The face of masculinity is changing. No, literally: his jaw is buoyed by meaty masseters, his peepers pulled into a positive canthal tilt — “hunter eyes” do better on the dating market than “prey eyes” — and his bosom is honed into shiny brioche buns by hours down the gym. This is the New Man, and he spends more on Botox, fillers and dental veneers than his girlfriend does.

The revelation that 23% of men aged 18 to 34 have invested in such treatments — versus 21% of women — is the result of a new Barclays survey of spending patterns; experts put it down to high-definition cameras, gym culture and “constant online visibility”. I would bet that the aesthetics of the Gigachad — that muscle-bound icon of incel looksmaxxing boards — have also had an influence, filtering into mainstream male beauty standards. The logic: speedrun sexual prowess by getting some Polyfilla in your mandible.

The problem is that women can tell. As “filler blindness” enters the lexicon — typified by that one horrifying picture of Love Island girly Molly-Mae Hague — female celebrities have started rowing back on puffball pouts, dissolving their lips and deflating their cheeks. The dreaded “pillow face” has already ravaged the female populations of some British cities: this condition sees said filler migrates across your subcutaneous planes and makes you look like you’re 30 years older and in the throes of an allergic reaction. Go to Selfridges in Birmingham or Leeds: the escalators are strictly single-file to accommodate shoppers’ panoramic cheekbones.

But the march of the medspa-sexual male seems unstoppable. At the time of Molly-Mae’s stint on Love Island in 2019, the Turkey-teethed men on that dating show were freakish exceptions. Now radioactive veneers, which cost up to £1,800 per tooth, can be seen glowing in the dark of nightclubs from Essex to Ellesmere Port. The stigma of “tweakments”, and their containment within the gay world, has given way to mass appeal and affordable payment plans. After all, what’s a little Brotox between friends?

All this is surprising, not least because of men’s supposed invulnerability to beauty standards, which this trend reveals to be a big, fat lie. But it’s also odd because they have the privilege of being said to “age like fine wine”. Those considering a nip or tuck might want to consider the preferences of the opposite sex and realise that women have a much higher tolerance for grizzled gruffness, and far less truck with vanity and insecurity, than men do in women. Where celebrity dames have often been praised for their alien ability to defy time itself (Kris Jenner’s new face has recently set social media aflame) famous men who undergo plastic surgery more often than not end up looking freakish, cat-like and taut (think of Kris’s paramour Bruce, now Caitlyn).

Of course, naturally handsome men are hard to come by and they have been assisted through the ages by powdered wigs, beauty marks and tactical beards to hide weak chins. But the options available to modern men are expensive, invasive and freakily uncanny. The problem with tweakments is that they destabilise the very idea of masculinity these men are chasing: rugged, unbothered lumberjacks do not owe their pectorals to silicone implants.

Instead, such men are engaging in a kind of unwitting drag, a joke-shop version of manliness which tends more towards the male gaze than the female. Put down that numbing cream, hombre: it’s long been an open secret of bodybuilding competitions that being swole is to impress other men. Who’d have thought that one consequence of the feminisation of culture would be men absorbing women’s somatic self-hatred?

---

Poppy Sowerby is an UnHerd columnist

poppy_sowerby

---