By sTACY LEE KONG

Before we begin, a quick update about Friday Things! I kind of alluded to this before and… um, have not written a newsletter for two months, so it might not be surprising to hear that I’ve been struggling to find a balance between new professional obligations and writing the newsletter every week. When I started Friday Things in 2020, I was a full-time freelancer and wanted it to grow into the type of lifestyle media outlet where I’d spent most of my career. So, over the past four years, I’ve treated it like a professional pursuit—a company I can build into something bigger, and that I need to support with a business plan and marketing strategy. But as we head into 2025 and this newsletter’s fifth year, I think I would actually like Friday Things to be more about personal fulfillment. So, I’m going to be changing a few things going forward. Namely: I’m going to be focusing mostly on the weekly newsletter, plus a few bigger projects (including the video series). I’ll be mixing up the format of the newsletter so that I’m writing more than just essays, and will be doing much less social and web-only content. I’m also going to wind down the paid bi-weeky Q&As I’ve been publishing for the past little while; instead, starting in January, the And Did You Hear About recommendations at the bottom of each newsletter will be earmarked as premium content. (Relatedly, if you’d like to support the work I do with Friday Things—and keep getting those curated recommendations—I’m running a 25% off sale until Jan. 10.) All of which is to say, I’ve loved writing Friday Things and, more importantly, getting to talk to you about pop culture stories and why they matter, so thank you for being part of this community! I’m excited to keep the conversation going.

And now… onto the conversation. Specifically, the one about Lindsay Lohan’s new face. Or, actually, about the thing I’m always more interested in: how the people are talking about Lindsay Lohan’s new face.

ICYMI, we’re deep into the Lohanaissance. Two decades after the “bubblegum misogyny” that characterized 2000s media and pop culture, which simultaneously sexualized a teenaged Lohan and criticized her for being ‘troubled,’ the once-beleaguered Hollywood starlet is back on our screens, and millennials everywhere are thrilled. We saw the first inklings of this cultural reset in 2021, when Netflix announced she would be starring in a new rom-com for the streaming platform. Since then, she’s gotten married, had a baby, appeared in a Super Bowl commercial, landed magazine covers, filmed Freaky Friday 2 and starred in two more Netflix rom-coms, including this year’s Our Little Secret. And with each new success, people have been so genuinely happy for her. This is almost certainly related to the recent cultural reckoning focused on how we treated young women in the ‘90s and 2000s, and in general, I think it’s exactly how we should be reacting to any positive Lohan news. Except. Recently, she debuted a new look (er, new face), and amid all the speculation about what surgical procedures she had done to make her look like a ‘better’ version of her younger self, there has been a vocal minority of social media posters who insist she hasn’t done any plastic surgery, and that her dramatically younger look is due to clean living, becoming a mother and being in love. And that idea—that her beauty is due to some kind of biological advantage—is troubling, and perhaps worth pushing back on!

First of all, yes—there is something uncomfortable about spending so much time analyzing another woman’s face

I should acknowledge that any conversation about a public figure’s appearance is going to be, well, complicated. Back in 2020, I wrote a newsletter about Adele’s then-recent weight loss and whether it was fatphobic to notice that her body looked different in a new photo she posted to Instagram. As I said at the time, the fact that her IG photo sparked such intense news coverage, much of it celebrating her weight loss, was “proof that we live in a world where the size and shape of our bodies matter. Automatically assuming weight loss is good news, or something to be praised or celebrated, is inherently fatphobic. That’s just logical. If you believe losing weight is always positive, then weighing more has to be negative… That’s why, in an ideal world, the right way to talk about Adele’s weight loss would be to not talk about Adele’s weight loss. Like, at all. [Still,] the idea of not acknowledging a change that we can all see is… weird.”

I have similarly contradictory feelings here; while I tend to think the changes women (or anyone) make to their bodies are their own business, it’s still hard not to assign meaning to these aesthetic choices, and even harder to avoid speculating about the hows and whys of their new looks. People (I) am nosy! But human curiosity aside, I also think the fact that a celebrity invested time and money into looking a particular way should raise some questions about how our society glorifies youth, especially for women, what ‘natural’ beauty even means, how our idea of beauty shifts according to social, cultural, political and economic factors, and the potential repercussions of this new era we’re entering where plastic surgery can be “undetectable.”

In the case of Lohan, red carpet photos from the Our Little Secret premiere went viral last week after the entire internet started speculating about what she’d done to her face (complimentary). Amid all the discourse, her dad spoke out, claiming her glow-up could be credited to fillers, peels and Botox, but that she’s never gone under the knife. And to be fair, some plastic surgeons agree. But others think she’s spent somewhere in the range of $300,000 on procedures, including a “baby face-lift.” (This is just a regular face-lift with smaller incisions, btw, which means there’s less scarring.) What’s more, this type of plastic surgery is the new trend; as USA Today explained in October, when new photos of Christina Aguilera sparked a similar discourse about her new face, plastic surgeons are seeing a shift away from wanting a specific (dare I say Kardashian-adjacent) look, toward a more natural one. The goal is for the work to be so subtle it can be explained away as the result of drinking more water, losing weight and maaaaaybe doing some intense, but not invasive, skincare. But it’s not, and I think it would be silly to pretend that won’t impact the way us non-celebrities think about our own appearances and what we can reasonably aspire to look like.

