Loosely quoted, Jennifer Aniston once said of her Friends co-star (and subsequent life long bud) Courteney Cox, ‘I’d never seen a more a more perfect face’. Yeah, ok, we know there is no such thing as perfection – but let’s just speak in the shallow terms of society’s narrow and out-of-touch beauty standards of the time – Aniston was right. But the focus on this kind of beauty (one that has no signs of ageing thanks to the one foolproof anti-ager – youth) took its mental toll as the one sure thing to make you age kicked in – time. Recently, Cox spoke out to New Beauty about the pressures to be young, and her mistake to think fillers were the answer.
“I grew up thinking that appearance was the most important thing. That’s kind of sad because it got me in trouble. I was trying so hard to keep up, and I actually made things worse,” she said.
“What would end up happening is that you go to a doctor who would say, “You look great, but what would help is a little injection here or filler there.” So you walk out and you don’t look so bad and you think, no one noticed—it’s good.
“But I’d see pictures and think, ‘Oh, is that what I look like?’ I never thought of myself as being delusional. I think photographs do show up worse, so when people in the world see you and write comments that are usually mean, I think, ‘It can be worse than what it really is.’”
She has since decided to dissolve her fillers and take a more natural approach to ageing and beauty.
“I’m as natural as I can be. I feel better because I look like myself. I think that I now look more like the person that I was. I hope I do. Things are going to change,” she said. “Everything’s going to drop. I was trying to make it not drop, but that made me look fake. You need movement in your face, especially if you have thin skin like I do. Those aren’t wrinkles—they’re smile lines. I’ve had to learn to embrace movement and realize that fillers are not my friend.”