One of the main things I get told about my face is that I always look sad, angry, bored, or tired — you get the gist. Once, at my job, I was told by a man that he was going to go to the other till because the girl working it had a prettier smile. Since I can remember, I have been told that my resting bitch face was a problem I needed to fix. So, why is lobotomy chic back in style?
Cristina Yang, from Greys Anatomy, once said “SOMEBODY SEDATE ME”, and I have uttered these wise words many times when life becomes too much. Three essays due in a week? Situationship not texting back? America starting another war? Sedation is the answer! This rhetoric has fuelled the recent re-emergence of ‘lobotomy chic’. Originally popularised in 2022, this aesthetic is characterised by pouty lips, wide eyes, ironic tees, and mini skirts. The patron saint is Fiona Apple, the holy text is The Bell Jar, and the church is an underground jazz bar. It represents the rising trend of detachment, and, as the world grows more unpredictable, dissociation becomes more appetising.
The figurehead of this movement is the photographer Maya Spangler. She views this distant valium induced stare as a response to patriarchal stereotypes, and after being photographed by male photographers, she felt uncomfortable, and was forced to question who these photos were for. This bleakness led to Spangler claiming “I wanted to shoot girls in the sort of way that I wanted to be shot. I felt like nobody could capture me the way that I wanted.”
This proclamation summarises the mindset of this deadpan look, as it subverts the expectations of women needing to be sexy by portraying a dissatisfied and uninterested look, the very look previously looked down upon. However, lobotomy chic has remerged at a time of glamorised mental illness and a fear of feeling.
Something does not feel quite right about trying to look like you had a lobotomy, the procedure that turns your frontal lobe into scrambled eggs. It was a five minute surgery that kept you out of the straight jacket, and in the apron as a housewife. Many patients reported feeling worse off, as they were more “apathetic, slow, knocked-off” according to neurosurgeon Henry Marsh.
Today it has been linked to frail femininity — when you are detached, what goes on in the world does not matter. As Umair Akram, senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Lincoln, explains “The culmination of recent events like the pandemic, and the current state of politics and the economy have left many individuals feeling like they have had enough… the obsession lies under the premise of reduced tension, increased apathy and lethargy, an almost sedated feeling which is easy to romanticise and perhaps crave in current times.”
Sedation is in; showing any emotion other than complete disinterest is out. We have seen the overturning of Roe v Wade, women murdered in Iran, and half the planet ending up in the Epstein files in the space of a couple years. It is no surprise that women feel like they have lost control, and it would be a lot more fun if we were high on valium with a hole in our heads.
As empowered and relieved as I am that my resting bitch face is finally “in,” there’s no hiding the docile, stepford wives-esque origins of lobotomy chic.
Image by Faustian Okeke on Unsplash