If you happen to haven’t seen Joe Jonas’s recent celebrity endorsement campaign, titled Beauty On Your Terms, let me describe it to you now. Joe Jonas lies in bed. “Who desires to get up looking like another person?” he asks over jaunty background music. “Not me!” The singer then gets up, and starts to walk through a sunlit house. “There isn’t a one approach to define beauty…” he continues. “…With a sensible toxin like Xeomin, it’s on my terms.”

That’s right. This campaign, stuffed with body-positive language about defining beauty on your individual terms and looking out like yourself, is definitely promoting Xeomin AKA botulinumtoxin-A, a cosmetic injectable that smoothes effective lines and wrinkles, just like Botox (Xeomin’s rival brand). 

If the message of the campaign seems to you in any respect incongruous with the product it’s selling, that’s since it is. The brand has co-opted body positivity rhetoric – language meant to encourage people to feel good in their very own bodies, to spice up self-esteem and counter toxic, unimaginable beauty standards – and used it to steer you into buying injectables to vary your face so you can fit into these mainstream beauty ideals.

Accompanying the campaign video is an interview with People magazine. Here, Joe Jonas, 33, delves more deeply into his “anti-ageing journey” and shares how a part of getting older is becoming more comfortable in our skin. He wants to interrupt the stigma of men getting injectables “to smooth out a few of those frown lines and wrinkles that include age”.

“We will be open and honest about it and be confident and probably not draw back from speaking our truth,” he tells People. Using such a language and messaging to sell injectables is becoming increasingly common as brands, medical practitioners and advertisers have made the savvy move to reposition each non-invasive cosmetic procedures and cosmetic surgery as a form of non-public empowerment and (alternative) feminism. It appears to be working. In line with the Aesthetic Plastic Surgery National Databank, the variety of Botox procedures performed in America increased by 54 per cent between 2019 and 2020, and fillers were up by 75 per cent.

What’s increasingly becoming clear, nonetheless, is that not only do all these procedures not appear to be empowering individuals, additionally it is creating enormous pressure on the collective. By adhering to this oppressive system of beauty, we’re raising the baseline of beauty ideals and making them less and fewer accessible to realize for everybody however the very wealthy. The sweetness ideal is demanding more of all genders and in consequence, we’re in a self-esteem crisis. Eating disorder rates are skyrocketing, and half of each men and ladies experience body dysmorphia. Research done by body care brand WooWoo found that one in ten British women said they “hate every part about their body” – almost half of them said these feelings affected their mental health, and over a 3rd said pressure about their bodies got here from social media.

It’s no wonder, then, that folks are stepping into debt to pay for cosmetic procedures, sacrificing necessities like food to afford the prices. “We’re socialised to be desirable and to think our worth is being wanted,” psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber told Dazed. “If you happen to feel that your survival depends upon being appealing, it becomes a matter of life and death. Psychologically, it feels absolutely desperate.”

If this weren’t bad enough, the audience that’s being targeted for these procedures is getting younger and younger, with the message being that injectables like Botox and Xeomin are “preventative”. This can be a pure marketing ploy. “That’s not how it really works,” Dr Amina Ahmed told Dazed back in May. “All botulinum toxin does is paralyse the muscle. So since you’re not moving the muscle, the skin will not be getting creased and contours don’t appear.” As botox starts to wear off, those wrinkles will appear.

All the identical, young individuals are getting ushered onto the treadmill of pricey treatments that may must be topped up perpetually. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons found that 19 per cent of the roughly 4.4 million cosmetic Botox injections performed in 2020 went to women under 40, and 12,000 of those procedures are in girls ages 13 to 19. The Department of Health estimated that as many as 41,000 botox procedures were carried out on under 18s in 2020 (the UK has since banned the procedures for minors). 

This absolute fear of ageing is so strong that Kim Kardashian admitted to The Latest York Times in June that she could be willing to “eat poop each day” if it could make her look younger. Clearly, the stigma that should be broken will not be the “stigma” of men getting injectables however the stigma surrounding ageing. The stigma meaning if you might have a few frown lines on the age of 33 you possibly can’t be confident. 

“I feel like sooner or later you make that call for yourself – the things that you wish to do, the things that you wish to wear, even to the hair products you place in your hair,” Jonas says in his People interview, adding that he has stepped away from the pressure to look a certain way. “You get to an age where you only go, ‘OK, I don’t feel those pressures anymore.’” However it’s exactly that pressure that has forced a person in his early 30s to feel that he couldn’t be his “best self” without injecting his face with toxins to stop the natural technique of ageing. And while Jonas, as a star in the general public eye, is undoubtedly under more pressure to look a certain way, he also wields more power and influence than most individuals. The system is rigged against us all, but he has the platform to challenge it, fairly than uphold it. Breaking the stigma of ageing, as a substitute of the stigma of Xeomin, is step one.