Saturn in Aries & Copy-paste Face
While the trend has been ramping up for years now, over the past few months I’ve encountered increasingly more public discourse on the rise of the “copy-paste face.” Essentially, the advancement of cosmetic surgery procedures has gotten so refined that it can go undetected, but most celebrities – especially women in their 30s and 40s – are opting for the same facial features; more importantly, they’re trying to freeze their faces in time, to get ahead of the beauty trend curve and the biological curve at the same time. It has struck me that the increasing homogeneity of facial features, even among a class of people who are already pre-selected in large part due to their natural adherence to conventional beauty standards, might have to do with Saturn’s transit through Aries. Previously, the trend was filler and Botox, which to me speaks to Saturn in Pisces, a water sign. We went from fullness (Pisces is ruled by Jupiter, planet of expansion and excess) and an almost-bloated (Pisces is also a water sign) look, to buccal fat removals and rhinoplasties that are meant to look “authentic” (Aries).
What made me think this? Being that Saturn is the outermost visible planet in the solar system and thus represents boundaries and limitations, it symbolically speaks to the elements of life that constrain us – such as time. In Latin, Saturn was also nicknamed “Falcifer,” translating to “scythe-bearer.” Among other things, it can represent aging and death. And so, with Saturn in the sign of its fall, Aries, there is a greater sense of urgency to beat the clock, to defy time itself, acquire status or wisdom without taking the neat and ordered steps in order to achieve those states. Saturn is concerned with conserving. During the seasons ruled by Saturn – Capricorn and Aquarius – we are entering the dead of winter. We have very limited heat and light; the animals have gone south for the winter or are in hibernation; the plants have died. We can only subsist on what we have preserved from earlier months. In our lack, we turn to what remains of the past and try to make it stretch for a long period of time. We have to be cautious and take greater care – which is the same way we, in a natural progression of time, would have to treat our bodies. Less zeal, more care. More rest. More recovery.
Meanwhile, Aries is a sign associated with youth, being the first sign of the zodiacal calendar. Youth holds within it a high amount of energy – think of the pure force it takes for buds to burst through the ground and make their way out into the world at the beginning of Spring. It requires head-first vision. It is, in some ways, violent and difficult; it requires severing, breaking, bursting. I associate those three words with plant life in the spring as well as looksmaxxing, if you’re getting where I’m going with this.
And so, when this planet enters into a sign that is so full of youth and life, we get the potential for an obsession with preserving youth. It doesn’t matter that Anne Hathaway is still young enough to be pregnant and having more children – she still “needs” (in Hollywood, or in the prison of her mind, whatever) to preserve this youth while she has it. Getting work done when you’re old and want to look younger isn’t enough. With Saturn in Aries, we are watching the wealthy jump to the act of preservation while they are still in a time of abundance. They are using the martial tools of Aries – in this case, the severing surgical tools – to accomplish the task of Saturn – preservation.
Of course, this is somewhat a perversion of Saturn’s task, and that is because Saturn’s aims are at odds with the nature of Aries. This is because Saturn is exalted in, or particularly well-suited to, the sign opposite of Aries – Libra. Libra is an air sign and ruled by Venus. This means that Libra creates harmony and cohesion through social norms. While Venus is associated with beauty, in the sign of Libra capital-B Beauty is more theoretical and socially constructed, as opposed to the embodied and sensual Beauty that we find in Venus’s other sign, Taurus. It makes sense, then, that when Saturn is in the sign opposite the place where it thrives through creating constraints and norms through which we come to recognize what is beautiful or harmonious, we see people thrusting the creation and maintenance of beauty standards into the hands of the highest-paid surgeons rather than developing their own sense of what it means to be refined or attractive, and with little concern for the impact it might have on culture at large (or the little girls watching at home, just sayin’).
Another reason I feel that the current cosmetic surgery trends are a reflection of Saturn in Aries is because a lot of the specific procedures, like buccal fat removal, actually stray from what is biologically youthful. “Baby fat” got its name for a reason; extra skin around the cheeks, softness around the eyes, these are a result of cells that eventually stop regenerating. Because Saturn is in the sign of its fall, it makes sense to me that there would be a kind of irony or paradoxical nature in how we try to chase the beauty we associate with youth – by actually making ourselves more gaunt and hollow.
Another note: Saturn is also concerned with humility and service. Saturn is at home in the sign furthest from the Sun’s home – in Aquarius – and in many ways can be antithetical to what the Sun is all about. Saturn does not need individual attention, does not need to shine. It knows that posterity requires collective action and that contributing to a larger network is ultimately what keeps the world turning – not a singular hero in a cape or the king on his throne, but the many civilians who show up to work day after day, sharing resources and labor and knowledge. But in a sign where the Sun is exalted (Aries), Saturn’s modus operandi gets confused. Aries wants to stand out, to lead, to trailblaze. Insert the copy-paste face – those who are thinning their noses, lifting their eyebrows, and widening their smile are able to at once set themselves apart from the lower classes of people who cannot afford these precise procedures while still remaining part of the pack. They are selfishly (Aries) self-mutilating (Saturn), allowing them at once to elevate their status (Aries) without concern for the damage it’s doing to the collective psyche.
It’s particularly interesting that this iteration of Saturn in Aries is co-present with Neptune, which is why I think this manifestation of the planet-sign combo – if it can be chalked up to this transit – is showing up so prevalently with celebrities and centered around beauty standards. Neptune rules mystery and idealization, so it would make sense that we are seeing people attempt to freeze an idealized form of youth and in time. But with Neptune’s illusions and fantasy usually comes a moment of truth, and I can imagine that at some point – maybe when Saturn departs from Aries – this moment of reckoning with the consequences of all this plastic will come. Will all of these procedures just lead to eventual premature aging?
But the thing about Saturn in Aries is that while it can make you panic about the passage of time and make rash decisions to try to fight against the limitations that time presents you, it also offers us the opportunity to think about Saturnian themes from a new perspective, one where we aren’t simply respecting traditions or structures or hierarchies for their own sake. It asks us to question what it is about those traditions or norms that we actually value, and what we don’t. So while the wealthy are busy smashing their faces in so that they can distinguish themselves from the plebs at home, it’s also possible for us plebs to defy their normalization of Alien Face altogether. Whatever is institutionally sanctioned, culturally normalized, upheld as the standard, can all be f*cked with during this time. Get a weird tattoo. Wear bright lipstick to highlight your asymmetrical lips. Stop looking at Instagram, which is filled with images of people with rearranged faces, and go look at your friends’ faces, which are textured and gorgeous and full of life.
Sources:
Comments