Adverts from six companies selling liquid Brazilian butt lifts (BBLs) have been banned in the UK for trivialising the risks and exploiting women’s insecurities around body image. This may seem like a sensible move from the Advertising Standards Authority, often performed in unregulated settings that can lead to infection, lethal blood clots and scarring. Yet these adverts are a drop in the ocean compared to the new wave of Botox and filler, both of which come with their own horror stories of drooping eyelids and half-frozen faces.

All adverts for cosmetic surgery and procedures exploit women’s insecurities. Their very aim is to stimulate demand, and they do so under the guise of “wellness” and “self-love”, not by helping women make peace with their imperfections. And there are now just so many imperfections to choose from. Women no longer just have the option of boob jobs, tummy tucks and facelifts, but can choose from a whole menu of interventions: Chin implants for a more defined jawline; brachioplasty to remove “bingo-wings”; and labiaplasty for that porn-star look. These clinics are creating anxieties rather than solving them.

It seems madness that advertising prescription drugs is banned in the UK, but we allow adverts for expensive, unnecessary and invasive aesthetic procedures on healthy people. While there is already a ban on advertising cosmetic surgery and other procedures (such as teeth whitening and chemical peels) to under-18s, this is extremely difficult to monitor in practice. How do we know whether a minor has seen an offer for “baby Botox” or not? Why is it acceptable for a 20-year-old to be advertised for a nose job, but not a 17-year-old?

Social media is saturated with content designed to make people question their appearance. The algorithm loves to push before-and-after pics of buccal fat removal; vlogs in which chirpy content creators say how confident, happy and empowered their boob job has made them; selfies of concave-contoured faces where everything goes up rather than the natural down. The pipeline of follow, filter, filler is irresistible: two-thirds of Gen Z say they have seen cosmetic surgery addressed on their social media, with over a third saying they are more likely to go under the knife as a result.

The problem is that by allowing any advertising of these procedures, we implicitly condone them and perpetuate the online narratives surrounding them. The ever-increasing popularity of these procedures is, of course, partly down to exposure (programmes like Love Island and the Kardashians’ Instagram profiles have a lot to answer for).

Yet it is also partly due to the stories that surround these transformations. The message is that these procedures are a form of self-care, comparable to getting a haircut or a manicure: getting these curves, contours or cat-eyes isn’t just about chasing youth and beauty, but making you feel confident. It’s about self-love, not vanity. In the meantime, we continue to ignore the vicious irony that audiences are being told to “do what makes them happy” by the very forces that make them insecure in the first place.

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Kristina Murkett is a freelance writer and English teacher.

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