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Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare | The New Yorker

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As cosmetic procedures become both more invisible and more extreme, our connection to reality is fraying.

Save this story Save this story To borrow a phrase from Simone de Beauvoir , the face is not a thing but a situation—one that is, increasingly, more technically beautiful but more spiritually unattractive, replete with new information but devoid of human meaning. Today, the young inject their faces and look old; the old inject their faces and look uncanny; a twenty-year-old got famous for hitting himself in the jaw with a hammer to become hotter; teen-agers ask strangers on the internet if a facelift is their only hope. The internet casually scrambles basic ideas of personhood, reframing peopl

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