Living in the age of plastic
Navigating an age of artificiality as a Gen Z Christian
“If you decide for God, living a life of God-worship, it follows that you don’t fuss about what’s on the table at mealtimes or whether the clothes in your closet are in fashion. There is far more to your life than the food you put in your stomach, more to your outer appearance than the clothes you hang on your body. Look at the birds, free and unfettered, not tied down to a job description, careless in the care of God. And you count far more to him than birds.
“Has anyone by fussing in front of the mirror ever gotten taller by so much as an inch? All this time and money wasted on fashion—do you think it makes that much difference? Instead of looking at the fashions, walk out into the fields and look at the wildflowers. They never primp or shop, but have you ever seen color and design quite like it? The ten best-dressed men and women in the country look shabby alongside them. - Matthew 6:25-29 The MSG (Bold added)
“I will get wrinkly and haggard on principle,” one comment read, on a TikTok on a young woman sharing that no matter how much she struggles with self-image, she won’t get plastic surgery.
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She will never feed into that ‘evil industry that profits off of women believing that there is something innately wrong with them”
“‘I do it for myself’...girl pls,” another user commented.
“My spite is stronger than my self-hatred.”
“I hate my nose so much but the thought of my future beautiful daughter having it and wondering why I changed it makes me so sad so no way I will do it.”
Being on TikTok feels like participating in the largest anthropological study in human history. Never before have we had access to so many different voices from so many places across the world.
For those who are not on the app (good for you), there is a consensus, for the most part, that if women want to get filler or lipflips or whatever, that it is fine. Women and girls acknowledge that it is disheartening that women are sold insecurities and solutions by the beauty industry, but they try to be careful not to offend those who get work done. It feels silly to blame the women for giving in to the standard that they are told their whole life they need to adhere to in order to be beautiful.
I find the whole argument fascinating.
Since a secular worldview does not have a singular consensus on what is right and wrong and it is highly individualized, it makes sense that they have landed in this strange spot. Knowing something is actively harming women, but letting the individual women discern for herself if it is a good fit for her or not.
People who support beauty maintenance through the form of plastic surgery, or in this case, reconstructive surgery, make the claim that they are 1. Doing it for themselves, or 2. It doesn’t affect anyone else. This is obviously a manifestation of our individualistic worldview in the West. We think that folks can make individualized decisions, but the reality is, you can not get plastic surgery in a vacuum.
You can not get a lip flip or botox or a facelift or filler without contributing to, and effectively affirming the narrative that women are objects. We merely exist for consumption, and we are most easily consumed when we are smooth, youthful and small.
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“Subtle” plastic surgery
It seems like everyone is getting a facelift recently (allegedly). I seriously doubt Anne Hathaway or Lindsay Lohan or Kris Jenner care about one 23-year-old Christian writer’s opinion of the moral and social implications of their reconstructive surgery, but it feels safe to throw in an ‘allegedly’ just in case.
I can not imagine the weight of being a celebrity.
I have had one (1) person come up to me before once at a Taco Stand and tell me they liked my writing and I started sweating profusely and responded with confusion on how they recognized me.
With every public outing you take being documented and parsed through by the general public, I can imagine that the idea of controlling the narrative by altering your body would feel “empowering” in some way.
But that’s the issue. Empowerment is supposed to feel like confidence. Ownership. Assurance. And what are we teaching young girls if that can only be found when we have to go under the knife to find it? If we have to inject filler into our cheeks to feel confident walking into a room and owning it?
Although most of us are nowhere near celebrities, we all have the option to occupy a strange, omnipresent digital presence. I wrote about this phenomenon a few months ago. This idea that we can be in so many places at once bends the physical limits God has placed on our bodies. We were not meant to be in this many places at once, yet our limbs are stretched across cities and continents as we consume the devastation that covers the earth as we scroll through algorithms tailored to our likes and dislikes.
It used to be that the Kardashians had the monopoly on beauty. But fillers and other cosmetic surgeries have gotten more accessible.
For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them. - Ephesians 2:10
Hollywood gatekeeps glamour. That is what is so alluring about the red carpets and the flashing lights and the blue checkmarks by their names. It’s something we can’t have, no matter how hard we try. BBL’s and big lips used to be the standard, but as those have become increasingly popular, and swung out of the trend cycle. Now people are getting their filler dissolved in fear of Pillow Face or Instagram face.
