You can only get ~10% hotter

Beauty and it's underappreciated opportunity costs

Not many stats in this post… this one’s mainly for my millennial girlies. Listen, we’re aging, and while we might feel that “we’ve only gotten hotter and hotter!”, no matter how hard we try, that won’t be true forever. Yes, there’s an ever expanding menu of options to help arrest the aging process and fix our flaws (some of which you might not even have known were “flaws” until someone named and pointed them out - for me these included “hip dips” and “hooded eyelids”). But the TLDR of this post is that I think you can generally only get, like, 10% hotter. Now, that 10% might feel really important to you. But, if achieving it requires excessive amounts of time and/or monetary investment… I think it’s worth reflecting on whether you actually value it as much as you think you do and what else you could be doing with that time, money and mental energy.

This doesn’t just apply to anti-aging, but to anything that requires excessive investment in order to improve minor details of your physical appearance. This could be tortuous dieting in an attempt to lose the last 5 pounds separating you from your goal weight or spending every gym session not on some physical activity you actually enjoy but on glute isolation exercises to try to add a ½ inch to your peach (both me circa 2016).

I’m not denying that there are some epic glow ups where women (and men) get way more than 10% hotter. And I’m not denying that looking good can impact how you feel. But… I’m not speaking to women who have never thought about their personal style, never worried about their body, never really wore makeup and don’t have a multi-step skin care routine. I’m talking to women who can immediately spot tear-drop breast implants and know what a blepharoplasty is. 

First of all, if you work in media or entertainment or some other job where your beauty is part of your brand and directly relevant to your financial success, this won’t apply to you. And if you just really enjoy beauty and aesthetics and experimenting with changing how you look, that’s totally ok too - I don’t really find personal vanity off putting. I’m not trying to judge individual women, even though I do think the normalization of expensive cosmetic procedures is likely net negative for women as a class. I’m talking more to women whose investment in beauty is a reaction to their anxiety about aging, a feeling that they “need” to do this in order to compete in the mating market or who’ve just fallen into the habit of striving to improve their appearance and haven’t really reflected on what they’re getting out of it.

People have always cared about beauty, and beautiful people have always gotten benefits as a result of their beauty. But there’s been a significant rise in what I’d call “tweak” procedures over the past 20 years. Data from the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) indicates that while the number of surgical cosmetic procedures performed per year (breast augmentation, nose jobs etc.) has actually slightly decreased from 2005, (from 1.8 million in 2005 to 1.5 million in 2022) minimally invasive cosmetic procedures (botox, fillers, lip injections etc.) have nearly tripled (from 8.4 million in 2005 to 23.7 million in 2022).

Things like botox, filler and lip augmentation are relatively affordable per visit, with average fees in the $500-$1000 range. But they aren’t permanent and typically have to be redone every 6 months or so to maintain the look, so this can definitely add up over time. Regardless, the financial burden isn’t really my focus, it’s more the general mindset that leads to pursuing these procedures and the overall cost including the time, effort and intense self-scrutiny (relative to what I think are pretty modest gains).

Again, I think this stuff is legitimately fun for some women, and if that’s you go ahead and do as much of it as you can easily afford. But I also think for many women, especially women for whom being beautiful has been a major part of their identity, it’s not coming from a place of fun but from a place of fear. And I think you’ll get a lot further in terms of improving your mental state by finding things you really enjoy and are positively motivated to engage in than by overinvesting in beauty.  

Last point, for women who think it’s worth doing all of this to improve your mating market value… you’re failing to recognize the opportunity cost! Yes, men are more focused on physical appearance when selecting a partner than women are. But it’s far from all they’re focused on. And assuming you’re trying to find a long-term partner you probably don’t want one that values you primarily on the basis of your appearance anyways. I met my boyfriend at my meetup group which is (unintentionally) male-dominated and heavily filtered for people I have a lot in common with. Maybe try something like that instead?