Also? This is a failure of critical thinking! Comments about Lohan’s natural beauty or how her new lifestyle is obviously the only reason she looks so rested and youthful remind me of nothing so much as Nara Smith’s comment section, which remains full of women gushing over how amazing and beautiful her life is. In both these cases, audiences are not only opting to believe something that strains credibility, they’re literally aspiring to live that life, or have that face, even though this a) is a fantasy that b) requires massive amounts of capital to achieve.

Biological advantage and physical perfection are key hallmarks of fascist aesthetics

But this conversation is also a really great example of how beauty ideals and aesthetic trends reflect political movements. Right now, fascism—an authoritarian, right-wing political ideology characterized by nationalism and militarism—is growing in popularity in Canada, the U.S. and around the world, and as that happens, we are seeing corresponding shifts in what we are socially conditioned to consider beautiful. Fascism prioritizes youth, discipline, physically strong and slender bodies and virility. It’s also a racist ideology that sees non-whiteness as a mark of intellectual, physical and moral inferiority. As Susan Sontag argues in “Fascinating Fascism,” a 1975 article published in The New York Review of Books that analyzes the aesthetics of fascism, “fascist art displays a utopian aesthetics—that of physical perfection. Painters and sculptors under the Nazis often depicted the nude, but they were forbidden to show any bodily imperfections. Their nudes look like pictures in male health magazines: pinups which are both sanctimoniously asexual and (in a technical sense) pornographic, for they have the perfection of a fantasy.”

I feel like we’ve been talking a lot about the return to the bad old days of ‘90s beauty ideals, particularly around thinness. But what if this is not (or not just) the natural outcome of our nostalgic desire to mine the ‘90s for aesthetic inspiration, and instead reflects where we’re going politically? Because when you look at what fascism espouses, it suddenly makes a lot of sense that plastic surgeons are reporting their patients want a more subtle and athletic look, which the Hollywood Reporter has dubbed the “de-Kardashian-ification of America.” (Remember when I wrote about Kim Kardashian’s slow move away from performing Blackness?) If fascism is about valorizing moral “hardness” and rejecting hedonism and decadence, doesn’t it make total sense that the beauty standard of this era is thin, constrained, minimal, white, blonde, etc.?

I also keep thinking about that rhetorical insistence that Lohan’s look is an example of “natural” beauty.  Last summer, fashion critic Rian Phin commented on an article about the decreasing popularity of foundation, which the writer hypothesized was ushering in a new age of self-acceptance, to posit another theory. The reason for this consumer shift wasn’t actually about loving yourself as you are, Phin argued. It was that “beauty shifted to being about the semblance of biological advantage rather than skill. we see this transition through the shift toward skincare, surgery / injectables, lash extensions… ever since then i knew we’d have more and more minimalist makeup because it implies inherent genetic advantage: naturally good skin, long lashes, full lips, even if untrue.” That also feels kind of fashy, doesn’t it? Like, sure the ideology allows for excellence through hard work, as long as it builds on a baseline of genetic superiority. (Also, Lohan is wearing so much makeup in every photo I’ve seen of her, which is great! I love makeup! But that is not what natural beauty implies, lol.)

This also brings to mind all the TikToks on my fyp that show young women performing their high-maintenance night-time routines for the camera, which they explicitly say are intended to allow them to appear low-maintenance the next day. So: they’re doing overnight masks, mouth-taping, lip stains, sock curls, tooth-whitening strips, lash serums, etc. so they don’t need a lot of makeup.

This is not to say that there’s a causal relationship here. These women aren’t doing anything wrong, and neither is Lohan. I’m just thinking about the why of this discourse, and trying to emphasize that aesthetic trends and evolutions should be parsed in the context of what else is happening in the world, and the messages we’re being fed about beauty, appearance, femininity, goodness, etc.

Circling back to Lilo. When her dad was defending her from allegations of plastic surgery, he “gushed” (Page Six’s word, not mine) that “her look [is] so natural—just like her talent,” before going on to say that he thinks it’s “disgusting” for people to “propagate false narratives” about celebrity plastic surgery. Which… is a little on the nose, but kind of proves my point, no?

And Did You Hear About…

This extensive explainer on the JonBenét Ramsey case, and why Netflix’s new documentary is leading viewers astray.

Dr. Ally Louks’ PhD thesis on olfactory oppression in modern and contemporary literature, which set the internet ablaze this week after right-wing bros took offense to her… um, earning a PhD? Her research is fascinating, though, especially if you understand how the prospect of smelling bad has been weaponized against racialized and otherwise marginalized people from time. (As a non-academic, I also found this close read of her abstract helpful.)

This thoughtful reported feature about why gamers don’t chat anymore.

This essay from last December about the aesthetics of surveillance, which feels very relevant considering Jack Harlow’s most recent music video, which evokes the aesthetic of Ring doorbell cameras.

The kid who got naming rights for her family’s farm animals for one year. (Adorable!)

My favourite gift guides of the season: Helen Rosner’s food-centric gift guide, RepresentASIAN Project’s annual Asian-owned gift guide, Lizzie Logan’s gift guide of “stuff people might actually like,” The T-Zone’s beauty-focused gift guide and Goop’s 2024 gift guide, which apparently includes 12 different vibrators? (I don’t know for sure because I refuse to fact-check it.) Also, Anne Helen Petersen’s theory of the modern gift guide is v. good. Also, also, I know I’m late, but fair warning: next week’s newsletter might just be my pop culture gift guide because I’ve bookmarked some fun things this year.

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