A few months ago, a photo of Kris Jenner circulated on the internet. In it, the 70-year-old media personality is standing next to her daughter, Kim Kardashian, and they look nearly identical. Their plump lips are stretched along the same planes, half-smiling; both bear the same kind yet blank expression. Jenner’s poreless skin is so taut that the generational divide between her and her 45-year-old daughter had seemingly collapsed.
Jenner had already revealed that she’d had a facelift (her second, no less; her first was in 2011), which might have explained how she could be mistaken for her daughter’s sister. But it soon transpired that the photo had, in fact, been generated by AI. That people initially thought it was real, however, was unsurprising: not only was the AI image of Jenner uncannily similar to undoctored photos of her new face, but we have become disturbingly accustomed to seeing celebrity faces that have transcended both time and gravity.
Women in their fifties and sixties seeking facelifts is not new. What was so shocking about Jenner’s facelift – even more than the $100,000 (£74,000) it reportedly cost her – was the result. Gone are the days of 1990s-style wind-tunnel facelifts. Instead, Jenner looked dramatically younger and more radiant but still very much like herself. Within the last few years, there has been speculation over a rise in women in their thirties and forties who have undergone cosmetic interventions beyond the level of fillers. Rumours have swirled online about A-list celebrities, including: Jennifer Lawrence (35), Emma Stone (37), Lindsay Lohan (39), Anne Hathaway (43) and Christina Aguilera (45). Take Stone, who invited scrutiny when she appeared at the premier of her recent film Eddington. With her brows lifted, lips plumper and her pores erased, she looked both like herself and somehow totally different. Amateur sleuths online commented on how much her face had changed by getting “rid of her quirky features”. One tabloid called her “unrecognisable”, and a source who spotted the actress at Cannes last May noted how she personified the “uncanny valley”, the unsettling feeling one experiences when robots look almost, but not quite, human. What was so unnerving wasn’t that she looked imperfect – it was that she embodied perfection itself.
As a culture we have left behind the era of the Instagram face – a term coined by New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino in 2019 to describe the freakish composite of Photoshop, digital filters and Botox that saturated our social media feeds and became the look that defined the 2010s. For the first time our prevailing cultural aesthetic was informed by how we wanted to present ourselves online. In doing so, the digital sphere started to reconfigure our notions of what beauty meant in the real world. The filler-boom was all about adding volume in a way that denoted artifice. It was inherently unreal yet relatively attainable – all it required was a quick trip to a doctor’s office. With no recovery time needed, you could go on your lunch break.
But it was a face designed, ultimately, to be looked at through a screen. The aesthetic that was conceived for the internet too often translated in the real world to waxy foreheads that refused to move or swollen, overfilled lips. It was impossible for anyone to look like their online self in real life; the physical and digital versions were irreconcilably divergent.
We have now ushered in a new era: the age of AI Face. For those with the means, Botox and fillers are increasingly being eschewed for facelifts. It is a dramatic shift: a leap from non-invasive injectables to major surgical intervention to reconstruct the face. Yet the technological advancements deployed in today’s surgeries lead to results so discreet that major procedures can be hard to recognise. Indeed, the hallmark of a good facelift lies in its imperceptibility; the same can be said of an AI-generated image. “It should never be obvious,” says London-based aesthetics doctor Jonathan Betteridge. “When a facelift is done well, you cannot tell that anything has been done at all.” It looks real, natural even, but something is odd in a way that is hard to pinpoint exactly.
Both AI and the new breed of hyper-sophisticated facelifts share a genius for deception. The female faces we are increasingly being exposed to are uniformly similar. She has high cheekbones and a sculpted jawline; her features are balanced, her face symmetrical. Her skin is glowing, clear and taut. She’s youthful but of indeterminate age. She’s a chimeric compilation of beauty’s greatest hits. She’s dystopian, a Frankensteinian rendering of the hyperreal.
But just as AI Face is warping our understanding of what is aesthetically and biologically possible, it is also compromising our ability to discern what is real. What is the cost – psychological, emotional, human – when, suddenly, your grandmother can pass as your mother or perhaps even your older sister?
In its nascency, the internet stood for unbounded self-exploration. Social media in the early 2000s was an anarchic arena in which we could upload videos of ourselves lying supine in public (“planking”) and rate our friends on MySpace, all in the name of constructing our identities. Today, these platforms feel more akin to a panopticon, a place of continual, inescapable surveillance, where self-consciousness is inevitable and the need to perform never goes away.
Under the internet’s constant scrutiny, cosmetic intervention seems unavoidable. One must be continually self-optimising – a feeling that has crystallised into data. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (the aptly acronymised BAAPS) has reported an 8 per cent increase in face and neck lifts over the last 12 months in the UK, with the procedures rising by 26 per cent among men. It’s a dramatic leap considering the price tag of a traditional facelift in Britain ranges from £9,000 to £30,000. In the US, the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery (AAFPRS) found that an increasing number of younger people are having facelifts, with 32 per cent of them being performed on those aged 35-55. “People are jumping into a facelift faster than they have been before,” the New York-based plastic surgeon Melissa Doft told me. “I definitely have a lot of patients who are in their forties and sometimes even younger.”
