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    What Happens When Someone You Love Changes Their Face?
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    What Happens When Someone You Love Changes Their Face?


    As face-lifts, GLP-1s and cosmetic procedures go mainstream, a spate of new books, TV shows and movies explore the emotional fallout of transformation.

    Posted by bloomberg

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    16 Comments

    1. bloomberg on

      *Alice Robb for Bloomberg News*

      “When the stranger’s face arrived to occupy my mother’s body, it shocked the language out of me,” recalls Linli, the 26-year-old narrator of Sarah Wang’s debut novel, *New Skin* (May 12, Little, Brown). The stranger was her mother, Fanny, transformed by a face-lift and a nose job. Linli was 8 years old, and she was so disturbed that she regressed: Her grades slipped, and she stopped speaking. “I recoiled when she came near me.”

      A spate of new fiction and TV is making room for an underexplored perspective: that of the families and partners of plastic surgery patients. Parents, lovers, children and friends bristle at seeing their loved ones eliminate familiar quirks — and, with them, evidence of a shared history. In *New Skin*, Fanny’s original face is so bound up with Linli’s earliest, defining memories that she comes to feel that the surgeries have robbed her of her “real mother.”

      In Amy Wang’s 2025 movie *Slanted*, Joan, a Chinese-American high school misfit, spends endless hours on social media, admiring her blond-haired, blue-eyed classmates and filtering her own face through an app called Ethnos. When she’s offered experimental surgery that will make her look White, she doesn’t hesitate (or ask any follow-up questions, like, “Why does this surgery take place in the backyard of a strip mall?”)

      The emotional risks of cosmetic interventions are real. [Read the full review here.](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-22/plastic-surgery-and-glp-1s-are-inspiring-a-new-wave-of-body-horror?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTc3OTQ3MjE3OCwiZXhwIjoxNzgwMDc2OTc4LCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJURkZJODRLR0lGUUkwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiJEMzU0MUJFQjhBQUY0QkUwQkFBOUQzNkI3QjlCRjI4OCJ9.35B0KlJmIym3wrSimw6hzF7QfxEm5xZrHXp8esMabJM)

    2. Diligent_Dig9591 on

      I just got a promotion from my yoga studio that is promoting Botox and a yoga session! I feel so upset by it I don’t even know who to say it to or if I’m being dramatic. It feels so counter productive to the practice of yoga!

    3. Limeade_Espresso on

      > In one study, people who’d had Botox felt less fear than untreated subjects when shown footage of a man eating a sausage containing live worms, and they were less amused by America’s Funniest Home Videos.

      Who the hell designed this experiment?

    4. GusherBrush on

      I think about this a lot, especially in the context of parents changing their faces. What does that say to their children that they don’t like their natural features they passed down?

      No shame, you do you, but…

    5. likelywitch on

      Same thing that happens when they physically or otherwise (their path) don’t “look” like what I thought it was to begin with. I love them as they are and not as my expectations wanted them to be and we move forward. If I can’t do that I give myself a break and move on separately.

    6. hedahedaheda on

      I was always curious about this. I’m not someone who is anti cosmetic surgery by any means. If you’re truly unhappy about something, do what you want, it’s your body. But when I love someone, it’s different. It would hurt me if they felt they weren’t good enough and had to change a part of themselves. Because to me they are perfect. Especially romantically, when you’re suppose to love someone flaws and all. I just cant imagine being happy my perfect person wanted to change their perfect self. Even if they didn’t feel perfect, they are to me. To me that’s love.

      But also have to acknowledge that you want your partner or loved ones to be happy and confident and your love would not be enough if they are that insecure.

    7. zeldas_stylist on

      we need more thoughtful discourse about this topic — especially as this concept of changing your physical features coincides so intensely with the dawn of the AI age. it’s so easy now to change who you are both in person and on the internet (especially if you are wealthy). what happens to our concepts of individuality and identity in a few years? how are the brains of young people changing as we allow this to happen without critique and conversation about it?

      blargh, my thoughts are jumbled but i do think about these topics quite often. i appreciated this article.

    8. expiredfajitas on

      Look @ interaction with Heidi Montag and her mom: devastation and confusion.

    9. mrs_ouchi on

      I mean it must be so weird for yourself aswell? U see your face everyday and suddenly its different. I would be so scared that my brain would react in a bad way and what do you do then?

    10. badgerette86 on

      My mom and I looked so much alike we could unlock each other’s phones…until she got her upper and lower bleph and a full face lift. Does a real number on your own self confidence.

    11. throwassah on

      When I got a small tattoo on my face my grandma freaked out. She grabbed my face and said “Y WOULD U RUIN UR FACE. U LOOKED LIKE A DOLL”. So I can only imagine how jarring it is when it’s actually something drastic that changes

    14. romilliad on

      I had a friendship that fell apart after she got a nose job. I was so supportive of her getting the surgery leading up to it but afterwards it was like we just couldn’t connect with each other anymore. We would start arguments over the pettiest shit. I think she subconsciously associated me with her old “ugly” life before she reinvented herself and resented me for it. She’d make all these pointed comments about me not having a “proper” job/wasting my potential etc. Meanwhile, I began to get more insecure about my looks because I was always wondering if she secretly thought that I needed surgery too (we had the same kind of ethnic nose) and chafed whenever she tried to give me life advice or try to“improve” me.

      Anyway, I’m glad people are talking about this because I’ve always felt guilty about it, wondering if I caused the fallout because I was bitter/jealous of her and in denial about it. Maybe it was fated to end as many young friendships do regardless of surgery but it was a strange and sad experience for me.