A while back I was watching You’ve Got Mail for the first time with a friend of mine. The 1998 romcom is a fascinating time capsule of the era, and not just in its depiction of the burgeoning world of email and mega bookstores, but also in style. Meg Ryan’s Kathleen Kelly sports a very Paige Davis-circa-Trading Spaces haircut (ahead of its time in 1998, really) and has a late ‘90s kitschy-chic apartment that looks like something I would have created in The Sims. The movie is useful as a depiction of mainstream beauty standards of the era as well, as many characters remark on how gorgeous Kathleen Kelly is. While it’s not strange for movie characters to view the romantic lead as beautiful, my first thought upon hearing the other characters constantly praise her looks was, “Really? Her?”
Now, obviously Meg Ryan is perfectly conventionally attractive, which mostly goes without saying if you’re a hugely succesful movie star. I mean this with no shade to her or her looks. But looking at You’ve Got Mail through the lens of 2023, it was jarring to hear the other characters describe her as strikingly beautiful. Ryan is thin, but she doesn’t have the muscle tone of a professional athlete coupled with the full breasts of a Victoria’s Secret model that we would expect now of such a description. She has proportional features but she doesn’t have incongrouly full lips or Disney princess eyes. Ryan was 38 when You’ve Got Mail hit theaters, and looks every bit the adult woman. She is a white woman who looks like a white woman, not a white woman attempting to coopt a vaguely “ethnic” beauty with a fake tan. And by today’s standards, that’s not enough to be a female romantic lead, let alone a bonafide movie star.
In the contemporary mainstream movie landscape, female leads are expected to be stunningly beautiful, perfectly made up at all times, preferably perpetually youthful, and yet their movie star beauty is rarely remarked upon because it is taken as a given. You can see this in much of the Judd Apatow catalog, or even in more traditional prestige films like Silver Linings Playbook (an alternative to this is Diablo Cody’s Young Adult, in which the fact that Charlize Theron looks like Charlize Theron is crucial to her character’s delusion and sense of entitlement).
I was thinking of this more recently while watching the latest season of Love Is Blind (spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen season six). Good reality TV is often a useful distillation of contemporary culture, and this season of Love Is Blind is no exception — the dynamics of heterosexual dating, racial politics, birth control expectations, it has it all. And given the concept of the show (prospective straight singles date each other behind closed doors and only see each other after proposing marriage), it’s also particularly fraught with beauty politics.
In a moment that was slightly against the spirit of the show, Chelsea, one of the contestants, asked her date Jimmy if he has any celebrity doppelgangers; he asked her the same in turn and she said that she is told she looks like Megan Fox, though she insisted it’s only because she has light eyes and dark hair. Jimmy’s eyes light up, he eventually chooses Chelsea to propose to over another girl in the pods, Jessica, who taunts him over how beautiful she is after he rejects her. When he finally meets Chelsea in person, he is visibly less than thrilled that she doesn’t look exactly like the Megan Fox-twin he perhaps imagined.
Like everyone cast on Love is Blind, Chelsea is conventionally attractive, probably moreso than anyone Jimmy would meet in real life. But whether or not she can call herself Megan Fox-adjacent or whether or not Jimmy was right to be disappointed has inspired plenty of online debate. I’m not going to litigate whether or not Chelsea actually looks like Megan Fox — it’s beside the point, and impossible to judge as Megan Fox doesn’t even look like Megan Fox anyore — but it is illustrative of the high beauty standards women are expected to fulfill in 2024. Standards which are much higher for even “regular” people than they were for movie stars back in 1998.
What’s changed between now and 1998 is that beauty, or at least a certain type of it, has become more accessible. Botox only received FDA approval for cosmetic use in 2002, and hyaluronic acid fillers like Restylane and Juvederm followed. And in the decades since, their usage has become inceasingly commonplace, particularly in the wake of Covid-19 — according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, procedures for neuromodulator injections like Botox rose 73 percent from 2019 to 2022, while hyaluronic acid filler usage rose 70 percent in the same period. And it’s not just non-invasive procedures getting a boost. Breast lift procedures rose 30 percent from 2019 to 2022 while eyelid surgery procedures increased 13 percent.
Being beautiful is easier than ever, no longer just the domain of movie stars but also regular people and reality TV stars and influencers — the latter two being the middle ground between movie stars and regular people. Some Love Is Blind cast members, like Sarah Ann, openly talk about getting lip fillers, as such work is no longer taboo. But if regular people can achieve beauty through lip fillers or breast augmentation, then the standards for movie stars need to be even higher, making Meg Ryan’s approachable beauty a rarity on today’s screens. And yes, men have gotten more beautiful too albeit not at quite the same rate (just watch contemporary viewers’ reactions to the men of Sex and the City — they were believably normal and thus kinda ugly!).
This explosion of one very narrow type of beauty on screen — usually the pillow-lipped, chiseled-cheek visage known as Instagram Face — has in turn made that type of beauty less special. And perhaps to some, less appealing. It opens up a theory I’ve see on TikTok that trends will go in the opposite direction, making an “ugly” or unaugmented face more fashionable than a conventionally beautiful, augmented face.
It’s an interesting idea though I’m not sure in practice how far it could go. Would it be cool to be “ugly” if you’re not also thin? Or white? Or able-bodied? Likely not. But I don’t think this prediction for ugliness to come into fashion is so much about a rejection of beauty standards as it is a desire for something more interesting, more personal. Beauty standards like a lip lift have become like an oversaturated handbag, signifying that the wearer has money though perhaps a lack of personal taste.
Will we see someone like Meg Ryan back on the big screen, or even on reality TV? I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s likely. At least not in the glossy Nick and Vanessa Lachey empire of Love Is Blind or the big ticket rom com. We’ve been trained to expect something different there, such that it is reasonable to believe you’ll find a Megan Fox-clone on the other side of your dating pod. Of course there are still many people who have never opted into the Instagram face aesthetic — only for that you might have to go out into the real world.