Kylie Jenner’s Ever-So-Slightly Puffy Face Isn’t the Problem Here
Someone named Kylie Jenner—not sure if you’ve heard of her—went to Paris last week to attend the couture shows and, controversially, she brought her face with her. Over the last few weeks, we’ve heard politicians discuss the need for a 500,000-strong citizen army to mobilize against Russia; learned, via Facebook post, that Mark Zuckerberg is sinking billions into making the Terminator franchise a reality; and been informed that global warming might be about to unleash a pandemic of “Arctic zombie viruses” from Siberia’s permafrost.
The Internet’s Reaction
You’d be forgiven, then, for thinking the internet might have directed the bulk of its rage towards something other than an influencer’s “festoons,” which—as everyone knows—means swollen under-eye bags. But no. Let the Doomsday Glacier melt and Western society collapse into a nuclear hellscape populated by hermit crabs in plastic “shells,” but a woman looking faintly tired after a long-haul flight without being dragged to hell for it? Not on our watch! French X users, in particular, took it upon themselves to prove in 280 characters or less that Paris is categorically not always a good idea, declaring they were positively put off their croissants by the fact that Kylie looked—quelle horreur—“dans la quarantaine.”
The Influence of Kylie Jenner
- If Jia Tolentino labelled Kim Kardashian “patient zero” of the millennial “Instagram Face” phenomenon, Kylie is the viral vector that’s introduced it into Gen-Z’s very DNA.
- This is a person who, despite being four years shy of her 30th birthday, has been famous since before Bush left office.
- Kylie has morphed from a tweenager with a normal amount of buccal fat into King Kylie the Kontoured, Arch-Influencer of the Filler Generation.
Criticism vs. Tweakment Culture
Which isn’t to say that I think Kylie should be wholly excepted from criticism, or that we shouldn’t be thinking long and hard about what the rise of tweakment culture means. When you get filler, or surgery, or anything of that ilk, you are, on some level, casting a vote for a world in which youth and beauty (whether God-given or doctor-bought) continues to confer a disproportionate amount of privilege. You can be frustrated by this, of course—you can and should rage against a cottage industry built on stoking women’s sense of inadequacy. But laying into an individual who, though apparently poreless, is very much human? That isn’t going to move the Botox needle one bit.
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