We still call women hysterical – but now we do it through BotoxAs women train their faces not to move and inject away their expressions, the result is faces that never read as angry, with no laugh lines to betray how much fun you hadShareLink copied ✔️October

30,

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The rules of eternal beauty are simple. Come on girls, you know the ones! Don’t frown when you’re mad, don’t purse your lips when you sip, don’t smile in photos, don’t crease your eyes, don’t squint in the sun, don’t scrunch your face in concentration, don’t let your forehead crease, don’t relax your tongue, don’t laugh too hard (or too often). Don’t move a muscle. Don’t express. Don’t object. In the 21st century, we still call women hysterical – we just do it by telling them to freeze their faces.

There are “anti-wrinkle” straws marketed to stop puckering, face taping methods sold to immobilise your features while you sleep, TikTok videos teaching you how to train your face not to move, and even micro-routines to unlearn expressions that might one day settle as lines. Dermatologists keep pointing out the obvious: any smoothing from tape is temporary, and tools that change your sipping motion don’t prevent aging. But the algorithm rewards smoothness and stillness, and the myth persists that if you can just stop moving, you can stop time.AdChoicesADVERTISING

Underneath the hacks is a cultural update to an age-old insult. In the 19th century, women deemed “hysterical” were sedated, institutionalised, or electro-shocked into silence. An overt display of emotion or defiance could see a woman locked away for being “crazy” or “unstable”. Now, instead of being confined to an asylum, we head to the aesthetics clinic and do the paralysing ourselves. We erase the evidence of emotion from our faces. We stop reacting altogether.

Clinically, the line between normal facial movement and pathology is increasingly blurred. Consultant dermatologist at Self London, Dr Anjali Mahto, told me the requests for these ‘fixes’ are up: “Ten years ago, most people would not have noticed or been concerned about lines that only appeared on movement. However, constant exposure to filters and curated images has shifted the frame of reference, and people now compare their dynamic faces to static, edited ones.”

You can see the beauty standard creep: it's not just softening a furrow after the fact, but preventing the feeling that would make it in the first place. The rhetoric isn’t “beauty” so much as self-discipline. And the pressure starts young.

Dr Mahto recalls a medical acne consult with a fourteen-year-old who wanted a fix for the “wrinkles” at the corner of her eyes - creases that only appeared when she smiled. Last week, skincare influencer Natalie O’Neill had to post a video explaining to her young followers that the lines around our eyeballs are not wrinkles but natural skin folds that allow the eyes to open and close. “This pressure is feeding into young women at a much, much younger age,” Dr Mahto told me during research for my book, Pixel Flesh. “Yes, I’m seeing the twenty-year-olds, but what’s happening is actually starting at eight, nine, ten years old. With all this information and digital accessibility, we’re supposed to be moving forwards. We’re not, we’re moving backwards.”

The more we re-code youthfulness as staticness, the more a mobile face looks like a mess. Expression becomes “excess”, the moral failing of a forehead that insists on being a forehead. “In the clinic, I remind patients that lines on smiling or frowning are a sign of a functioning, healthy face,” says Dr Mahto. “If we remove all movement, we risk losing natural expression and even altering the way others perceive us. The harder conversation is that this desire often comes less from personal preference and more from cultural conditioning, as we have collectively moved the goalposts of what is seen as acceptable skin.”

When women stop moving their faces, we don’t just lose lines; we lose language. Facial expression is one of our most efficient communication systems, carrying affect faster than words and anchoring everything from consent to care. Research shows expressions are foundational to social interaction, not decorative add-ons; take them away and accuracy drops. We read sincerity through “Duchenne” smiles that crease the eyes; when smiles are inhibited or controlled, credibility falls. We also understand one another by unconsciously mirroring – mimicry is a conduit for empathy and bonding – so when movement is suppressed, that circuit shorts. There’s evidence that freezing key muscles with Botox reduces the felt intensity of emotion and can blunt recognition of others’ expressions, because you can’t subtly mirror what you’re seeing. The sum is a social tax: fewer signals of joy shared, less nuance in conflict, diminished rapport in daily life. Smoothness here isn’t neutral maintenance – it constricts the channels through which women negotiate safety, solidarity and delight.

Inside the clinic, Dr Mahto sees the psychological toll. “The cost is profound, as we risk teaching a generation that any visible sign of emotion is a defect to be corrected. For adolescents especially, this can erode the process of developing a stable sense of self. If you are told your natural expressions are problems, you internalise the idea that your authenticity is unwelcome. In counseling, I try to shift the conversation back to function. Our faces are designed to move, to signal joy, empathy and connection. To deny that movement is to deny a fundamental part of being human. The challenge is to validate the distress these young women feel, because it is real, while also holding the line that medicine should not collude with cultural pressures that pathologise normality.”

Experts have said for years that wrinkle formation comes from many inputs – genetics, sun exposure, collagen changes, skin thickness – and while genuine smiles do crease the corners of the eyes, stillness is not a skincare routine. The science on exercise-based face routines is mixed to weak; some small studies suggest tonus changes, others call the evidence insufficient, and mainstream medical sites remain cautious. Keep your sunscreen; keep your retinoid if you like it; but beware of any lesson that treats joy, surprise, anger – the human reflex to the world – as a design flaw. A wrinkle is not ruinous. A frown is not a failure. And a woman whose face tells the truth is not hysterical; she’s alive. Training your face not to feel isn’t medicine or self-care; it’s gendered mood policing with a misogynistic twist.

“If we are really to shift this, we have to shift the way we value beauty – this can only be done collectively,” says Professor Heather Widdows, philosopher and author of Perfect Me. “Do we really want to live in a world where the pressure to modify our bodies continues to increase? Where we are having surgery every five years, preventative Botox from 25, as many women are already doing? What else could we do with the time and attention?”

Zoom out, and the “don’t move” mandate looks less like skincare and more like social control with a “self-care” sheen. To be legible as competent, calm and employable, you present a smooth surface that never dissents. Perfectly, calmly amicable. No sharp brows in the boardroom, no face that reads as angry, no laugh lines that betray how much fun you had. A resting face that doesn’t challenge, or signal fatigue, or react too strongly, is a resting face that’s submitting. That’s why the obsession with training expression hits women first and hardest: it dovetails with the demand to conform.