A woman reflects on her mother's face transformation and the difficult feelings it brought forth.
One summer while home from college, I noticed something different about my mom’s face. All she’d done was get someand around her eyes, but to me, she looked entirely new, entirely different.
Her soft, sparkly eyes looked stuck in a state of mild surprise, and the line between her brows, the one she’d had as long as I could remember — that would crinkle when I was in trouble, when she was driving, or just before she let out a mischievous laugh — had been smoothed nearly entirely. Today, I probably would’ve had more grace, but at the time, I was 19 and couldn’t comprehend what it felt like to age in a way that didn’t just involve going up a cup size.
“I don’t know what you did to your face,” I said to her, “but please don’t ever do it again. ” It was the same stern tone she’d used on me when I’d whined about wanting a nose job. Looking back, I think I hurt her feelings, but her face was too frozen to tell. A few months later, I noticed the furrow in her brow had returned to where it once lived.
My mother has always been excruciatingly, objectively beautiful. Even now, in her late 50s, when friends meet her or see her photo, they often remark on it. When I was a child, I’d hide away in her closet and pull out every bit of makeup she owned — pastel eye-shadow palettes, lipsticks in shades of plum and cherry, chalky beige foundation that smelled of lilies — and smear them on my face as I’d seen her do.
I wanted to be everything she was, look exactly as she did. She was my first reference point for beauty. All these years later, when I look at my face in the mirror, it’s hers I want to see staring back at me.
I didn’t have the words to speak to my mom about what work she’d had done; I only knew it felt like betrayal, like my mom had abandoned me and left someone who only vaguely resembled her in her place. I understand now how much of that reaction was really about me, about my sense of security in both my relationship with my mother and my own face.
As more and more women across age groups opt to tweak or change their appearance , mothers and daughters have new, uncharted waters to swim through. Over the years, as I’ve recounted this moment to friends, it feels as if more of them have reached a similar threshold: One half of the mother-daughter duoWhen her mother FaceTimed her just days after undergoing a face-lift near the end of 2024, 27-year-old Mary felt she could hardly recognize the woman speaking.
Her features had been stretched into a smoother version, one unburdened by life, by emotions, by gravity. Mary looked for signs her mother was still in there — her eyelids crinkling, the dimples at the corners of her smile — but “I remember being like,,” Mary says.
She hoped that after the swelling went down, she would find the woman who had raised her once more, but now, though she concedes the face-lift “looks good,” that sense of sadness wells up nearly every time she sees her mother.
“She does look like herself. It’s just that the things I used to love aren’t there. Her smile is different. Her little dimples she had are gone.
It doesn’t look bad; I just feel like the essence of who she is is kind of gone,” Mary tells me.
“It’s like I can hear her laugh in my head, and when I hear that, I can remember times with my grandparents, sitting around and seeing her dimples come out when she was laughing. ”happy for her mother, that she regained her confidence. But still, “I don’t know if I would ever tell her my thoughts on the sadness I feel toward her face-lift,” she says.
“It would have been a nice conversation to have had before. ”user shared that “for some reason I feel like l’ve lost a part of my mom physically. Her body shape doesn’t look like her anymore and I’m trying to accept it but I can’t … I feel bonded to her by seeing myself in her features, but now that’s gone and it hurts.
” Another, whose mother opted to get crowns on her teeth that “fundamentally changed my parents relationship and her self-esteem, and they way we all see her” commiserated.felt anger and borderline betrayal: “I don’t know how to face her without thinking about how my mom’s body is so similar to mine. ” Meanwhile, entire industries are built on how to speak to children about puberty, body neutrality, romantic partners, bullies.
Then again, many of those benchmarks are considered natural rites of passage. Is that how we now, or will, consider cosmetic work? Has anyone else experienced this???? Speaking from personal experience… Growing up, the insecurities we hold of ourselves are usually introduced to us by watching our own mothers think critically of themselves.