It makes sense why we are craving a ‘no makeup-makeup look’ after all that was 2016. Because if everyone gets these nips and tucks throughout their life and they look generally ‘normal’ and less like this,
then we are misled, thinking that we should all have faces like Hailey Bieber or Gwyneth Paltrow.
Don’t get me wrong, those two women are naturally really stunning ladies, but their beauty is maintained by having access to plastic surgeons and estheticians and any beauty treatment they could imagine.
Because when the standard is so unnatural, we can convince ourselves it is not normal to look that way.
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Nobody’s waist is naturally that small, or lips that big, with their set of features, we say to ourselves, scrolling past the Kardashians’ photos. But that healthy level of speculation will continue to get erased as folks slip under the radar as they pass for ‘natural.’
This move toward more of a natural look is not just speculation. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, treatments like smaller breast implants, facelifts and Miami thong lifts (basically a more chill BBL) are in.
In an article by the ASPS about the trends of plastic surgery in 2025, they said:
Plastic surgery this year is all about subtle, natural results as well as cutting-edge technologies and treatments.
Beauty standards are ever-changing, but this shift toward more subtle work being done makes sense. Even though it has become more normalized, there is still stigma around getting work done and having a more natural look creates this allusion of natural beauty, which we all would probably choose over having to go under the knife.
Despite it being well-known that celebrities like Bella Hadid or Kylie Jenner have had plenty of work done to manufacture their signature looks, they are still held in high esteem in our culture. Why?
We yearn for beauty. (Even if it’s artificial, because we are in a fallen world.)
If you are anything like me, you seek beauty when you watch movies or read books or go on a walk outside. You collect up small pieces of order among chaos, ways that you see glimpses of things that are in perfect harmony.
In a broken world, beauty is what keeps us going. You may be stuck in traffic, but struck by a beautiful mural on the side of a corporate building. Or you are picking up your morning coffee and the barista did one of these for ya:
If we look closely, moments of beauty are presented to us every day. We are always hungry for more
“We do not want merely to see beauty, though, God knows, even that is bounty enough. We want something else which can hardly be put into words — to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.”
-C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Beauty is a virtue, but vanity is a vice. It does not seem like secular culture has any idea how to hold these realities together. So, how should Christians respond to this age of plastic?
The answer is simple,
Kidding, but this influencer has a good point.
It is frankly impossible not to be self-conscious when we use social media. We, whether we are actively pursuing it or not, are existing as an ambassador of our own personal brand. The stakes feel higher to be just ordinary-looking.
Humans have been looking at their own reflection for thousands of years, but only now do we have access to a camera at any moment. People used to just see gorgeous women on magazine covers or at the movies, but now they are all over our feeds. Even if plenty of filler and filters are behind their curated content, our subconscious mind is not picking up on the nuance. Without knowing it, we are absorbing the lie that this is the most important thing about us, even if nobody is directly telling us.
Our lives are documented through images, and if somebody else is behind the lens, we are likely going to be confronted with our double chins and bad posture or angles. How many times have you seen a photo of yourself taken by a friend and looked in horror, hoping you didn’t actually look like that.
I am not interested in shaming women who participate in beauty culture, because there is a lot of social currency in conforming to beauty standards (that are being shoved down our throats 24/7). From a young age, girls are told that what they look like matters. This pressure to conform can be suffocating.
But there used to be a level of freedom in knowing that our eyebrows, cheekbones or even our height are things we can’t change. Those were the cards (genetics) that we have been dealt, we could tell ourselves while critiquing our appearance in the mirror. Now, we can pull out our phone and with the help of filters, see what we would look like with smoother skin, a different nose or jawline. With the help of a plastic surgeon, we can actually make ourselves taller, or change the way our chin looks.
I am less concerned about shaming people who get lipflips or face lifts and more interested in speaking to the young women and girls who feel the pressure to look perfect.
Because that is what this all distills down to. A compulsion for perfection.
Even if you, like the TikToker I opened this piece with, have no intentions of going under the knife, you probably still spend a lot of time poking and prodding at your face and your body.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. - Psalm 139:14
What you look like is the least interesting thing about you
It’s easy to tell the people in my life that their appearance (while absolutely jaw-dropping and stunning) is not important to me.
