Last year, Gwyneth Paltrow became the goopy face of Xeomin, an “anti-wrinkle” injectable which works a lot like Botox, but from what I understand, is slightly different than Restylane. Restylane seems to make women that “puffy” and “filler” look, where Botox makes women just look frozen. Judging from Gwyneth’s current face, Xeomin has found a way to decrease the puffiness and the frozen-ness. Gwyneth still looks a bit different and she definitely looks slightly altered, but all in all, it’s good injectable work from where I sit. Gwyneth recently spoke to Harper’s Bazaar about her Xeomin contract, and this is just a piece of spon-con, but it’s interesting to hear Gwyneth talk openly about this stuff, especially considering that so few of her peers do talk about it.

Why celebrity women don’t want to talk about their injectables: “A lot of successful women in Hollywood are motivated early on by not being good enough, and so we’re trying to prove something to ourselves. By getting injectables, it’s like admitting a vulnerability. I think sometimes honesty is perceived to be a weakness…There does seem to be a lot of stigma around injections.”

Xeomin is an FDA-approved anti-wrinkle injection for frown lines between the eyebrows: For Paltrow, a “teeny drop” of the stuff makes her “look less pissed off.”

This isn’t her first time using injectables. “I had a midlife crisis when I turned 40, and I went to go see this doctor. It was a disaster. I didn’t do anything else for a long, long time. I was bruised, my forehead was completely frozen, and I didn’t look like myself at all,” Paltrow admits. She says the switch to Xeomin—and a new doctor—are responsible for her more natural look these days.

She’s fine with talking about it: “I think it’s nice when women share, because there’s a lot of shame around surgery or injectables or fillers, and it would be nice if people felt confident about the choices they were making. But if they want to have a beauty secret, that’s okay, too. I’m an open book—I’ve shared what works for me, because that’s how I’ve always learned.”

Gen Z is partly to thank for the evolving conversations on beauty & alterations: “The younger generation is embracing and deifying women like Jane Fonda and Frances McDormand. They just love cool women, whether they’re older or different to them. They’re so much less judgmental about other women of all shapes and sizes. I observe that with my daughter. They look at the whole woman, instead of some super-airbrushed, FaceTuned Instagram photo. I like the trend I’m seeing.”

[From Harper’s Bazaar]

From where I sit, the Millennials went too far in embracing the Facetuning/air-brushing cartoon-character beauty. As someone slightly older than Millennial, it was disturbing to see how rapidly the culture went from anti-beauty/grunge in the ‘90s to infantilized girl-women in the early ‘00s to the “no imperfections, every woman must be hairless, wear a mound of makeup and airbrush all of her selfies” with the rise of social media. In my heart, I’ll always be the grunge girl who eschews all of that, but that being said, I still love a good night cream and I am increasingly spending more and more on my under-eye cream. I don’t know what point I’m making, I guess that it’s not purely a generational thing and every generation embraces different beauty icons and sometimes those icons are wildly different.

As for the injectables helping her look LESS pissed off… what she’s saying is that she has Resting Bitchface and she gets injectables because she doesn’t want the peasants to know how dismissive she is of them.

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Photos courtesy of Instagram, WENN, Backgrid and Avalon Red.