“I’m so fat” “My stomach is too big” “My arms look flabby” …without realizing how dangerous this is to our kids. Children’s brains are like play dough, everything sticks, whether it’s true or not. As a teenager I could never understand why I wasn’t growing into the woman my mother looked like, and I thought I was doing something wrong.
I thought maybe if I start eating as much as I can or working out as much as I can, then maybe I would start to look like her. It wasn’t until I FOUND OUT that I realized that I would NEVER look like her. My momma is the best momma in all of her imperfections, BUT I do wish that I could have shared this life with her in that type of way.
It can be jarring when the person who gave you half of your DNA, whose nose, lips, and eyes you may share, opts to change their face. The loss of the sense that you’re supposed to be looking at someone who looks like you is destabilizing. But for other young women, like Vanessa Paradela, it’s their mothers who can’t accept their daughters’ choice to change their faces, and they don’t hesitate to make it known.
Before Paradela got a nose job, her mother tried to dissuade her.
“You don’t like the nose we have given you? ” she would say.
“Why would you change your face? There’s still time to back out. ” Ultimately, her mother helped nurse Paradela back to health after the operation but still laments it.
“She said I look less Filipino,” Paradela says. After opting for a nose job at 19, Maya claims her mother “would yell at me and be like, ‘You got your nose done because you’re insecure,’” Maya says.
“You’re supposed to be supporting me here. ” Maya has since gotten Botox and lip injections, which her mother similarly criticizes: “She said, ‘Oh my God, you look like a duck,’ and over the past two years, any time I post a photo or talk to her over FaceTime, she’ll say something mean about my lips. I know she’s just projecting.
” But Maya’s mother, Eman, told me all she has ever seen in her daughter is an “extremely beautiful” girl who just isn’t “appreciating her natural beauty. ” Eman herself started getting Botox around age 40, she says, but beyond that, she believes in “taking care” of oneself in as natural a way as possible. To her, that means eye creams, face creams, microneedling, facials, peels, collagen stimulators, and stopping short of anything that involves synthetic fillers, silicone, or surgeries.
It was how Eman says her own mother had raised her — on the belief that one’s “natural” beauty and its upkeep supersedes all else. Not until Maya opted to go under the knife did Eman have to contend with what some modern women view as self-care.
“It made me sad that Maya didn’t look like she once did. She’s a beauty, and she did things that she didn’t need,” Eman says.
“But she loves her nose job. It made her more confident, so I’m okay with that. ” Despite their different approaches to their respective appearances and the subsequent butting of heads, the two maintain an open, albeit contentious, line of communication about cosmetic work. Whenever Maya calls her mom, worrying about whether she needs to adjust the filler in her lips, Eman has no problem giving it to her straight: “You are beautiful.
Don’t make it complicated. You don’t need these procedures. ” Twin sisters Lexi and Allie Kaplan didn’t have an issue with their mother Amy’s decision to have a face-lift — in fact, they encouraged it and documented it for their. On their page is a dedicated playlist titled “Moms Facelift Journey,” in which the two follow the before, during, and after of Amy’s surgery.
“It’s not because we thought she needed one. She would just kind of walk around pulling on her face all the time. We could tell she was thinking about it and it just wasn’t being said out loud,” Allie says.
“So Lexi was kind of like, ‘Mom, just get the face-lift. It already seems like you want it. ’” Amy admits the twins’ TikTok followers were “mean” at times when they posted videos of her online, but she is thrilled with the results: “The jowls are gone. I just look a little refreshed,” and even more so with how this served as a litmus test for their honesty with one another.
“We talk about everything,” Amy says. “Nothing’s taboo with us. ” Including how, when the girls were in third grade, their mother’s raving about how beautiful the two were resulted in a nose job.
