That face on the other side… do you know her?
Have you seen her face pull down to the sink? Do you reach your hands up to your temples, just behind the hairline, caress the pressure points, and pull back ever so slightly? Nothing too noticeable, just enough to turn the brightness up one degree.
Just enough to feel a little tension.
Just a stretch.
Just a little… ah! [Ahhhh…]
HEAD IN A VICE
An early scene in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire Brazil (1985) shows the protagonist’s elderly aristocrat mother admonishing her child in the midst of a facelift consultation. Lamenting the protagonist’s unwillingness to ascend the arbitrary ranks of state bureaucracy, his mother barely flinches while a plastic surgeon gleefully ratchets his hands to the side of her face and pulls her cheeks back as far as they can go, so that the bare skeleton, the nerves and vessels and muscle tissue, are all made visible. The tension of the skin barely stops the contents of her whole head from falling out.
“Relax…they won’t know you when I’ve finished with you”
Angelic choir sings“
First you remove the excess dermAH”
A smoulder to the mirror
“...the flaccid tissues…”
A bubble of delight
“Now, I LIFT”
Crescendo of harmony
The doctor traps the expression in place with a tight layer of saran wrap, spins his patient around, and reveals a face that looks like a baby doll defaced by a manic toddler and covered in scotch tape. There’s a tragic sweetness in the mother’s unmoving expression; serene in its naivete, holding fast in the doctor’s promise to make her 20 years younger.
If you live long enough and ascend the ranks, you can loop back in time.
If you hold a smile long enough, it becomes a grimace.
“VOILA!”
Though this scene is a caricature of a form of plastic surgery that was novel at its time (the modern-day cosmetic facelift was developed in the 1970s), the normalization of vanity-induced facial reconstruction that the film projects onto its dystopia is almost quaint when you think of what’s on the menu 40 years after Brazil was made.
What can I get you?
An endoscopic brow LIFT?
A “smas” LIFT
A lip LIFT?
A fox eye LIFT?
A subcutaneous skin-only LIFT?
A deep plane subperiodontal LIFT?
Like so many chronically online transsexuals, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit diving down the rabbit hole of face alterations available to the general consumer in 2025. As a result, YouTube’s algorithm has dutifully fed me a deluge of videos by creators who specialize in dissecting celebrity transformations. I can’t stop watching these videos; speculating on the likely surgeries xyz celeb may have had, based on a shortlist of common procedures favoured among the segment of society for whom going under the knife is de rigueur. These days, the veil of secrecy about all of this is quite thin. We live in a post-Instagram face world, where Botox and filler injections are part and parcel with anything else in your Sephora cart. But as some YouTubers have rightly observed, the new celebs and elite have moved on from the overfilled faces of the last 10-15 years. Fillers are OUT, and facelifts—once thought to be the domain of a certain kind of older woman similar to the mother in Brazil—are IN.
Have you seen that celeb who suddenly looks exactly like she did 20 years ago?
Or the one whose face hasn’t changed in 20 years?
Have you seen the latest to STUN in new photos?
What’s holding her in place?
In every single YouTube video I watch on the subject, one procedure comes up time and time again; always speculated, but rarely ever able to confirm: the “ponytail facelift”. A minimally scarring procedure that makes small hidden incisions behind the hairline, the ponytail lift is one of the most trending surgeries in Hollywood right now. Rather than cutting off a larger section of the skin around the jaw, like the surgeon was preparing to do in Brazil, the ponytail lift works by probing a large needle with a camera on it into all the corners of your head, allowing surgeons to see inside you, saw you off, and sew you up from underneath the skin. Recovery times are quick, and by the time you re-emerge into the world, the only sign that you’ve had invasive surgery is a sudden enigmatic brightness that suggests the forces of nature only apply to you in the inverse.
Successfully done, the facelifts of 2025 allow time to fold in on itself from within. The present is a black hole, swallowing the past and future selves so that there’s never a need for before and after pics. You’ve always looked this way, and you always will – just don’t stare for too long. But of course, I do, because what draws me to obsess over these surgeries is not the satisfaction of a perfect lift, but rather the thrill of the tipping point, where each uncanny red carpet smile seems to groan and ache at the seams. As I linger on the photos in these YouTube videos, pausing on the countless faces that have pulled their contents back in on themselves, time becomes slippery, and I feel the ground underneath me begin to dissolve into a membrane so thin it could give out at any moment.
