Nipped, tucked and botched: The rise of the post-surgery aesthetic

In July, Skims released their Seamless Sculpt Face Wrap – a kind of facial shapewear that encases the neck and head in a tight spandex sock – to predictable uproar. Almost as quickly as the product sold out, the internet discourse fired up, deriding both the product’s dubious promises (“collagen yarn” is not a thing) and its very existence. As someone who (regrettably) owns a similar chin strap – bought to fix a jawline I’d been gently conditioned to believe was flawed – I can confirm both the futility and the bleakness of it all.

Conceptually, the face wrap belongs to a growing canon of modern beauty products designed less for facial decoration and more for facial censorship (blurring, tightening, draining, shrinking). These products ride the wave of plastic surgery culture, offering themselves as quick-fix, low-cost imitations of more invasive procedures. But the face wrap’s virality also speaks to something deeper. In its commitment to mimicry and artifice, it becomes a hyperreal symbol of surgery culture, echoing the silhouettes long used in fashion to both glamorise and satirise the uneasy relationship between beauty and the knife.

There’s an uncanny timing to the release of such a product. Beyond the promise of the snatched jawline, the face wrap speaks to the shifting appeal of overt aesthetic labour and the status that comes with it. In recent months, we’ve seen the Kardashians pivot away from plastic surgery denial and towards a more radical honesty (see: Kylie Jenner’s ‘candid’ boob job specification share, and Kris Jenner’s discussing her face lift). As treatments become more sophisticated and less outwardly obvious, it’s as though rendering the invisible visible, and in turn making a statement about your participation in the system, is a new symbol of power. Surgery and tweakments have become an “aspirational” lifestyle, and the face wrap allows people who can’t afford procedures to buy into that lifestyle, functioning in the same way as a Chanel perfume for those who can’t afford the couture.

Culture seems to be collectively grappling with the allure of plastic surgery, while still reckoning with its inherent harm. We can see this tension played out by MUA pioneers like Isamya Ffrench, whose eponymous beauty line’s recent rebrand plays with medical-adjacent visuals, and rising ‘Mug Queen’ stars like Tilda Mace, whose work self-consciously riffs on mutilation and modification. Or even Doechii’s blatant face tapes, which transgressively reclaim a beauty act at a time of invisible tweakments. “She likes exposing something that’s meant to be hidden”, her stylist told the New York Times last year. Or, as Doechii put it, “the face tapes are there on purpose because it’s cunt”. 

It comes as we’re observing a bubbling resurgence of the pastiched surgery-adjacent visuals popularised in the 00s. Take the duality between Steven Meisel’s infamous 2005 shoot for Vogue Italia – in which Linda Evangelista is pictured as an off-duty celeb in various states of mid-op dissection and post-op mummification – and photographer and creative director Eamonn Zeel Freel’s 2022 collab with SFX artist Carole Methot, in which a faux Daily Mail spread pictures the artists covered in plasters, bandages, botched lips, accessorised with massive shades and trench coats. Both images tread the line between subversion and sublimation, satirising surgery culture while suggesting that there’s glamour in a bandaged face: a promise of beauty that is heightened by both the evidence of sacrifice and the concealment of its reward. 

“Meisel’s original editorial commented on the prevalence of plastic surgery in pop culture during the Y2K era. Now, with invasive procedures even more accessible, and decades of ‘platform capitalism’ pressuring ordinary people to think about their own star potential, it’s no wonder we’re revisiting the ‘glamour’ and the cynicism of botched and bandaged faces,” artist and theorist Alex Quicho says. “The high femme aesthetic doubles down on this eternally appealing paradox: the horror, eroticism, revulsion and allure it awakens in us.”

There can be something erotic in the devout constriction of the body in pursuit of a certain kind of desire. Post-op masks and bandages, with their tight anonymity, recall gimp masks, evoking the mutilation and concealment central to kink, where such garments are tools of domination and masochism. But within post-surgery aesthetics, the body’s devotion is not to pleasure, but to beauty. It’s a colder submission – one that calls to mind the more sinister themes of Kristoffer Borgli’s 2023 cult film Sick of Myself, where the protagonist fetishises her self-mutilated, bandaged body not for another’s gaze, but for her own erotic satisfaction.

There’s also something inherently camp in such looks, a kind of artifice, exaggeration and commitment to beauty that has seen the botched and bandage aesthetic appear as a historic trope within queer culture. Take Leigh Bowery’s iconic masked outfits, featuring stylised bandages and mutilated mouths. Or Lady Gaga’s tragic, farcical, yet glamorous crutches in the video for “Paparazzi”. Or the classic surgery-patient drag look, as seen on Drag Race’s Sharon Needles. Or the trans legend Amanda Lepore, who appears as if made from pumped-up, high-gloss vinyl.

In their duality, both critiquing and indulging in surgery culture, these aesthetics offer fertile ground for social commentary. Purposefully botched beauty has appeared on high-fashion runways in recent years, from Balenciaga’s SS20 show, with its razor-sharp cheekbones and oversized lips, to Barragán provocative SS23 show, which paired swollen mouths and “meth teeth” with satirical Karen wigs. Spawned from the minds of two famously political creative directors, Demna Gvasalia and Victor Barragán, these choices clearly function as deliberate critiques of the sickly superficiality of Western consumerism and its beauty ideals.

In a moment of divine timing, I came across an extravagantly botched gaggle of friends at a dance festival just the other day, who had adorned themselves for the occasion with bandages, fake lips, balloon boobs, proxy bum implants and nose plasters. They looked ridiculous, horrific and gorgeous all at once. Why did you want to be botched? I asked them. “It’s glamorous!” one of them replied. And what makes it so glamorous? I said. “The pain!” she shouted.