This year I decided that all I want for Christmas is Botox, and today I got my wish. I received a few “conservative” injections in my forehead and finally feel the tension of the past 32 years melting away. It is so nice not to move my forehead after 3 decades of squinting and scowling at screens/people. For once, I don’t have a headache.
I can’t emphasize this enough: Botox is the best beauty decision I’ve ever made. Not to quote Samantha Jones but I feel the same way about Botox that I do about therapy: everyone should have it, and it should be free. There’s still a stigma surrounding Botox that it simply doesn’t deserve. Anyone I’ve mentioned my Christmas wish to has doubled back in disbelief, “you don’t need that!” But I do.
I’ve been unhappy with my face ever since I became an adult and had to live with an adult face. I liked my face when I was a child and it was sweet, soft, and inoffensive. As an adult my face became pointy, hormonal, and asymmetrical. Other people claim they can’t see what I’m complaining about, but they’re definitely lying, and they don’t have to live with my face. I want to have the face of an infant with lip injections and no one can convince me otherwise.
When I told my mother I was getting Botox, she was like, this is just like The Twilight Zone, reflecting on an episode where a “pretty girl” who simply could not comprehend her own beauty went to get plastic surgery to look like all the other lip-inflated bots in the town and “immediately regretted it.” I actually find this whole premise to be extremely offensive. We all have to live with psychic pain and discouraging Botox is dehumanizing. Injections and plastic surgery are ways to deal with the pain of existence. Some people would rather look like an Instagram filter because it feels like a safer way of existing, and I think that’s totally fair. This isn’t to say that Botox cures depression. By all means I’m still depressed, but now I’m depressed and .01% hotter, which makes it more bearable.
Not to bring this back to Samantha Jones, but what she says to Carrie in the first movie about Botox is incredibly resonant. It was something along the lines of, “marriage doesn’t work, but Botox, that works every time.” Carrie doesn’t agree, but we all know by this point that Carrie is a fucking sociopath who is incapable of using a phone. We all know that Carrie is not who we should be taking advice from anymore. She let her husband die in a pool of his own Peloton sweat. I believe if Carrie took Samantha’s advice and just got Botox instead of marrying Big, she wouldn’t be in this position now.
While Samantha’s statement sounds incredibly superficial, there’s a lot to unpack there: get Botox and avoid heartbreak; the more you invest in your own beauty the more impervious you are to the idiocy of straight men. I have to say that feels hauntingly relevant.