At first glance, The Substance, a movie about a failed Hollywood starlet, felt like just another recycled trope. We’ve seen the tragic, aging starlet narrative before. But then something shifted. Last December, when Lindsay Lohan stepped out with a new, suspiciously smooth face, the internet didn’t do what it used to. There was no mass dragging or public shaming. Instead, everyone wanted to get what Lindsay Lohan had. That moment cracked open what would become the facelift epidemic.
This wasn’t your mom’s facelift either. It wasn’t the “ironed-on” look that screamed “I went under the knife”. It was natural, youthful. Almost like aging had been hacked. Kris Jenner’s glow-up with a new face, Kylie Jenner diffusing her previously plumped face, even Emma Stone with a whisper of a lift. The era of pillow faces and frozen expressions was fading. Aesthetic surgery had evolved again, and this time it wanted to pretend it never happened at all.
These kinds of procedures have always been the domain of the ultra-rich. The 1% playbook includes not just private jets and cryo chambers, but now, stealth facelifts with zero visible scars and a private nurse on call for post-op smoothies. Beauty trends get invented by the rich, gatekept like a club with no membership list, and pushed onto the rest of us like a joke we’re not in on.
Except something’s changing. And maybe, just maybe, it’s the start of a beauty revolution. When the rich said, “Let them eat cake,” maybe the modern version is “Let them get a facelift in Guadalajara.” Because now, with $15k and a passport, middle-class women are flying out to Latin America for procedures that look just as good or sometimes better than what you’d get in Beverly Hills. Clinics in cities like Tijuana, Bogotá, or São Paulo are offering elite-level surgery with full aftercare, all for a fraction of the U.S. price.
So what happens to our beauty standards when anyone over 50 can look 29? And why have we never looked to Latin America for surgical innovation in the first place?
Western medical superiority is a myth rooted in colonial arrogance. For decades, treatments and procedures outside the U.S. and Europe have been branded as unsafe, unhygienic, or sketchy, even when the opposite was true. The idea that only the West can be trusted with a scalpel is baked into our cultural software, even though some of the most innovative surgeons and techniques have come from places the West doesn’t bother to understand. We see this clearly in the story of the BBL (Brazilian Butt Lift).
Despite the name, it wasn’t even invented in Brazil; the name just capitalized on Western fantasies of Latin beauty. The procedure exploded in popularity, especially among women who couldn’t afford traditional surgery and turned to black-market clinics, resulting in people injecting industrial silicone or motor oil into their bodies, who then died or suffered lifelong damage. These horror stories cemented the stereotype: if you get plastic surgery in Latin America, it must be dangerous, cheap, trashy. Meanwhile, white influencers take “medical tourism” trips to the same regions, glamorizing their cheap, high-end facelifts as self-care retreats. It’s a hypocritical double standard; it fetishizes the results and demonizes the culture.
But platforms like TikTok are cracking that open. One of the most viral facelift stories is that of Michelle Wood, who documented her transformation after visiting Dr. Maribel in Mexico. She doesn’t look “surgically altered”; rather, she looks like someone who hit rewind on her face by 30 years. Her testimonial didn’t just go viral; it flipped the narrative. Suddenly, Latin American surgeons weren’t cautionary tales but turned into heroes.
On the surface, this shift feels empowering. Surgery isn’t just for celebrities anymore. We’re seeing the democratization of beauty, where the middle class can finally access procedures that were once elite-only. It feels a little revolutionary, like the class walls are cracking. The rich are no longer the only ones who get to cheat time.
But it’s not that simple. If facelifts become as common as Botox, what then? We’re looking at a near future where aging faces might disappear altogether. A Black Mirror world where 60-year-olds look 25, and your wrinkles are considered an aesthetic failure, not just biology. What’s supposed to be empowering starts feeling like pressure on steroids.
Beauty standards for women have always leaned disturbingly childlike: small bodies, no body hair, smooth skin. Now we’re literally pulling our faces back to fit the mold. And while the results are mind-blowing, it begs the question: why are we spending so much time, money, and brainpower trying to make women look young, instead of helping them feel well? Aesthetic surgery is advancing at warp speed while basic women’s healthcare is still stuck in the ‘90s. The birth control pill hasn’t meaningfully evolved in 60 years. Endometriosis affects 1 in 10 women, but diagnosis takes up to 10 years. It’s not that the science isn’t there; it’s that these conditions don’t make money. There’s no billion-dollar beauty fantasy in treating period pain or hormonal imbalances. But what does sell is women’s insecurity; youth, beauty, desirability. The system isn’t broken, it’s working exactly as designed.
The rise of facelifts from Guadalajara isn’t just a trend but more so a mirror. A mirror that reflects not only our obsession with youth, but also the twisted economics of medicine, where we invest more in looking good than being well. It’s easy to celebrate the democratization of beauty — and sure, it can be empowering, but empowering by whose rules? Because until we value how women feel as much as how they look, we’re not revolutionizing beauty. Maybe The Substance was not only about a washed-up starlet but more so a prophecy. A woman consumes something that promises to restore her youth, only to be torn into one version living, admired, adored, and the other decaying in silence. The film showed us what happens when beauty becomes a product, youth becomes currency, and women are split into the ones we see and the ones we choose not to. And suddenly, life does really start to imitate art.
