I already knew what buccal fat was before the discourse around it kicked off this week on social media. I knew because just a few years ago I began googling around to see if the buccal fat removal procedure was something that I could have done to my face. I desired to have cheekbones. I desired to be beautiful. Years of watching tutorials filled with contouring, of industry messaging around being sculpted and lifted, of faces with high outstanding cheekbones being held up because the aspirational standard had taught me that, if I desired to be beautiful, I needed to have cheekbones. Removing my cheeks gave the impression of the strategy to achieve that.

It’s so exhausting to easily exist in our culture right away. You’ll be able to’t have a body without being criticised for it. You’ll be able to’t have the natural features that include having skin and organs and a working nervous system. We’re not allowed to have pores or “strawberry arms” or stretch marks or fat or laugh lines. Now, we’re not even allowed to have cheeks.

The buccal fat pad is a rounded mass of fat between your cheekbones and your jawbone. Everyone has it, but the scale will vary from individual to individual and it affects the form of your face. The more buccal fat you have got, the more rounded your face.

Buccal fat removal is a surgery where the buccal fat pads are cut out through an incision contained in the mouth. This creates a hole and accentuates the cheekbones. The result’s a face that appears more angular, severe and, crucially, more ‘high fashion’. For this reason, the procedure has quietly develop into a go-to in celeb land over the previous couple of years. Nevertheless, it got here to public attention just a few days ago when Lea Michele posted a selfie where her cheeks looked noticeably absent of buccal fat.

The image kicked off discussions on social media across the procedure, in addition to the increasingly unbearable pressure of current beauty standards. “What the fuck is buccal fat how are they still inventing recent flaws for us,” wrote music supervisor and author Jules Zucker on Twitter, receiving over 104k likes. “I’m literally running out of limbs and features.”

What also resulted from the discussions, more positively, was a way of unity: everyone got here together to have a good time and champion “cherub” cheeks and baby faces. “No more buccal fat removal. Baby cheeks girls must unionise,” tweeted @immaterialgirlz to 128K likes. “I cannot consider buccal fat removal is a trend rn. You’re telling me that my exact type in women is currently being slaughtered daily and I even have to only sit here and find out about it,” wrote Michaela Okland, the creator of podcast and platform SheRatesDogs, to 37k likes. 

Many individuals identified that as we age, we naturally lose a few of the plumpness in our faces, which suggests that those individuals who have undergone the procedure will develop into much more hole once they are older. “Removal of the fat may cause the face to look more gaunt with age,” because the American Society of Plastic Surgeons puts it.

“My excessive buccal fat could also be unchic in the intervening time however the tables will turn once we’re all in our 60s and I’m the one bitch on the town who looks jolly,” Dazed 100-er Rayne Fisher-Quann tweeted, while Vox author Rebecca Jennings wrote, “‘buccal fat’ this, ‘jaw filler’ that, us cherubic round-faced milk-fed girlies are playing the long game’”.

If the 1000’s of likes and retweets received by these posts are anything to go by, many individuals each have and love full, rounded, milk-fed cheeks. So if you happen to’re on the market feeling insecure about your cheeks please know, simply because runways and social media feeds are filled with angular bones and high cheekbones, it doesn’t mean that you have got to look the identical way.

In the long run, my buccal fat removal research never amounted to anything. Perhaps if it had, I’d right away be capitalising on the societal advantages that include meeting an on-trend beauty ideal. Or perhaps I could be lamenting the infant face that when caused the person at an off-license to laugh disbelievingly when he saw the age on my ID. Either way, I’m completely happy with the choice I made: none of us should feel like our body parts are a trend. I’m definitely not the primary to say this, and I won’t be the last, but our bodies should not something that we will tackle and off like a Diesel micro skirt. BBLs being ‘in’ or ‘out’, heroin chic thinness coming ‘back’ and replacing the ‘slim thick’ look, boobs jobs being all the fashion then not – all of it creates a culture where persons are scrambling to maintain up with the trends, always having to change their bodies, never succeeding to attain beauty ideals and having their self-esteem destroyed.

As author Imogen West-Knights so eloquently identified, “this whole cheek removal thing is so silly because in nine months time there’ll be a TikTok girlie who invents chipmunk core or cherub mode or some shit.” The carousel will probably never stop turning, so sooner or later, we’re all going to should make the choice on our own to get off.