Allie Rowbottom > Quotes

“Maybe she’s a natural beauty, an untouched beauty. The sales pitch for every powder, cream, procedure. But there’s always a consequence, some side effect that keeps away the promised miracle. Acne from pore-clogging foundation. Asymmetry from filler injected willy-nilly. Body dysmorphia from the asymmetry caused by the filler, which even when dissolved leaves your skin stretched out and floppy. It’s the same with pills: Vicodin cuts the pain, but then you can’t shit;”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I had the privileges attached to health and youth and whiteness. And a wide open something I mistook for beauty. I imagine it now as an invisible mark, an absence where a father went, a fear of who I’d be without a mother. She had always been sick, and even when I pushed her away, even as I tried to be different, I knew to fear her loss. I am responsible; I am not at fault.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Natural is better than prosthetic. Natural is moral. Natural connotes a certain kind of woman, a peaceful wise-woman, a woman like my mother.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I am neither lost nor found, lucky nor cursed, and no fairy Godmother is coming to save me.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Objectifying myself could never make me happy, she said, though she was wrong. Her version of feminism was outdated, too rigid to work in the real, digital world where I was in control of my body, my content, and smart to leverage the short blush of my youth for what was permanent and sure:”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I just want to look like myself, my true self, stripped of time and the violence of past mistakes.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Yes, it outraged me to see how they’d lied. It entranced me, what they truly looked like versus what they shared.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“the more I wondered if image alteration might actually be empowering. For women, so often robbed of agency, was there some freedom in controlling how the world saw our bodies, consumed our bodies?”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Influencers with one hundred thousand followers earned a thousand dollars a post, easy. Two hundred thousand followers equaled paid vacations to five-star resorts. Almost foolish, to want to do anything else.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Today there’s a sort of contentment to invisibility, even if I suspect it won’t last. I suspect I’ll recover, return, and sometimes the wanting will, too: to be beautiful, to be seen, to be loved and never left. Desire like that isn’t a failure, or a girlhood flight of fancy. It’s a fact of every life.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“learned them from YouTube, Instagram, and though my mother said she wanted instruction too, she never stuck with the rituals I prescribed. Contouring and gua sha massage, retinol and ten-step serum routines, all abandoned, as if she thought learning to care for herself would rob her own mom of the chance to rise from the dead and teach her.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Have YOU been looking in the mirror your whole life and deluding yourself? the rest of the sales pitch went. Now, for only five hundred dollars, you can own the one True Mirror™ in which you can gaze and know, finally, how you appear to the world.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.” —Marguerite Duras, The Lover”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I dream, as I often do, of meals I didn’t mean to eat, drugs I didn’t mean to swallow, faceless men I didn’t want to fuck. Even in sleep, I open my mouth, and scream.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I look weird, but not for LA, where cosmetic recovery is a status symbol as much as the work itself. Almost as much as beauty itself.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“They’re cute, but each one needs a tweak to achieve true beauty. Rhinoplasty, I diagnose when I look at one. Brow lift, I silently suggest for another. Buccal fat pad removal.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“It was always about the women, then. Whether or not I was better than them. Sexier, but not sluttier, my wants smaller, my body smaller, though not too small.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“most popular soul belonged to a beautiful girl with a dead father and domineering mom, a girl with a heart-shaped face, a sex tape, reality show, celebrity wedding, and slim, ribless waist, giant ass. When she declared she wanted to be a lawyer, to fight for the rights of the wrongly accused, people said it was impossible. But impossible is what we loved her for, followed and paid her for. It was only when she wanted to be smart, useful, that we wondered if she could.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I believed that Instagram, the filtered aesthetic it popularized—Instagram face, we called it—was true. It was how people had always wanted to look, would always want to look: high cheekbones, cut jaw lines, frozen brows, fish lips and perfect symmetry. I thought that was an everlasting ideal. When after some years, it shifted—girls, women, people, going filterless, makeupless, foregoing injectables, drugs, social media”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“The curse. When my mother was a child, it was used to explain all manner of familial misfortune. Death, alcoholism, wealth and the existential boredom it brought with it. It was, she was told, confined to men and therefore nothing for her to worry about. All she had to do was stay cute, stay pretty, stay silent. Later she understood these admonitions were the curse. The curse wasn’t confined to men; it came from them, from a social structure predicated on their power. The curse was the silence impressed upon her, her mother before her, and countless women before them. The curse was the sickness that silence becomes when swallowed, lumps of unspoken words ticking like bombs. Our task was to reclaim and speak, to take up space with our bodies and our voices. This is how we save ourselves, my mother constantly reminded”
― Allie Rowbottom, JELL-O Girls: A Family History

“They’re considered offensive in Australia,” she said, and I flared inside, like she thought they weren’t offensive here, too. Like she thought her leaving, her political awakening, college education, had made her wise. “I used to only care about animals,” she said. “But then I realized women are endangered too. The world is so fucked.” “Totally,” I said, “the”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I had heard it before. A month before I left for LA, my mother had made an appointment with a new naturopath. “The ache,” she’d said, “it’s deeper lately,” and asked me to drive her. The office was on the seedy side of South Houston, manned by a woman with chin hair, a binder of prescriptive herbs. “You harbor hatred,” she told my mom. “It’s a toxic place to come from.” She suggested tinctures, meditation, a retreat she hosted in a Sedona vortex. Three thousand for the weekend. “Toxicity blocks a body,” she warned. “Tumors, artery clogs. You need to cleanse.” “Three thousand isn’t feasible,” my mother”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“This was every woman’s function: to be the piece that held the family, the culture, the country, together.”
― Allie Rowbottom, JELL-O Girls: A Family History

“Career, money, a blue and black Ferrari, according to Instagram, Dr. Perrault has all that, which for a man, is better than a snatched jawline or a full head of hair.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Get a color all your own,” he’d suggested, neither Kardashian black, nor platinum Playboy blond.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Drugs erase time, age, mistakes; drugs don’t work the way they used to. But they’re better than nothing,”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“I’m old enough to know that this is how true transformation works, in increments so small you don’t notice until one day you wake up and realize you’ve changed.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“was the best, most beautiful, sweet and pretty, astonishing and iconic. A victory, that I could be all these things when my mother could not. And a sign of how clueless she was about where power truly lived.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“Six espresso-brown blow outs, six boob jobs, six Botoxed foreheads. Six bodies, made like mine, only better, more beautiful, beautiful like I knew I’d never be.”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica

“opportunity, a new frontier for entrepreneurial youths like me, youths with initiative. College stifled that sort of thing and I had read online that even rich kids were taking gap years to experience the real world. I had read that student debt was shackling my generation, condemning us to the same hardship”
― Allie Rowbottom, Aesthetica