On Botox, Beauty, and Life Without a Mirror
Look Out Your Own Eyes
I was 37, a number I could no longer mentally round to 30. In the mirror, the lines on my face whispered, “40.”
There would be nothing wrong with that, but I had just broken off an engagement, and my head spun with stories about men preferring younger women.
“Who is going to love this soon-infertile woman?” I asked my droopy reflection.
Desperate, I turned to Botox. I was not alone: in 2023, the U.S. recorded over 7 million Botox injections.
I feared I’d come out looking clownish, but I was delighted with my shiny new face. Feeling that my lease on youth had been renewed, I gallivanted around Lisbon like I was in my 20s.
But the price of Botox was steep:
The cost.
I paid €550 for a small amount of Botox. Had I "needed" more, the price would have gone up. And it only lasts six months. So you're looking at a €1k/year+ habit, and that's just the beginning. Botox is a gateway drug to a world of beauty for money.The night terrors.
I’d awake in a panic, trying to lift my eyebrows, but my body wouldn't respond. Of course, my face was paralyzed. I had paid good money for that! Over time I unlearned my impulse to move my face or have an exaggerated facial expression.
It is a great luxury to be able to lift one's eyebrows, I decided.Mental dullness.
I'm not sure if it was the Botox or not, but when it wore off I felt able to think better. Maybe facial muscle movement helps with blood flow to the brain? Maybe putting a neurotoxin in your head isn't a good idea?
Getting Botox gave me a surge of confidence, and that led me to showing up to lots of social events. At one of those, I met someone wonderful—someone who doesn’t care about smooth skin or conventional beauty.
“Who doesn’t like a weathered face?” he asked, confused when I brought up the topic.
So what had the Botox done? It healed an insecurity that the beauty industry had implanted in me to begin with. Had I been confident in who I was, I could’ve skipped the procedure entirely.
Maybe I should’ve spent that €550 on a therapist.
Look out your own eyes
When my partner and I moved to the woods to build a house, for the first time I lived without a mirror. Before, every bathroom visit was a moment to inspect my face and compare it to the billions of media images of “woman” I’d absorbed. My reflection was my sense of self. After all, the mirror was showing me who I was—wasn’t it?
But without my days punctuated with mirror checks, something strange happened: I started living from behind my own eyes.
The center of my identity became my felt experience—not my appearance. I stopped imagining how others saw me and started noticing how I felt. The "me" I now recognized was the embodied one, the one looking out—not the one being looked at.
From the perspective of how it felt to be me, paralyzing my face for beauty was absurd.
Maybe I hadn’t gotten Botox for a potential mate, but for the judgment in my own gaze.
Living without a mirror, I would go into town, have a nice interaction with people I met there, and then go to the bathroom to discover that my hair was completely disheveled. As far as I could tell, no one had treated me any differently. No one cared.
Or maybe they did judge and I didn't notice. But I decided to let people think whatever they wanted in the privacy of their own minds. Besides, if their thoughts are critical, doesn't that reflect more on them than on me?
Surely the most beautiful people are those who see beauty in everyone.
Curiously, I never held others to the standards I tried to meet myself. I don’t care if you look like a model. I care if you’re alive, present, kind. I care whether I feel safe being my full self around you.
When someone looks too perfect, I get uneasy—like they’re too self-focused to have space for me, or might expect me to match their standards.
Maybe what I needed to cure my neurotic narcissism was to break the feedback loop. Maybe I just needed to stop looking in the mirror.
Mirrors: a relatively new technology
Mirrors, as we know them, are relatively new. The silvered-glass mirror was invented in 1835, and it wasn’t until the early 20th century that mirrored bathroom cabinets became standard.
These days I’ll sometimes see a woman with false eyelashes, huge lips, and coats of makeup. “She looks so strange,” I think. But then I realize there’s a new mirror in town: all of that accouterment must look good to her in her Instagrammed reflection.
For most of human history, we didn’t stare at our own faces all day. Maybe, like Narcissus, we’d be better off tearing ourselves away from our own reflection.
Releasing the fixation on self
When I fixated on my reflection, I was doing so because I wanted to be loved. Media tells us a beautiful appearance will make us lovable, but in my experience, people love you because you love them back.
A thousand likes on a selfie won’t bring you soup when you’re sick.
Beauty marketing—and consumerism in general—wants us focused on ourselves. “Look better, live your best life.” But maybe it’s time to grow out of that. Maybe it’s irrelevant what I look like.
Maybe… it’s not about me at all.
In Buddhism there’s the notion that attachment to the sense of self - what we think of as "I," "me," and "mine" - is a fundamental source of suffering.
When I let go of the need for “me” to look a certain way, I feel free.
Becoming an Elder
Without Botox, my wrinkles tell me something important: I’m getting older.
And knowing that helps me know what season of life I’m in. Maybe it’s not the time to gallivant. Maybe it’s time to double down and focus on the people and things that matter.
But… how does one get old?
I didn’t know, especially not as a woman. Growing up in the '90s, I learned that to be accepted as a woman you needed to be young, thin, and beautiful. And today it seems that people are lauded for looking and acting younger than they are.
Is the only role for the aging to pantomime being young?
Other societies view aging differently:
Many indigenous cultures view wrinkles as "story lines" – physical manifestations of accumulated wisdom and experience.
In India, the traditional ashrama system divides life into stages, with the later years dedicated to spiritual growth and becoming a guide for younger generations.
In Yoruba culture, aging means gaining power—becoming an elder grants one the right to participate in decision-making councils. Likewise, many Native American tribes traditionally grant special status to elders as decision-makers and knowledge keepers.
Perhaps aging's natural rhythm is simple: first we discover ourselves, then we guide others. Our youth is for finding our place, our later years for sharing learned wisdom and supporting those who follow. This evolution from self-focus to mentorship feels like aging's true purpose—one that's easily lost in our culture's obsession with appearing young.
I didn't have elder role models until recently, when I've had the great privilege of meeting many older women whom I admire. Brilliant and accomplished, present and wise, they are too busy living wonderful lives to fret over wrinkles. Having good role models makes it easy to age: I want to be like these women.
When I think of becoming an elder role model to younger women, I am happy with my wrinkles. They make me proud of all that I have learned and all that I can share.
I hope I can help these younger women to feel good in their own skin. I hope I can help them drop the burden of vanity.
I will tell them not to think of themselves as their reflections—and certainly not in comparison to media impressions—but as their experience looking out through their own eyes.
I will tell them to take all the money they are encouraged to spend on beauty products and save it for the rare things that make their soul sing.
I will tell them that the secret to being beautiful is to find the joy that makes you happy to be alive.
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by the way, even as a man reaching 40 i relate a lot to this.
you probably also agree with Fernando Pessoa :)
"man shouldn't be able to see his own face — there's nothing more sinister.
nature gave him the gift of not being able to see it, and of not being able to stare into his own eyes.
only in the water of rivers and ponds could he look at his face. and the very posture he had to assume was symbolic.
he had to bend over, stoop down, to commit the ignominy of beholding himself.
the inventor of the mirror poisoned the human heart"
Alexandra, this was a very special piece for me to read, especially meant for my inner teen and recently turned the bend around 40. In some moments, she is still present in me.
Thank you for sharing this, I know firsthand how vulnerable this topic can be. I resonated clearly with your insight about having better elder role models. It’s not talked about but is nonetheless very influential.