The Algorithm's Ugly Obsession with Analyzing Female Celebrity Faces
Plastic surgery analysis videos are like digital blasons!
If you weren’t an English major, you’ve probably never heard of a blason. It’s a poem that catalogs female beauty part by part, usually “drawing on images from The Song of Songs.” Petrarch popularized it in the Il Canzoniere, a collection of 61 poems dedicated to Laura, the unrequited love of his life. (What was it with dudes in the Renaissance seeing a woman once and writing about her for decades? As the kids say, RED FLAG.) As a result of Petrarch’s influence, blasons hit the height of popularity in the Elizabethan Age.
I can’t remember exactly when I learned about blasons in school, but I do remember that the idea blew my mind. While the poems were meant as the highest compliment, they essentially broke a woman down into a bunch of beautiful parts.
Here’s an Edmund Spenser version:
Her goodly eyes like sapphires shining bright,
Her forehead ivory white,
Her cheeks like apples which the sun hath rudded,
Her lips like cherries charming men to bite,
Her breasts like to a bowl of cream uncrudded,
Her paps like lilies budded,
Her snowy neck like to a marble tower,
And all her body like a palace fair.
I read this Substack post by Anniki Sommerville (@anniki) a while ago, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since. Sommerville mentions stumbling upon a video that dissected Jennifer Aniston’s face and speculated on her plastic surgery. She wrote:
And here if we look more closely into the skin around her eyes, we can see evidence of Botox, the slightly raised eyebrow on the left and then around the mouth lines…’ he continued this diatribe, this blow by blow account on the surface of Jen’s face in a flat tone as if he were a serial killer describing how he had chopped up his female neighbour and dissolved her remains in an acid bath.
Plastic surgery analysis videos do extremely well on YouTube and TikTok, but they’ve always bothered me. I’m not naive; I know almost every famous actor in Hollywood has had at least some plastic surgery, but these videos seem so…speculative. Did someone have buccal fat removal, or did they age twenty years and lose facial fat? They’re also usually—not always—created by male plastic surgeons who use them to build an audience and sell their services.
I’m going to nerd out here: these videos are a kind of contreblason that monetize female insecurity using the same fragmenting gaze. But unlike actual contreblasons, they aren’t intended to be funny.
The State of Modern Beauty
As Ted Gioia has written, the internet has flattened culture. It’s done the same thing to beauty. You’ve probably all heard the term “Instagram face,” which references a type of “universal beauty” heavily influenced by filters and plastic surgery culture. Wired has written about “the consolidation of the face,” where the “best” features from around the globe meld into one impossible beauty standard.
As the excellent Jia Tolentino wrote a few years ago:
This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski).
If you’re online at all, you’ve probably also heard the line, “You’re not ugly; you’re just poor.” In other words, anyone who can pay enough, regardless of their original appearance, can attain beauty.
These plastic surgery videos reinforce that idea. If you’re ugly or aging, that’s on you for being poor or unmotivated. But here’s the contradiction: in these same videos, celebrities are also mercilessly analyzed for making interventions. Whatever your choice, you’re doing it wrong.
That’s not an accident. It’s an endless feedback loop: fear drives views, views drive more content, and content drives more fear. If your content can drive a comments-section debate, the algorithm gives you more viewers.
The Algorithm Feeds on Anxiety
YouTuber Lorrie Hill made her first video about celebrity plastic surgery in 2020, and picked up about 100,000 followers from it. She recently pulled back from making these videos, saying she was “burned out” after years of analyzing faces. (There is speculation that her video about Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, might have earned her a cease-and-desist. However, that hasn’t been confirmed, and another plastic surgery influencer still has his video about Sanchez up.)
I have never been able to watch these plastic surgery videos, so I don’t claim to be an expert, but it does seem like most of the prominent influencers are male plastic surgeons. Their language, as Sommerville called out in her blog, is dispassionate and focused on breaking down the celebrity.
