My Over-40 Friends Are Obsessed With Wrinkles. Let’s End the Madness.

It's true that I have my own personal wardrobe consultant at Henry Bendel. I do not, however, have my appearance altered surgically. Except every other election year.

My Over-40 Friends Are Obsessed With Wrinkles. Let’s End the Madness.

Wrinkles have disappeared not just from celebrity faces but from many of my 40-something friends. What would happen if we all agreed to put down the Botox?

By Emma Rosenblum. WSJ

May 17, 2026 7:00 pm ET

I have a friend—one measly friend—who’s sworn off Botox. She didn’t want to deal with the upkeep or cost and didn’t care that it meant her forehead wrinkles would return, her muscles unfreezing to their natural, 40-something state.

She still looks great; it’s not that wrinkles look bad. They just look like…wrinkles. “We could all just stop getting Botox,” she semi-joked to me (or maybe it was a hint). “Then we’d be back on a level playing field. We’d look older, but if everyone did, no one would notice.”

I’ve thought of my friend’s words often while watching this season of “Your Friends & Neighbors,” the Apple TV show starring Jon Hamm as a hedge funder-turned-burglar. In the show, Hamm’s ex-wife, played by actress Amanda Peet, is going through perimenopause, a life stage not often depicted on TV, and especially notable in a series that’s mainly about misbehaving men.

The “Friends & Neighbors” story line is more poignant for the fact that Peet looks like an actual, perimenopausal woman, albeit a strikingly beautiful one. She appears free of the extreme cosmetic interventions that have become de rigueur for her contemporaries—and, in the trickle-down sense, mine. Peet has wrinkles on her face, her forehead moves, and when she frowns, she frowns.

Peet recently shared in an interview that she’d been accosted by an older woman in public who made a point of telling her how much she loves her wrinkles.

Off screen, Peet speaks candidly about her choice to forgo Botox and other plastic surgery, and recently shared an encounter she had with an older woman at the premiere for her new movie, “Fantasy Life,” in an interview.

“She made a beeline for me and sort of opened her arms and said, ‘I love…’ And I thought she was going to say, ‘your performance,’ because we were at the premiere party. And instead, she said, ‘I love your wrinkles,’” Peet told NPR’s Fresh Air. “I was like, wow, it’s getting to the point where not taking away wrinkles is as distracting as if I got a weird pull or lift or whatever,” she said.

She has a point. Since 2002, when Botox was approved for cosmetic use, wrinkles have all but disappeared from our screens and social media feeds. Fillers, injectables and face-lifts are now the norm instead of the exception. (Nowadays, spotting an actress who looks her age is as thrilling—and rare—as witnessing a whale cresting in the ocean.)

There are some refreshingly outspoken celebrities bucking the trend. Kate Winslet is particularly eloquent on the subject. “Having a face that moves, all the wrinkles…I want young women to look at my body, my face, and go, oh, that’s a normal one,” she said during an interview last year. The clip was shared endlessly on social media, women seemingly desperate to see a real face on a famous person.

If Kate Winslet’s not embarrassed of her wrinkles, maybe we don’t have to be, either. Or maybe we do. More common are interviews in which a celebrity credits her eerily preserved face to using a red light, or drinking lots of water, or some gobbledygook about how her outlook on aging is more about gratitude than fear.

‘Having a face that moves, all the wrinkles…I want young women to look at my body, my face, and go, oh, that’s a normal one,’ Kate Winslet recently said.

I’m not blaming the actresses. The noise to appear ageless is overwhelming, even for us regular people. I can’t imagine how loud it must be for women whose careers are so public facing. Yes, it’s none of our business what any individual person does to her face. But taken as a whole, the trend has shifted beauty standards enormously, and in a very short time. That’s something we’re allowed to reckon with.

Botox use has surged among all ages, but the greatest growth is among younger women using it for preventive purposes (according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, between 2019 and 2022, Botox use rose 71% in adults between 20 to 29). Women are hoping to stop the aging process before it starts, to live in the land of the young for as long as possible.

Men are also increasingly under pressure to maintain their looks as they get older—1.6 million men received Botox injections in 2024 (though that still only accounts for 15% of total users). But I’d argue that the Bro-tox trend is significantly less prevalent in the real world than in Hollywood. None of my friends’ husbands get Botox. They find youthful vitality elsewhere. They take up padel. They join a middle-aged jam band.

As women, our self-worth is inextricably linked to our appearance. I wish that weren’t the case, but the evidence is solid. The global beauty market is booming, with projected revenues of over $900 billion by 2030. Medical spas offering Botox and filler are popping up on suburban street corners. Tweens are spending their allowance on skin care. I get it. I don’t like seeing my face age, either. In simplest terms, it makes me feel worse about myself. Uglier. Invisible. One of my friends, a longtime Botox user, is considering a face-lift in the next five years. She’s 42. “I’m doing it for myself,” she assured me, explaining that she wanted to like what she saw in the mirror.

I was reminded of the line while watching a recent chat about cosmetic procedures between Drew Barrymore and Lena Dunham, who’s promoting her new memoir, “Famesick.” “The assumption is that if you can afford it, you should do it…People say, ‘I did this for myself,’ but how do we know anymore?” said Dunham.

Here is the hard truth: No matter how smooth your forehead looks, how amazing your deep plane face-lift appears, you will eventually get older and die. Part of Peet’s resistance to the procedures, she explains in the Fresh Air interview, is a superstition that by trying to beat death, she’d actually bring it on.

I was scrolling through Instagram the other day, confronted by ageless celebrity after ageless celebrity, feeling demoralized. As tech titans invest in cryogenic freezing and stem cell therapies to live forever, my peers are manipulating their faces to deny their own mortality.

“I look so old,” I said to no one in particular, not realizing my son was nearby. “You don’t look old, Mommy,” he said. “You just look like you.”

My Botox-less friend is right. We don’t have to keep doing this.

Emma Rosenblum is the author of the novels “Bad Summer People” and “Mean Moms.”