesthetics, and the commodification of the self. In the end, the uncanny face might not be a glitch at all, but the inevitable result of a system that demands we be both human and brand, soft and sculpted, effortless and engineered. One way of meeting that standard is to try and sink, natural and skin-blurred, into the cultural norm. The other declares itself, boldly, as performance.
This story first appeared in the June/July 2025 issue of GRAZIA Singapore.
READ MORE
Food For Thought: Are Upcycled Ingredients The Future Of Sustainable Beauty?
Objects of Desire: How Beauty Brands Are Cultivating Communities With Pop-Ups And Collectibles
Real Deal: Hailey Bieber Sells Rhode To E.l.f. Cosmetics For A Staggering $1 Billion