It’s not a coincidence that these videos became extremely popular during the pandemic. We were home with nothing to do. Social media usage soared; we were all seeing ourselves on Zoom, which—let’s face it—isn’t the most flattering view for most of us. TikTok—with all its filters—soared in popularity. And, of course, while there’s always been a fascination with celebrity beauty, the lack of openness about plastic surgery and procedures frustrated many people. All these factors really set the stage for a surge of interest in celeb plastic surgery videos.
In fact, when compared to pre-pandemic times, there was an 11% increase in interest in plastic surgery and other procedures. TikTok not only drove misinformation about plastic surgery, it reinforced trends like facial harmony and buccal fat removal, which can make young people feel like they need to alter their faces. (Trust me, kids, from a middle-aged woman: do not remove your facial fat. You’ll want it later.)
Plastic Surgery Monetizes the Male Gaze
Look, I’m not saying that men are the only offenders here, although in 2022, nine of the top ten plastic surgeons on TikTok were men. (As a side note, two basically lost their licenses, which shows that popularity does not necessarily equate to expertise.) Although I don’t have stats, I’m guessing their audiences are mostly women, so we’re not off the hook. After all, we’re driving the demand. When I was younger, I’d pore over Seventeen, Sassy, and Glamour to figure out how to magically transform myself; all that seems to have changed is the delivery platform.
And—you’re going to have to excuse some bitchiness here—the irony is that most of these plastic surgery experts aren’t exactly lookers themselves. Sommerville also noticed this. In her piece, she wrote that, although she’s never been a huge fan of Jen Aniston:
“Nonetheless I hate this man and his incessant negging on Jen’s face. Doesn’t he realise that she can never get it right? This man has a hamster-like face, and I wonder how he would feel to watch someone dissecting his small, square jaw (like a French bulldog) and his tight, blonde curls (which make him resemble a weird man/baby hybrid). How would he feel?”
To be fair, you don’t have to be a beauty queen to be a plastic surgeon, but it does feel like irony when ordinary-looking men feel entitled to rip apart women whose careers depend on their beauty. Although most of these accounts focus almost exclusively on female celebs, some, like Linkov, include some male celeb analysis—but most often, it’s about their hair transplants.
As Sommerville points out, some of this language feels like something Hannibal Lecter would say. These videos not only undermine the medical profession’s credibility and blur the line between education and entertainment, they also commodify the male gaze.
The Economics of Insecurity
I’ve previously mentioned the constant “noise” of information in the attention economy. To break through, influencers use fear and anxiety to generate ad revenue. The irony is that, as beautiful as most of these celebrities are, they’re being mocked for either not being perfect enough or for trying to correct something, but with an obvious intervention. In other words, they can’t win. Natural aging is gross, but surgery is also somehow embarrassing (but still better).
And if Jen Aniston is doing it wrong, the rest of us with lesser genes and smaller bank accounts can’t hope to get it right. These hyper-analyses create new insecurities; in turn, that creates a new market. There’s something wrong with your looks, but no worries—these doctors can help you. Your face might be “wrong,” but there’s always something to fix it—skincare, procedures, and surgery.
Here’s where it gets even weirder. I clicked on a Dr. Linkov video, where he’s analyzing Natalie Portman—who, for my money, has one of the most perfect faces of all time. I couldn’t stomach watching more than a minute, but I noticed that many of the comments pointed out that some of the photos he was dissecting were AI-generated. As if a doctor’s dissection of an actress’s looks wasn’t enough, many of these plastic surgery influencers might not even be analyzing real faces. It’s becoming somewhat meta (and also somewhat uncanny).
While traditional blasons—at least theoretically—celebrated women’s looks, even if they objectified them, these video blasons dissect and judge women. How can we resist the algorithm’s push toward constant analysis and judgment?
In an ideal world, we’d abandon these videos, but given their number of viewers, that’s probably not going to happen. At the very least, we should remember that faces—even famous ones—belong to actual human beings, not content farms.
After all, the algorithm comes for us all.
That is, unless you’re a famous, good-looking, older man with a naturally great hairline. Congratulations to Pedro Pascale and George Clooney!