The Great Factory Reset

Fed up with the relentless pursuit of "perfect" features, more people are reverting to au naturel.

- By Véronique Hyland

If I had a dollar for every time someone suggested, unsolicited, that I "fix" my face, I might have amassed enough to fund one of those costly procedures by now. My childhood dentist told me that if I didn't do something drastic to address my strong jawline, I'd look like Jay Leno by the time adulthood neared. Years later, as an assistant with no health insurance, I was told by another dentist that I "needed" cosmetic jaw surgery. Then there was the makeup artist who, when I arrived on the set of a shoot, promised "We can make your nose disappear!" and proceeded to contour me to the nines. Shamefully, I was so happy with the results that I ended up using the photo as my professional headshot, trying not to let any candid shots slip through the cracks.

Those memories curdled as I watched a TikTok video by a woman identifying herself as a "certified aesthetic nurse practitioner injector" explaining the adjustments she would make to Stranger Things actress and fellow prominent-jawline-haver Natalia Dyer's face. The backlash was immediate, suggesting that something is brewing. We may finally be moving away from the cookie-cutter "Instagram face," the phenomenon chronicled by Jia Tolentino wherein cosmetic surgery and the filtered social media aesthetic converge somewhere within the bounds of the uncanny valley. Or at the very least, Gen Z seems to be swerving away from it. According to Dazed Digital, young people are even pursuing reverse rhinoplasties in an attempt to revert to a more natural look.