This can be explained, in part, by economics. A career as an online influencer has never been more lucrative. Forbes reported in 2024 that the industry was worth approximately $250bn, a figure predicted to swell to $480bn by 2027. It’s unsurprising, then, that some 57 per cent of Gen Z say they want to pursue this path professionally. But to do so is to be trapped in a double bind: profiting off one’s digital self can be financially rewarding, but often demands continual investment in one’s appearance.
Rendering ourselves into a contrived image for someone else’s gaze rather than allowing markers of individuality – acne, a crooked nose, uneven teeth – to remain untouched is a corrosive process to both our sense of self and reality. Surgeons are reporting they now regularly have clients bringing in filtered photos of themselves to their consultation to show their doctor what they want to look like. The AAFPRS found that 55 per cent of facial plastic surgeons have experienced this. I asked Doft if she has: “Absolutely.” “Surgery is hard enough,” she added. “And then when you’re competing with filters. There’s nothing as powerful as a facelift for anti-ageing, but you can’t change the skin like you can in Photoshop.” Betteridge told me that he “very often” has clients bringing in filtered photos of celebrities. “Some know the photo is filtered and use it to explain a look they like,” he said. “Others don’t realise how heavily [the photo] has been edited.”
Jenner’s recent transparency about her facelift is notable because so many other celebrity targets of speculation have remained largely silent about cosmetic surgery. Others show a quasi-transparency by admitting to some procedures but not, as suspected, all of them. Yet sometimes even openness can’t offset the deception. “It’s great that we’re having discussions about older ladies having facelifts,” says Doft. “But when the picture [patients bring in] is not real, it takes away any legitimacy to transparency.”
The 39-year-old actress Lindsay Lohan has appeared in public recently looking totally transformed. There is speculation online and on social media that she has had an upper and lower blepharoplasty (upper and lower eyelid surgery), along with an array of rumours about other procedures including fat transfer to her under-eyes, alongside a nose job, a brow lift, veneers, cheek filler and Botox. It’s impossible to tell from photographs which might be true and which are empty gossip, of course. But – as with Jenner and Stone – in recent pictures Lohan looks otherworldly, permanently airbrushed. The more you look at photos of these women, the less you can tell what has changed. What did they look like before? Or rather what should they look like, biologically, now? Yet Lohan has denied, via her team, that she has had a facelift, and the actress has put her recent appearance down to her daily consumption of a particular juice blend made from carrot, ginger, lemon, olive oil and apple. Celebrities are under no obligation to reveal whether, or the extent to which, they’ve had cosmetic enhancements. Yet people are unlikely to understand what resources are necessary to acquire AI Face if it isn’t disclosed. As Dr Doft says, “It gives people unrealistic expectations.”
More perniciously, such ambiguity reaffirms the ideological paradox women have found themselves at the mercy of for millennia: that “natural” beauty is virtuous – a moral achievement – while engaging in practices to attain it is shameful. As Kathleen LeBesco wrote in her 2003 book Revolting Bodies?, “The work of beauty is to conceal its work.” Often, what is deemed most beautiful is not what is most natural, but what appears to be most effortless. An ageing face will not only become the site of failure, it will also increasingly signify class and wealth status. In an age when preservation demands capital, ageing will soon read as a kind of fiscal transparency – the visible distinction between those who can afford to transcend time and those who must live within its confines.
Facelifts are inherently brutal procedures. The initial recovery period is four weeks long and it can take up to a year for the results to fully show once the face has finally “settled”. The surgery involves both the neck and the face. An incision is made behind the ear, beginning in the hairline. “In the face, the SMAS layer – a layer of connective tissue above the nerves and muscles of the face – is tightened,” Doft explains. “In the neck, the muscles are tightened centrally along the neck. In both, the skin is re-draped and tailored so that any excess sagging skin is removed.” Modern techniques are much more sophisticated than the facelifts of yesteryear as they allow for the SMAS layer to be repositioned. Whereas older techniques bluntly tugged the skin backwards, surgeons now peel off and then re-drape the skin into positions it once held before gravity took hold, which allows for a more “natural” result.
Doft says there can be unanticipated moments in surgery. “There have been a couple of people when I made my incision around the ear and filler just bubbled up,” she says. Upon peeling a face open, she’s found other things she hadn’t expected, such as surgical threads from previous procedures and “more scar tissue than I thought I would”.
It is still unclear how these faces will age. A facelift typically lasts between eight to 12 years, before gravity once again wins out. Someone who has one in their mid-thirties could in theory have another five in their lifetime, as long as their will and funds remain steady. But there is only so much the face can withstand; only so much skin that can be removed; only so much scar tissue that can build before it becomes too thick to operate on.
It’s also unclear what comes next. Radicalism is dulled by familiarity. Botox and filler were once markers of vanity’s outer edge but they have become so routine that, in a 2019 poll, 59 per cent of 51,000 respondents described getting lip filler “as comparable to getting a haircut or a manicure”.
In normalising filler, a vacuum formed at the margins that was occupied by something even more radical. But as surgery becomes more quotidian, what aesthetic extreme lies beyond the body’s own incision line?
More difficult to imagine: what if we accepted ageing as a neutral fact of the human condition and not as some malignant force that defines you as an asset of rapidly depreciating value? The cruellest irony is that very little about what AI Face represents is artificial. She is the manifestation of our most base desires and the embodiment of our most genuine fears of what it means to be an ageing woman. She is the sum of all our parts, and because of that, we must look her in the face.
[Further reading: We must fight the deepfake future]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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