Carey Mulligan slams rise of injectables and hits out at social media

Oscar-nominated star Carey Mulligan pulled no punches when it came to saying who is to blame for the rise of cosmetic surgery and injectables

Carey Mulligan has slammed the rise of cosmetic surgery and injectables, blaming social media for making procedures so accessible and fuelling an unhealthy obsession with our looks. The Oscar-nominated star, 40, warned this week that it’s “harder now than ever” to resist the pressure to alter your appearance because of online content and constant pressure from the beauty industry.

“In the society we live in now, there’s an obsessive level of scrutiny around the things we think we can change because it’s available, because there is an option,” she said. “In times gone by, there wasn’t this option to augment yourself.

“And because you’re also confronted with filtered pictures and face-tuned photos of people, the vast majority of the public look at something and think that it’s just how someone looks – and, of course, it isn’t for the most part. I mean, sometimes it is, but for the most part, it isn’t.”

Speaking on the Skip Intro podcast, the mum-of-three, who is married to Mumford & Sons frontman Marcus Mumford, 39, added: “We have this cycle of being fed the answer – ‘this cream, this injection, this surgery or whatever’ – it’s very hard. Comparison is the thief of joy. You just look at everybody around you and think that you fall short.

“This path of trying to fill that hole by, ‘if I can change my face, if I can make myself look 10 years younger, then I’ll be happy’, is just not true for anybody. It just isn’t.

“Even the people who look amazing and have done [cosmetic] work – and zero judgement – but if they’re happy, it won’t be because of that. It’ll be because there’ll be some other great thing in their life.”

The Great Gatsby star continued: “It’s harder now, probably than ever, because of social media, and because of the beauty industry as a whole. I’ve got no judgement – there isn’t an enormous amount of room for judgement because, particularly in the public eye, you really can’t win. But it does get too much airspace.

“There’s a very funny meme where there’s a Barbie drinking a soda, sitting on the steps, and behind her the whole world is on fire, and she’s just saying, Have you tried microneedling? There’s just too much conversation around it.”

Microneedling is a minimally invasive procedure that uses fine, sterile needles to create tiny punctures in the skin, stimulating a natural healing response that boosts collagen production. Carey, who married Marcus in 2012, shares with him daughter Evelyn, 10, son Wilfred, eight, and a two-year-old daughter, whose name they have not publicly disclosed.

On the podcast, she admitted she became more aware of the cosmetics industry’s growing influence after playing looks-obsessed Lindsay Crane-Martin in Netflix’s Beef series 2, which premiered earlier this month.

“If I was [Lindsay’s] therapist, I’d say there’s a gaping lack of self acceptance,” Carey said. “It has to be, on some level, about a grief about time past – and of fear about the time it’s left. Ultimately, that’s why we must all be so afraid of the idea of ageing. “There was a thing I talked to [Beef director] Sonny about really early on, which was this idea of a period of time passing in an instant, and how scary that is to all of us.

“She has no self-acceptance or identity in her own right, she doesn’t know what she cares about, or wants to be, or doesn’t know that she doesn’t have a place in the world. Her perceived value is her appearance and her allure to a man. “But it can only be about what I see of myself, not about who I am or what I feel. So this enormous amount of effort and anxiety goes into fixing all the things that she sees when she looks in the mirror.”

Carey added: “That was really interesting to me – the panic that ensues that means that every time you look in the mirror, the only thing that you see is all the things that have changed, and the things that are wrong with you.”

In 2018, the Promising Young Woman star revealed she was offered Botox at just 23 years old when she visited a doctor in LA hoping for a cream to treat unwanted wrinkles.

“Someone tried to give me Botox when I was 23,” she said. “I was bothered by the lines under my eyes, and went to see someone, hoping for a cream, but they said, ‘We can just put a bit of Botox in.’ And I replied, ‘My whole job is about me moving my face!'”