Written By: Zoe Weiner
Published by: Well + Good
Not so long ago, if you wanted to change your appearance without undergoing plastic surgery, you were limited by a relatively narrow scope of possibility. You could use makeup to cover your blemishes, diet and exercise to change your figure, or dye your hair to any shade of the rainbow. But you could only stray so far from how you naturally look. But with the rise of “quick fix” culture—which has normalized the use of facial “tweakments” like Botox and filler; body-sculpting treatments like EmSculpt; and, most recently, semaglutide injections (Ozempic is a brand name), which are diabetes treatments that are also effective for quick weight loss—the limit does not exist.
Injecting an appetite suppressant or a wrinkle-smoothing toxin may offer faster and more effective results than diet and exercise or topical creams. But at what cost?
The world is full of pressures to look a certain way. The body-positivity and more recent body-neutrality movements have made significant strides in working against the contemporary American standard of beauty in favor of respecting and appreciating the body as it is. But thinness and youth remain widely prized as the ideal, which is the simplest explanation behind why these quick fixes have become so prevalent.
“The problem with bodies being marketed as trends is that most of the time, our genetics will not allow us to have the body that’s in style without turning to cosmetic procedures or some sort of unsustainable, unrealistic diet behavior that will ultimately harm us physically and mentally,” says Dr. DeCaro. “But when you’re told over and over again that you should look a certain way—that you should stop yourself from aging or shouldn’t gain weight—and when you see that these things are actually accessible [without changing your behaviors], it can be tempting to turn to [these] solutions.
Click here to read the full article.