HEAD IN A VICE (AGAIN)
In Brazil’s sadistic climax, the protagonist finds himself in a surgeon’s chair, panicked, trapped, strapped down at the bottom of a colossal wind tunnel, forced to endure a lobotomy. A figure in a lab coat slowly walks across the bridge toward him, obscured by a plastic mask that cuts off at the hairline. The figure spins toward the camera, revealing a smooth and terrifying baby’s face, smiling into the void with nothing visible behind the eyes. The figure reaches for scalpels, scrapers, pincers, and prongs, but settles on a long needle, perfect for boring into the head and rearranging it from the inside. As he reaches toward the protagonist, squirming and begging for his life, we see the weathered state of the mask’s veneer, covered in jagged dents and cracks below the shining surface. The camera hovers on the needle as it’s about to make its way into the brain of the viewer, when suddenly a shot rings out and a bloody hole appears in the centre of the baby’s skull. The surgeon rips off the mask, spins around in shock while his head spills out, eyes bulging as the grimace grows into the folds of his face, collapsing into the hard ground. A miraculous rescue crew descends on the protagonist, clipping him into a harness and lifting him into the light, where an unknown future awaits beyond the ascension.
Just a little…[Ahhhhh]
Every time I close my laptop, I leave dozens of tabs open in my browser for future consideration. There’s so much more to explore once the hairline is pulled back, beyond the layer of skin. With new advancements in laser cutting, endoscopes, microcurrents, and neuromodulators, unimaginable levels of transformation are possible. There are brow bones to shave, jaws to contour, even small adjustments in position that can be made at the level of the nervous system itself. This is all speculative, of course, only for the people who have YouTube videos made about them. But then again, if you can’t dissect your own face, how are you going to dissect someone else’s?
I pull my hair back tight.
The apples in my cheeks are carved in ancient stone
My smile effortless in its allure
The brightness of my expression lifting the world around me
And my eyes are sharper than ever
I turn angles in a flat plane of glass
That contains a whole world within it
Release my hands from my temples
Watch the skin spring back towards the earth
That face on the other side… do you know her?
That face on the other side… do you know her?
Have you seen her face pull down to the sink? Do you reach your hands up to your temples, just behind the hairline, caress the pressure points, and pull back ever so slightly? Nothing too noticeable, just enough to turn the brightness up one degree.
Just enough to feel a little tension.
Just a stretch.
Just a little… ah! [Ahhhh…]
HEAD IN A VICE
An early scene in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian satire Brazil (1985) shows the protagonist’s elderly aristocrat mother admonishing her child in the midst of a facelift consultation. Lamenting the protagonist’s unwillingness to ascend the arbitrary ranks of state bureaucracy, his mother barely flinches while a plastic surgeon gleefully ratchets his hands to the side of her face and pulls her cheeks back as far as they can go, so that the bare skeleton, the nerves and vessels and muscle tissue, are all made visible. The tension of the skin barely stops the contents of her whole head from falling out.
“Relax…they won’t know you when I’ve finished with you”
Angelic choir sings“
First you remove the excess dermAH”
A smoulder to the mirror
“...the flaccid tissues…”
A bubble of delight
“Now, I LIFT”
Crescendo of harmony
The doctor traps the expression in place with a tight layer of saran wrap, spins his patient around, and reveals a face that looks like a baby doll defaced by a manic toddler and covered in scotch tape. There’s a tragic sweetness in the mother’s unmoving expression; serene in its naivete, holding fast in the doctor’s promise to make her 20 years younger.
If you live long enough and ascend the ranks, you can loop back in time.
If you hold a smile long enough, it becomes a grimace.
“VOILA!”
Though this scene is a caricature of a form of plastic surgery that was novel at its time (the modern-day cosmetic facelift was developed in the 1970s), the normalization of vanity-induced facial reconstruction that the film projects onto its dystopia is almost quaint when you think of what’s on the menu 40 years after Brazil was made.
What can I get you?
An endoscopic brow LIFT?
A “smas” LIFT
A lip LIFT?
A fox eye LIFT?
A subcutaneous skin-only LIFT?
A deep plane subperiodontal LIFT?
