The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.

it’s profitable—cosmetic work might seem like one of the few guaranteed high-yield projects that a woman could undertake.

Diamond had trained with an old guard of top L.A. plastic surgeons, he told me—people who thought it was taboo to advertise. When, in 2004, he had the opportunity to appear on “Dr. 90210,” he decided to do it, against the advice of his wife and his nurses, because, he said, “I knew that I would be able to show results that the world had never seen.”

Diamond said. “I’d say that thirty per cent of people come in bringing a photo of Kim, or someone like Kim—there’s a handful of people, but she’s at the very top of the list,

As I drove back to my hotel, I felt sad and subdued and self-conscious.

I had worn makeup at sixteen to my college interviews; I’d worn makeup at my gymnastic meets when I was ten. In the photos I have of myself at ballet recitals when I was six or seven, I’m wearing mascara and blush and lipstick, and I’m so happy. What did it mean, I wondered, that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant? How had I been changed by an era in which ordinary humans receive daily metrics that appear to quantify how our personalities and our physical selves are performing on the market? What was the logical end of this escalating back-and-forth between digital and physical improvement?

But I left with a very specific feeling, a kind of bottomless need that I associated with early adolescence, and which I had not experienced in a long time.

You know when you get a really good haircut, and you feel like the best version of yourself? This is that feeling, but exponential.”

I said that I dyed my hair and wore makeup most days, and that I knew I would continue to dye my hair and spend money on makeup, and that I didn’t consider this an addiction but a choice. (I thought about a line from the book “Perfect Me,” by the philosopher Heather Widdows: “Choice cannot make an unjust or exploitative practice or act somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.”) I asked Diamond if his patients felt more like themselves after getting work done.

I think ninety-five per cent of the most-followed people on Instagram use FaceTune, easily,” Smith told me.

favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism. “Absolutely,” Smith said. “We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern

He glanced at it, nodded, and said, “Let me show you what we could do.” He took a photo of my face on his phone and projected it onto a TV screen on the wall. “I like to use FaceTune,” he said, tapping and dragging.

They looked beautiful. The sun went down, and the hills of L.A. started to glitter. I had the sense that I was living in some inexorable future. For some days afterward, I noticed that I was avoiding looking too closely at my face.

According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans received more than seven million neurotoxin injections in 2018, and more than two and a half million filler injections. That year, Americans spent $16.5 billion on cosmetic surgery; ninety-two per cent of these procedures were performed on women.

it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does.

Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe.