It has grow to be a well-liked web pastime for individuals to take a position about what work a feminine celeb has had finished. Wrinkle-free, taut and glowing visages are analyzed by specialists and non-experts alike, usually leading to a prognosis that features a facelift, blepharoplasty, fillers, or Botox. Yet in latest months, it’s not solely well-known girls whose faces have been studied so intently – it’s the males too.
Case in level, the 51-year-old actor Leonardo DiCaprio, who made headlines at this yr’s Academy Awards not for his work, however for his distinctly less-puffy complexion. “He picked the Gua Sha up,” wrote one fan on X. “Finally quit the sauce and discovered water. Also mustache is carrying 40% of this comeback,” said one other, referring to DiCaprio’s new Tom Selleck-style mustache. Within hours, beauty surgeons had been speculating over what he had or not had finished, with the inevitable joke that the baseball cap and facemask he was not too long ago seen sporting in public had been to cover surgical procedure.
While the response to DiCaprio’s “glow-up” has been largely constructive, the response to fellow actor Jim Carrey’s modified look at the César Awards just a few weeks prior was not so variety. The 64-year-old has made a whole profession out of his rubbery facial expressions, so in equity, it was stunning to see how motionless and tight his face now takes care of a number of years out of the highlight. Some on-line even began sharing conspiracy theories that Carrey had despatched a physique double to the ceremony as a substitute of attending himself – a notion additional fueled by celeb impersonator and make-up artist Alexis Stone, who that week shared a photograph of the actor on Instagram captioned: “Alexis Stone as Jim Carrey in Paris.” (Stone didn’t reply to NCS’s request for remark.)
They are hardly the first males in Hollywood to have been the focus of anti-aging beauty tweakment rumors. In January, Bradley Cooper denied he had undergone any cosmetic surgery on the SmartLess podcast, after individuals had approached him on the road asking what he’d had finished. Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling was at the heart of a photoshop hoax that professed to point out that he’d had his cheeks crammed – simply months after he had been deemed “too old” by some on-line critics to play Ken in the Barbie film. Elsewhere, Barry Keoghan’s seemingly plumper lips and cheeks have led many to take a position that he’s had filler. Speaking on the US broadcaster SiriusXM this week, Keoghan mentioned how on-line abuse about his look was affecting his life, to the extent that he does “not want to go outside” anymore.
Some male celebrities have admitted to having “Brotox,” as the process, having grow to be rather more fashionable amongst males, is dubbed. Joe Jonas turned the face of Xeomin, an FDA-approved beauty injectable considered as a substitute for Botox, again in 2022, telling Allure at the time: “Looking your best comes from feeling your best. I make it a point to prioritize practices and routines that make me feel like the best version of myself.” Meanwhile, Robbie Williams, Gordon Ramsay, Gene Simmons, Tom Sandeval and Simon Cowell have all mentioned their use of Botox in the previous.
Outside of Hollywood, extra males have additionally been going below the knife – accounting for six.5% of whole beauty surgical procedure procedures in the UK, in accordance with the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons. And whereas there was a slight total lower in surgical procedures between 2023 and 2024, face and neck lifts surged 26%, “suggesting a growing interest in anti-aging procedures among men,” it mentioned. Meanwhile, in the US males accounted for six% of injectable therapies (which incorporates Botox and Xeomin) final yr, in accordance with the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
So why are we seeing an increase in males searching for anti-aging tweakments now? This is probably going resulting from a mixture of elements, equivalent to the rise of social media, video conferencing (like Zoom), and tv exhibits like “Love Island,” which enforces a “picture-perfect” tradition that has grow to be a significant supply of nervousness, notably for youthful males. At the similar time, there may be now a whole male neighborhood on-line that’s devoted to so-called “looksmaxxing,” whereby they optimize their facial options by doing all the pieces from “mewing” (placing the tongue to the roof of the mouth to form the jawline) to getting hair transplants, cosmetic surgery and even smashing their jaw bones to seem extra outlined.
“Traditionally, men tended to be valued through the kinds of work that they did – the work that they did with their bodies – but more recently, men’s value is being shifted towards the work that they do on their bodies,” mentioned Chris Haywood, reader in vital masculinity research at Newcastle University in England. “Yes, being successful at work is something that continues to be valued, but taking care of themselves, the way they dress, the way they look after their bodies, the ways in which they look, has been of increasing importance.”
The shift, nonetheless, is at odds with the still-dominant expectation that males mustn’t care about their look. Indeed, as Haywood explains, the need to look good is considered as a historically female high quality. “Whilst we see the value being transferred to how men look, the older traditional ways of viewing men don’t disappear, it remains still in focus. So what you tend to find is that with straight men particularly, men are currently walking a little bit of a tightrope,” he mentioned.
Historically, males in Hollywood have been granted much more leniency with regards to visibly aging. George Clooney is well known as a “silver fox.” Harrison Ford is described as “distinguished” wanting. Yet now, the tide seems to be turning, with males more and more being judged with the similar doubled requirements utilized to feminine stars. But is that this essentially an excellent factor? For some specialists, it’s a sign that toxicity round ageing may solely be deepening.
“It shows we have attached moral value to youth, and that we read youthfulness as productivity, desirability, health, and even worthiness,” mentioned Lauren Steckles-Young, a lecturer in social research at the University of Sunderland, in England. “In this, we have seen a blurring between ‘health’ and ‘beauty,’ meaning we assume that if we are attractive, we are healthy, and if we are healthy and attractive, we hold higher moral value. Social media amplifies this by surrounding us with filtered and curated faces that make aging seem like a failure rather than a natural process. Being anti‑aging reflects a culture that struggles to accept imperfection, change, or diversity in appearance.”
Society’s fixation on anti-aging additionally encourages a view that devalues older generations, added Steckles-Young. “When we remove aging faces from public view, we lose a realistic understanding of what it means to grow older,” she mentioned. “It creates a harmful loop in which younger people fear aging, and older people feel pressure to erase themselves.”