We were driving on the Fifth Ring Road to the Avenues for work when we started counting billboards that were advertising some kind of cosmetic procedure. Almost every one of them was telling us that we needed to change our appearance, fix our skin or transform our teeth into a blinding row of perfectly aligned white pearls.

We noticed the ads and they definitely rubbed us the wrong way. It’s not that we have anything against cosmetic surgery, but they felt so incessant. They seemed like a constant reminder of how we were just not good enough.

Take a walk in any mall and you will notice how so many women have the same nose, lips and teeth. We’re used to habbat, we’ve been through the rise and fall of so many from fried chicken to hoodies that we have come to expect and anticipate them. Unfortunately, going under the knife is more permanent than chasing the latest Yeezys.
There also seems to be very little information on who can offer these procedures. Some are available at clinics while some can be done in a salon under minimal supervision and disinfection.

What kind of training does someone need before they can inject botox or whatever the newest kind of filler is?
And before you start telling us that the place you have chosen has so many before and after photos we are going to stop you. How do you even know that these photos are legit? It is easy to over promise and then not deliver.

As adults, we are all being pushed to strive for an imaginary standard of perfection and forget that they’re just social constructs. But the real danger is how these ads are being viewed and internalized by younger kids. If all their small eyes can see are giant reminders of what is beautiful and worth striving for, we’re robbing them of self-acceptance and appreciation of themselves. Isn’t the constant stream of content from Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram Reels enough? Just spend a couple of minutes on any of these apps and you will notice that the content creators that are being recommended by the algorithms are the conventionally pretty ones. They’re almost always thin, affluent and beautiful with perfect teeth. It is almost impossible for them to believe that being average or god-forbid, different is ok.

There’s not much we can do about the billboards or the digital content, but we can keep having these conversations with our friends and kids to remind them and ourselves that we don’t need to be perfect, we just need to be perfectly ok with who we are.

Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash.