A large part of my community still lives in Los Angeles, and every time I visit, I leave with the same unsettled feeling. It’s not about politics, traffic, or even the pace of life. It’s about faces.
Beautiful, vibrant young women in their early 20s—some still in their teens—already reshaping their features with fillers. Lips inflated, cheeks lifted, jawlines carved into something sharper, smoother, more “perfect.” Women my age and older whose faces no longer move in familiar ways. Friends I have loved for years whose expressions I struggle to read.
I find it distracting. But more than that, I find it disorienting on a human level. It feels harder to connect.
When my best friend died at 37, aging stopped feeling like something to fight and started feeling like a privilege. She didn’t get crow’s feet. She didn’t get gray hair. She didn’t get to see her skin change after decades of laughter, stress, sunshine, and love. She didn’t get to grow old at all.
Once you’ve lost someone young, wrinkles stop looking like flaws. They start looking like evidence that you’re still here.
What troubles me about the current beauty culture isn’t the fact that women care about their appearance. We always have, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Caring for your body is a form of stewardship. Eating well, sleeping, moving, and protecting your skin from damage: These are acts of respect for the body that carries us through life.
But we’ve crossed into something different now. Something that feels less like care and more like erasure.
I have friends in their mid-20s, new mothers with soft, beautiful, expressive faces, who have already been getting fillers for years. Their faces don’t look younger. They look altered. Slightly puffy, slightly blurred, strangely ageless in a way that can actually read as older because it disrupts natural proportions and movement.
A face is not just a surface. It is how we read one another. Tiny muscle shifts around the eyes and mouth tell us whether someone is safe, kind, sad, amused, open, or guarded. When those signals are frozen or reshaped, something essential to human connection gets muted.
We are, whether we admit it or not, relational beings. Our nervous systems are constantly scanning the faces of others. When a face stops behaving like a face, it creates distance—not because we are judgmental, but because we are human.
I’m 47. I have smile lines around my mouth and eyes. I have stretch marks on my belly that remind me of the four lives I carried. When I look in the mirror, I see that I am older than I used to be. But I also see beauty—a beauty that comes from having lived in my body, not just decorated it.
These marks are not failures. They are biography.
There is a difference between caring for the body and trying to erase evidence that you have lived in it. One is stewardship. The other is a war against time—and time always wins.
So why are so many young women racing to get there first?
Social media has quietly rewritten the baseline of what a normal face looks like. Filters smooth, lift, enlarge, and reshape with a swipe. A generation has grown up seeing its reflection through a digital mask. Their real faces begin to feel like the “before” picture. Every pore feels public. Every shadow feels like a flaw.
But no injectable has ever created self-love. At best, it offers a brief hit of relief—a sense of control, a moment of approval—followed by a new feature to maintain, adjust, or “improve.” The goalpost keeps moving because the problem was never really in the mirror.
We keep asking our faces to carry the weight of our self-worth.
What if the answer isn’t in stretching the skin to match an artificial standard, but in stretching our lives to hold more meaning? In doing work that matters. In loving people well. In serving our families and communities. In tending our bodies with nourishment and movement instead of punishment and fear.
There is a kind of fullness that comes from a life engaged with reality—with children, land, faith, friendship, responsibility, joy, and sorrow. That fullness shows on a face in a way no filler ever can. It softens the eyes. It relaxes the mouth. It gives a groundedness that reads instantly as real.
Children recognize it. Animals recognize it. We recognize it in one another when we slow down enough to look.
Aging gracefully is not the same as neglect. It can mean strength, vitality, glowing skin, bright eyes, and a face that still moves when you feel something. It can mean honoring the body as the temple that houses the soul, rather than treating it like a surface to be endlessly edited.
I’m not here to declare that no one should ever have a procedure. I don’t know what choices I might make someday. But I am certain of this: I would never want to be 20, 30, or even 40 and already trying to outrun the natural story written on my face.
Because the story is the point.
Every line is a record of laughter, grief, resilience, and love. Every change is proof of survival. When we smooth it all away, we don’t just lose wrinkles. We risk losing recognizability—to others, and maybe even to ourselves.
Growing older is not an aesthetic failure. It is a quiet, holy privilege denied to many.
What if we treated it that way?