I genuinely do not care if my friend pulls up to our coffee date with frizzy hair or makeup-less. I imagine you feel the same way about the people you love. While it is fun to see your partner all dressed up, the joy and depth they bring to your life is not connected to their body or their face.
So, why can’t we offer that same care and hospitality to ourselves?
To free ourselves from the endless renovation project that is self-optimization. To let our hair grow at the pace it grows and accept our nail beds as the shape they are. To just let ourselves exist without trying to ‘glow up.’
I love fashion and beauty. I plan on repainting my nails once I finish writing this. I fall asleep every night going over different outfit options for the next day. If you are a woman (or a fella) who does not have a similar affection for aesthetics, you may have a hard time understanding why I would care about that stuff.
As the verse I opened with says, the clothes we wear don’t matter. There is more to life than that. I totally agree. But for me, clothes and style and all that stuff are really life-giving and fun for me. I love playing around with different colors and textures and finding new ways to use my clothes.
My understanding of that verse is less literal (although I think we could all do some good to think less about our clothes) and more about a general heart posture, which is that our appearances are not as important as we think they are.
And frankly, that God created us to spend our creative energy to make the world a better place. To bring His kingdom to earth through us. His vision for us did not include us using our imaginations about the different ways we could improve our appearance. That’s just not true.
We would do better to spend more of our time in the mornings preparing our hearts and minds to engage with God’s children than putting on makeup. That’s not to demonize beauty. I don’t think vilifying something small that gives you some confidence, like a cool outfit or lipstick, is not the answer here. But if we spend more time curating our appearance than we do cultivating our character, we are affirming the lie that appearances matter as much as they do.
Jesus did not preach on the Sermon on the Mount about not worrying about appearances just because he was worried about your vanity. But to free you from the oppressive, never-ending cycle of being obsessed with how you look and how you are being perceived. The reality is, you probably do not have six figures to spare to get a facelift to shave 40 years off your face like Kris Jenner did. So you should start accepting yourself as you are now. Because if you do not start now, you will go into each decade of your life, unhappier, instead of being deeply grateful that you have had the privilege to live into your 80s and 90s.
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. - 2 Corinthians 4:15
I can’t wait to have smile lines that my kids can see, because they know their mom lived a life of joy. I have no interest in Benjamin-buttoning for the rest of my life, trying to get back to how I looked at 20. That sounds exhausting. It also feels far removed from the life that Jesus calls me to have. And far from the definition of beauty that scripture lays out for us.
My advice for women young and old, and everything in between: resist the narrative that youth is the standard of beauty. Steep your mind in the biblical reality that the only beauty we should spend our time trying to cultivate is the kind that will last until the next life.
What does it matter if we die with our complexion intact, with no beauty inside of us? With no kind eulogy to say that we touched people’s lives. That we witnessed the living God to them. That we laid our lives down for our friends each day.
What if all they have to say is that she looked very beautiful?
Will any of it matter then?
But the Lord said to Samuel, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him. For the Lord sees not as man sees: man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” - 1 Samuel 16:7
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Hear! Hear! Preach it, Jenna! I catch myself about to complain about my wrinkles or grey hairs and realize those kinds of comments are feeding this culture of self-hatred. It is insane to resent looking my forty-two years, when every one of those years is a privilege and a gift. What do I want? The privilege of having lived without anything to show for it? I have been wanting to write a poem about this for the last month, so now I need to sit down and see if it can come together. I do not want to fight a war with myself everyday when I recognize that I look older. I want my inner self to rejoice at the outer signs of aging.
Wow I love this piece! I agree it's a little complicated because I wonder where to draw the line. I have never dyed my hair and almost never wear makeup now that I'm a toddler Mom, but I did have some cosmetic work done on my teeth years ago because they were crooked my whole life, even after years of braces. I struggle with the fashion piece too, since I, like you, love clothes so much and always have.
I guess maybe you hit on this when you described the "heart posture" thing. Maybe the question we need to ask is whether were are trying to fight nature so we can look forever young, and whether we're dressing up because we love it or because we want to impress others.
You are an amazing writer. I'm 29 and shiver to think what I would have written about this topic at 23.