“I remember she took photos of our noses because she was like, ‘I want my nose to be like their nose,’” Allie says.cosmetic work may make us feel about ourselves isn’t easy for many, if not most, of us. “A daughter forms her sense of self in the presence of her mother’s relationship to her own body.
If the mother communicates, either explicitly or implicitly, that she is not okay as she is or that she needs to change her body in order to be acceptable, the daughter may internalize the message that she is not okay as she is either,” explains Dr. Ellen Carni, a licensed psychologist who specialized in maternal relationships.
“Bear in mind that mothers are also daughters who internalize messages from their own mothers. This can lead to a pattern of intergenerational trauma that gets passed down through the generations until somebody stops it by getting professional help, among other things. ” Until she was well into elementary school, Bella thought she simply looked different from her mother.
Both of her parents had had double-eyelid surgery before she was born, and while Bella says they didn’t necessarily keep it a secret from her, they didn’t disclose it until she asked. Growing up, she says, she felt she looked nothing like her mother, who had more “western eyes” than Bella’s “traditional Asian face. ” But after seeing photos of her mother presurgery, from middle school, she realized the two looked uncannily similar.
When Bella turned 16, she says, her mother told her, “It’s time, girl,” and urged her to follow through with her own double-eyelid surgery.
“I didn’t want to feel offended because she had the same thing done, so I knew it wasn’t her telling me I was unattractive,” Bella says. While today, a decade later, she is “pretty happy” with the results, she says, “Because I was so young, I didn’t really know if I wanted it. It wasn’t really up to me to make that decision.
” While the discourse around what constitutes a healthy or feminist relationship with cosmetic work, if at all possible, is often contentious, several of the women we interviewed expressed a greater sense of understanding for their mother or daughter postsurgery. A few women saw what their mothers had lost in the work they chose to undergo, and several daughters said they learned, some for the first time, how to extend grace to them.
“I know what being a woman and looking in the mirror and not liking things is like,” Mary says. There is no prescribed path for how to bridge the gap between anger and acceptance, grief and relief, mother and daughter, but at least there’s an effort and an attempt to understand. I realized I had never spoken to my mother about how my comments on her face all those years ago made her feel.
From time to time, the thought of that interaction has made me feel guilty, ashamed, even. Now as an adult, all I want for my mom is what she has wanted for me my entire life: to feel her best. If these fellow daughters could engage in these difficult conversations with their mothers, why couldn’t I?
I wanted to tell her I was sorry, to repent for hurting the feelings of the woman who sacrificed much of her life so I could have a fruitful one. So I texted her.
“Mama, remember when I came home from college and asked you not to get Botox again? ” I asked. I assumed that moment was just as ingrained in her mind as it had been in mine, plaguing her with the same feeling of decadelong discontent.
“I don’t need Botox,” she typed, half-joking. I could practically hear her voice.
“I look younger than I am. I inherited that from my mom. ”Are Repetto Ballet Shoes Worth It? Your Weekly Horoscopes by Madame Clairevoyant: May 10–16 Leading up to the new moon in Taurus on Saturday, this week offers an opportunity to identify what isn’t working in your life and make changes.
The artist Lorna Simpson’s solo exhibition at this year’s Venice Biennale is a sweeping view set against the backdrop of a rapidly sinking city. After a wave of criticism for Williams’s Met Gala look, Aika Flores reminded people that there’s “a human with feelings behind the work. ”Half-Off Dusen Dusen, $35 J.Crew Shorts, and More Summer Sales This Weekend From summery accessories at Madewell to Anthropologie homeware, plus last-minute Mother’s Day gifts, under-$20 M.A.C lipstick, and Alo activewear.
Should I Be Freaking Out About Hantavirus? We called up the legend to talk about her new single, “Chakzilla,” and what keeps her going after five decades in the industry. Mushrooms Made a Mother‘Motherhood Changed My Relationship With My Sisters. How Do We Stay Close? ’Your Daily Horoscope by Madame Clairevoyant: May 8, 2026New York
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