Like so many chronically online transsexuals, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit diving down the rabbit hole of face alterations available to the general consumer in 2025. As a result, YouTube’s algorithm has dutifully fed me a deluge of videos by creators who specialize in dissecting celebrity transformations. I can’t stop watching these videos; speculating on the likely surgeries xyz celeb may have had, based on a shortlist of common procedures favoured among the segment of society for whom going under the knife is de rigueur. These days, the veil of secrecy about all of this is quite thin. We live in a post-Instagram face world, where Botox and filler injections are part and parcel with anything else in your Sephora cart. But as some YouTubers have rightly observed, the new celebs and elite have moved on from the overfilled faces of the last 10-15 years. Fillers are OUT, and facelifts—once thought to be the domain of a certain kind of older woman similar to the mother in Brazil—are IN.
Have you seen that celeb who suddenly looks exactly like she did 20 years ago?
Or the one whose face hasn’t changed in 20 years?
Have you seen the latest to STUN in new photos?
What’s holding her in place?
In every single YouTube video I watch on the subject, one procedure comes up time and time again; always speculated, but rarely ever able to confirm: the “ponytail facelift”. A minimally scarring procedure that makes small hidden incisions behind the hairline, the ponytail lift is one of the most trending surgeries in Hollywood right now. Rather than cutting off a larger section of the skin around the jaw, like the surgeon was preparing to do in Brazil, the ponytail lift works by probing a large needle with a camera on it into all the corners of your head, allowing surgeons to see inside you, saw you off, and sew you up from underneath the skin. Recovery times are quick, and by the time you re-emerge into the world, the only sign that you’ve had invasive surgery is a sudden enigmatic brightness that suggests the forces of nature only apply to you in the inverse.
Successfully done, the facelifts of 2025 allow time to fold in on itself from within. The present is a black hole, swallowing the past and future selves so that there’s never a need for before and after pics. You’ve always looked this way, and you always will – just don’t stare for too long. But of course, I do, because what draws me to obsess over these surgeries is not the satisfaction of a perfect lift, but rather the thrill of the tipping point, where each uncanny red carpet smile seems to groan and ache at the seams. As I linger on the photos in these YouTube videos, pausing on the countless faces that have pulled their contents back in on themselves, time becomes slippery, and I feel the ground underneath me begin to dissolve into a membrane so thin it could give out at any moment.
HEAD IN A VICE (AGAIN)
In Brazil’s sadistic climax, the protagonist finds himself in a surgeon’s chair, panicked, trapped, strapped down at the bottom of a colossal wind tunnel, forced to endure a lobotomy. A figure in a lab coat slowly walks across the bridge toward him, obscured by a plastic mask that cuts off at the hairline. The figure spins toward the camera, revealing a smooth and terrifying baby’s face, smiling into the void with nothing visible behind the eyes. The figure reaches for scalpels, scrapers, pincers, and prongs, but settles on a long needle, perfect for boring into the head and rearranging it from the inside. As he reaches toward the protagonist, squirming and begging for his life, we see the weathered state of the mask’s veneer, covered in jagged dents and cracks below the shining surface. The camera hovers on the needle as it’s about to make its way into the brain of the viewer, when suddenly a shot rings out and a bloody hole appears in the centre of the baby’s skull. The surgeon rips off the mask, spins around in shock while his head spills out, eyes bulging as the grimace grows into the folds of his face, collapsing into the hard ground. A miraculous rescue crew descends on the protagonist, clipping him into a harness and lifting him into the light, where an unknown future awaits beyond the ascension.
Just a little…[Ahhhhh]
Every time I close my laptop, I leave dozens of tabs open in my browser for future consideration. There’s so much more to explore once the hairline is pulled back, beyond the layer of skin. With new advancements in laser cutting, endoscopes, microcurrents, and neuromodulators, unimaginable levels of transformation are possible. There are brow bones to shave, jaws to contour, even small adjustments in position that can be made at the level of the nervous system itself. This is all speculative, of course, only for the people who have YouTube videos made about them. But then again, if you can’t dissect your own face, how are you going to dissect someone else’s?
I pull my hair back tight.
The apples in my cheeks are carved in ancient stone
My smile effortless in its allure
The brightness of my expression lifting the world around me
And my eyes are sharper than ever
I turn angles in a flat plane of glass
That contains a whole world within it
Release my hands from my temples
Watch the skin spring back towards the earth
That face on the other side… do you know her?