Are Aesthetic Treatments Really Making Everyone Look the Same?

Scroll for long enough and you'll find it: the boycott. Boycott the needle. Boycott filler. A steady stream of videos and threads mourning the fact that everyone, suddenly, looks the same. The same lips. The same cheekbones. The same brow, lifted to the same height, arched at the same angle. The phrase that keeps coming up is 'copy-and-paste face', and it's not wrong. Walk through any city on a Saturday night and you'll see it.

But here's the question nobody seems to be asking. Is it really the tweaks?

We don't think so. Good aesthetic work shouldn't make anyone look like anyone else. The sameness is coming from somewhere much bigger than a treatment room.

The algorithm in the mirror: looks-maxing and AI face analysis

We'd argue it goes a little deeper than a syringe.

There's a word for it now - 'looks-maxing' - and it's spread well beyond the corners of the internet where it started. Upload a selfie to an AI tool and it'll hand you back a to-do list for your face. Your jawline, your eye shape, your skin. Then it keeps going: the haircut that suits your face shape, the shade of blonde that suits your skin tone, the make-up that 'corrects' whatever it's flagged.

The trouble with a single definition of perfect is that there's only one of it. If everyone feeds their face into the same machine, and the machine is measuring everyone against the same template, we shouldn't be surprised when everyone comes out the other end looking like a close relative.

It's worth asking what, exactly, it's comparing you to. Somewhere along the line, someone decided what the ideal face looks like and taught the machine to measure against it. Your face isn't being judged on its own terms; it's being graded against someone else's.

The carousel wardrobe: why everyone dresses the same

Look at what people are wearing. Everyone really does look the same, and, to be fair, more put together than ever. That's because you can now swipe through a carousel that tells you exactly what to wear, which bag goes with it, which earrings finish it off and where to buy the lot. Some will even recommend which books to carry, so your reading matches your aesthetic.

There are instruction manuals for how to style a pair of jeans. The answer, usually, is with a jumper. Or a shirt. Or a T-shirt. Could we not have got there ourselves? And put a little more of ourselves into it while we were at it?

Because the beauty is in getting it a little bit off. That's what personality is. Compare 'I'm wearing this because it's my favourite top. I found it at a vintage market, it's a bit scruffy now, but that was the best day out with my friend' with 'Instagram said it belonged in my capsule wardrobe, so I ordered it from ASOS.' One of those is a story. The other is a receipt.

And it doesn't stop at clothes. The same three haircuts. The same milky nail. The same laminated eyebrows. The same matching gym set in the same muted sage. Nobody needed a needle to make any of that happen.

Glass skin, and freckles in a bottle: the problem with perfect skin

Then there's skin. The fixation on glass skin with tone and texture so even it looks airbrushed. It's become its own kind of uniform. And yes, if you have the money, the technology exists to get closer to it than ever before. But when did normal skin become one more thing to fix? Pores are not a flaw. Neither is texture. Most skin, on most days, has a bit of both.

What we find quietly funny is the loop it's created. First we're sold the treatments and serums to erase every trace of pigmentation. Then, once the skin is perfectly blank, we're sold freckles in a bottle to put some back. Faux-freckle pens and tints have become a category of their own, and it's not hard to see why: flawless, poreless, texture-free skin is, after a while, a bit boring to look at.

So here's a thought. Why not keep your own bits in the first place, rather than paying to remove them and paying again to draw them back on?

So, is it the tweaks? What good aesthetic work looks like

This is how everyone starts to look the same: not through one treatment, but through a thousand small instructions from a thousand screens, all pointing at the same face.

Softening your crow's feet or your frown lines shouldn't make you look like anyone else. Neither should replacing lost volume. Refilling your tear troughs for example should always be undetectable. It simply stops making you look like you never sleep. A frozen forehead is certainly a look, but it isn't one we'd ever recommend. Good aesthetic work goes unnoticed. You should absolutely still look like yourself - just a little fresher, better rested, the version of you on a good day. And nobody should be able to say why.

The faces that make you think 'that's too much', the copy and paste lips, the frozen expression, those are choices. Sometimes it's what the client asked for; sometimes it's a practitioner who wasn't aiming for natural. A good one will tell you when to stop

Aesthetics is an art, and not all artists are created equal.

Dr Mike • Eighteen years of practice

Keep the bits that are yours

None of this means you shouldn't care how you look, or that a little help is a betrayal of anything. It means the goal was never to look like the template. It was to look like you, at your best.

At Astral, our clinic in East London, that's the whole brief. Dr Mike has spent eighteen years learning when to stop, and most of what we do is the work no one can spot. The right amount, never more. Keep the scruffy vintage top. Keep the freckles you were born with. And if someone tells you that you look well, but can't quite put their finger on why, our work here is done.