Opening Arguments

The authors of “Face It” aren’t the first to note that modern women are in a bind.

In her 1991 book, “The Beauty Myth,” Naomi Wolf argued against the idea — flourishing today — that older female workers “need” plastic surgery to stay employed: “We can better understand how insidious this development is if we try to imagine a racial discrimination suit brought in the face of a powerful technology that processes, with great pain, nonwhite people to look more white. A black employee can now charge, sympathetically, that he doesn’t want to look more white, and should not have to look more white in order to keep his job. We have not yet begun the push toward civil rights for women that will entitle a woman to say that she’d rather look like herself than some ‘beautiful’ young stranger.”

In Nancy Etcoff’s 1999 book, “Survival of the Prettiest,” she explained one reason why an older face looks angry when the person doesn’t feel mad. “The lips get thinner as we age, and the brows lower. Both mimic what we do with our facial muscles when we get angry.”