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Why do women seem to be pursuing the Botox/lip filler/cheek filler look at younger and younger ages? It could just be my perception but I see women doing this in their early and mid 20s, which is bonkers to me. It’s understandable once you hit 35-40, but why do it when you’re young and still in your sexual marketplace prime?
At that age it tends to give your face a very eerie quality and actually make you look older and less attractive. This seems to be the consensus view among men, so presumably high-status men would also overwhelmingly feel this way. Are women doing it for instagram and to compete against other women? If that’s the case it’s counterproductive and actively harming their sexual marketplace value in the large majority of cases.
The other argument that I can buy: maybe I’m just not noticing all the instances of those touch-ups being applied with a milder hand. If done properly, it can increase a woman’s SMV? I don’t necessarily agree with this, I think straight men are extremely fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution to detect unnatural things like this, but I could be wrong. I certainly seem to be able to distinguish the odd and uncanny-valley quality it lends to a woman’s face.
I'm still uncertain of whether this term actually applies to this trend or if there are subtle nuances making it a mismatch, but it might be "Californication", the mechanism by which Hollywood distorts and perverts culture and art and beauty by amplifying its own degenerate tendencies.
People are not actually rational calculating agents, a lot of learning happens implicitly by associations. So suppose Hollywood gathers a bunch of incredibly beautiful people, suppose they have 3 times average beauty. And then they get older which drops their beauty by 20%, and then suppose they get botox which counters 10% from the aging but adds a separate 30% loss multiplicatively. So now you have a bunch of older botox women whose beauty is (3 * 0.9 * 0.7) = 1.89
That is, these botox women are still almost twice as beautiful as a random average person off the street. In reality, this beauty is entirely from genetic and selection effects: Hollywood finding and collecting the most beautiful people it can find. But what people see is really beautiful people with Botox. If enough people do this, then some people may start mentally associating Botox with beauty, implicitly assuming that that's what distinguishes Hollywood women and causes their beauty, rather than it being selection effects. This self-reinforces especially among people who actually live in Hollywood and encounter these people regularly in real life, which is how distorted memes like this spawn and spread. One or two beautiful but psychologically damaged people do X, people in Hollywood falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more, people outside Hollywood see them on TV and falsely associate X with beauty and fame and do it more.
This is also essentially the entire theory behind endorsement deals.
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