SINCE returning to Pakistan in 2017, with each passing year, I have noted how folks are beginning to look the same. Nowhere is this more visible than the salon, a refuge for most women, including myself. I’m not talking about everyone having the same Jennifer Aniston haircut — I’m showing my age by referencing something from the late 1990s. I’m talking about what Jia Tolentino wrote in her excellent 2019 New Yorker piece “The Instagram Face” about the new beauty ideal, a “single, cyborgian look”.

Sure magazines airbrushed images of models, a practice which was criticised for setting unrealistic standards, but now, we do it ourselves on our phones. The innumerable filter options allowed us to do so much to our faces except now we want to look like our filtered selves. Young women are willing to surgically alter their faces for what may prove to be a fleeting trend. Some of you may remember the popular surgical procedure called the Brazilian Bottom Lift for which there is no demand now. It’s been replaced by dermal fillers or deep plane facelifts which sheds decades off your face. What’s the harm, you ask, and how is it different to beauty practices that I myself indulge in at the salon? The answer lies in who I do it for and who I want to look like? (Short answer: me.)

The trouble with the single look is that it kills individuality. Whereas an unusual face would come along every now and then on our screens, breaking that moment’s beauty ideal, challenging stereotypes, expanding our minds on what we thought was beautiful, today women are morphing into versions of the Kardashians. Heck, even the matriarch has altered her face to look like her daughters. Google it to see for yourself.

The trouble with the single look is that it kills individuality.

I spoke to a dermatologist who told me dermal fillers are rising in popularity as are non-surgical procedures like micro-needling, radio frequency and lasers. His clients for Botox are getting younger each year, because they see it as a preventative treatment. Except that it can’t prevent ageing, so they’ll be forever on it.

Beauty ideals are shifting further from reality, and attainability. We cannot be OK telling our daughters that cosmetic procedures are normal, maybe even expected. I am stunned that girls as young as 11 have skincare routines. The mistake we’re making is thinking this is harmless. It does not end at skincare. Will you let her take a weight loss drug when she hits puberty and her body starts to change?

We all know someone who’s taken a certain injection meant for diabetes patients that causes weight loss. It is easy to procure in Pakistan without a prescription, let alone doctor’s supervision. Poor obese folks who really need the drug just can’t afford it.

Beauty standards, and by that extension, wellness standards, have become the purview of the wealthy.

Log onto TikTok or Instagram and you’ll find innumerable doctors and plastic surgeons either performing procedures on clients or dissecting what procedures celebrities have had done. You’ll find the cyborgian face on Pakistani fashion label’s social media accounts: skinny, fair, filler-ed lip, cheekbones jutting out, snatched jaw, cat-eyes that look like they are lurching to their hairline.

In her book Pixel Flesh, Ellen Atlanta talks about the digital realm as the new fountain of youth. “The result is a culture of homogeneous beauty, in which women covet each other’s features and strive for ideals that can only be achieved through augmentation — normalising injectable procedures, cosmetic surgery, photo editing and filter use in order to achieve the look (all of which have become incre­asingly acce­ssible over the past decade).” This is frightening.

The male gaze has always objectified women but with tech bros in charge of the content, do they also control our faces and how they should age? Tolentino wrote “technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests — rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes”. This is deeply unsettling.

It is almost a foregone conclusion that social media has a disastrous effect on one’s self-esteem. We’re wanting all the wrong things and beating ourselves up for not having that bag, that house, that body, that holiday home or that face. “Imagine people doing this forever,” Tolentino wrote about the quest for the cyborgian face.

I must admit, I have wanted to write about this for a long time but was torn because I didn’t want to come off as slamming people’s choices to — in Instagram-speak — be a better version of themselves. Except I was reminded of a quote by the British philosopher Heather Widdows who wrote “Choice cannot make an unjust or exploitative practice or act somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.” There is more to life than aesthetics. Faces cannot be fads.

The writer is an instructor of journalism.

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2025