I’ve been vaguely annoyed with Jia Tolentino for six and a half years, through no fault of her own; it’s just that people credit her with coining the term “Instagram Face” and she didn’t. The New Yorker critic’s December 2019 treatise on the topic, “The Age of Instagram Face,” was preceded by my own for Fashionista in June 2019 (“A Complete Guide to All the Non-Surgical Cosmetic Procedures People Are Getting for ‘Instagram Face’”), Eve Peyser’s for The New York Times in April 2019 (“The Instagram Face-Lift”), and about a year of general beauty industry discourse. Celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith says as much in Tolentino’s opening paragraph: “It’s Instagram Face, duh,” he tells her. Duh, as in, We know this already.
Now she’s back with “Our Plastic-Surgery Nightmare” — or “Instagram Face Part 2: This Time There’s Knives,” as comedian Claire parker put it — and this time, my annoyance is personal. Tolentino quotes me in the piece, then proceeds to either misinterpret my work (if I’m being generous) or mischaracterize it (if I’m not) in ways both bizarre (to me) and embarrassing (for her).
A section on the “grim” state of “the current media environment” in which “critique of anything has become radically attenuated” opens with this:
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