At some point in her late 20s, writer Emmeline Clein began noticing that all of her friends were quietly, routinely getting Botox. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise — in the past few years, med spas have cropped up all over the city, and getting a paralytic agent injected into your face is as common as a blowout or a wax. But Emmeline felt unmoored and slightly left out. Somewhere in between girlboss feminism and Kylie Jenner being praised for sharing explicit details about her breast augmentation, had Botox become an inevitable part of womanhood? Emmeline’s friends all shared her politics and had all felt similarly punished by early 2000s beauty standards as teenagers. So in this deeply reported essay, she decided to actually talk with them about it — candidly and sometimes anonymously, because, she soon learned, there was no shortage of shame around the subject. For one woman, part of the appeal of her preferred clinic is its remoteness: “You don’t tell a soul.”
—Paula Aceves, associate editor, New York
