Aesthetics

Zombie fillers: the super-rich are plumping themselves up with dead people’s fat

A few years back, I lost a significant amount of weight. It came off entirely by accident following a major unforeseen life crisis that resulted in a prolonged reduction of appetite. Almost overnight I went from being a healthy average-sized middle-aged woman to a thin one. Everyone was very complimentary, of course. But this was in 2022, back when shedding weight still seemed like an accomplishment and evidence of restraint rather than something to be bought and administered via needle and private prescription. I waited for my dress size to rebound to an eight from a four as it had in the past but this time round, for whatever reason, it did not.

zombie fillers

The terrible logic of looksmaxxing

For years, I’ve had a fantasy of destroying my own life by following every piece of extreme self-improvement advice the internet offers. Not the wholesome stuff. I mean the industrial-strength protocols: starvation diets, rhinoplasty, Invisalign followed by double-jaw surgery, chemical peels that promise an entirely new layer of skin. Whatever surfaces in the algorithmic swamp. The appeal is the same as another, more respectable fantasy: the one where a doctor scans your chart, finds The Problem and hands you a pill. You swallow it and everything clicks. Your suffering had a single, nameable, diagnosable cause. The cure might give you rashes or IBS, but who cares? You finally know what’s wrong, and what’s wrong can be treated. The uncertainty is over.

looksmaxxing