This article contains references to eating disorders.
Welcome to Body Talk, our new monthly column written by journalist, author, and GLAMOUR's Website Director, Ali Pantony. Ali has written extensively about her own journey with body acceptance and eating disorders for GLAMOUR, but still feels there’s so much to be said on this topic. Despite the millions of #bodypositive TikToks, the societal pressures we face as women have never really gone away. In her monthly column, Ali explores the journey to accepting our bodies in a society that has always taught us otherwise.
Before the close of 2022, I hadn’t heard of buccal fat. You probably hadn’t either. But suddenly, buccal fat was everywhere – except in our faces because everyone, including celebrities such as Lea Michele and Chrissy Teigen, was having it removed.
For the blissfully uninitiated, buccal fat is the name given to the pads of fat tucked between the muscles in your cheeks that sit beneath your cheekbones. Those with surplus fat in the buccal region have more rounded faces. Those that have it surgically removed – specifically ‘sucked out’ via an incision in your mouth while you’re still awake, in case you were wondering (apologies if you weren’t) – are promised a more chiselled, sculpted face.
I could make the painfully boring observation that this is ~yet another~ thing for women to agonise over (how we long for the days when that mirror scene in Mean Girls didn’t seem so ludicrous) but truth be told, I’ve always been insecure about my buccal fat. I just didn’t know what it was called.
Choosing to have the fat sucked out of your cheeks is not an inherently empowering decision.
Growing up, I’d obsess over my round face. I’d stand in the mirror and pinch and pull at my cheeks, baulking at the size of the chunk of flesh squeezed between my forefinger and thumb. I’d look at photos from nights out and feel my heart plummet into my stomach when I saw the size of my round face. ‘Note to self,’ I’d think, ‘Don’t smile like such a gormless fuckwit next time, and maybe your face won’t look so fat.’ Cue a tonne of toe-curlingly embarrassing MySpace-style poses, lips pursed into a tight pout, desperately trying to turf out the cheekbones I knew were there somewhere.
As a journalist writing about my – and many women’s – deepest insecurities on a monthly basis, I’m aware that this kind of talk can sound overly maudlin and self-pitying. So, reader, please don’t pity me. Because come 2015, I discovered the antidote to the repulsion of my buccal fat – or, back then, the more euphemistically endearing ‘chubby chipmunk cheeks’. Contour! Glorious contour!
The contouring boom of the mid-2010s helped to quieten the internalised fatphobia of a whole generation of women looking to sculpt their faces, define their jawline, and even disguise a double chin. We thought bronzer was our aesthetician. Benefit Hoola was our scalpel. Millions of us Googled, ‘How to contour like Kim Kardashian’. The beauty industry capitalised on our collective longing to slim our faces and brands churned out new contour kits almost as often as we posted pictures to Instagram using the Clarendon filter.
Applying bronzer under my cheekbones, along my jawline and across my forehead before blending (badly) became part of my everyday makeup routine. Almost 10 years later, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say it still is. Even though I write a column about body acceptance, my internalised fatphobia means that I still try to slim my face with bronzer every day.
Millennials grew up absorbing a societal fear of fat by osmosis. Fast forward to 2024, and ask any member of Gen Z if they contour, and they’ll look at you as though you’ve just said Blank Street Coffee is overrated or that Elon Musk is misunderstood. This fervently progressive generation of teens and twenty-somethings challenge unrealistic beauty standards and embrace their so-called ‘flaws’. TikTokers, quite rightly, post videos mocking how we did our makeup back then, with foundation lips and streaks of tangerine contour. Natural makeup trends reign supreme, and some even serve as an antidote to the inauthentic, artificial contouring of yesteryear. Makeup artist Mary Phillips recently popularised ‘underpainting’, a technique of lightly contouring before applying foundation on top for a more natural look, feeding into the ‘clean girl’ minimal makeup aesthetic preferred by her clients Hailey Bieber and Kendall Jenner (and 200 million people on TikTok).
TikTok content
Of course, it isn’t just millennials who are affected by society’s obsession with thinness. Even the TikTok generation aren’t immune. There are Discover pages full of videos on ‘How to lose face fat’, ‘POV: you finally find out how to get rid of your face fat’, ‘Me: hating my round chubby face’, ‘Getting a leaner face is the fastest and easiest way to get more attractive and confident’. Some of these pages have hundreds of millions of related posts.
So, given our fatphobic culture, is it any wonder a slew of wealthy celebrities with access to the world’s most esteemed cosmetic doctors have chosen to have their buccal fat surgically sucked out? If I’m being totally honest, I’m sure I would be tempted. And I imagine the millions of people consuming ‘how to lose face fat’ content on TikTok would be, too.
Most recently, Sophie Turner denied rumours of buccal fat removal. In an interview with Vogue, the 28-year-old actor shared how the hyper-fixation on her body when she first hit the mainstream – and the cruel comments online if her weight fluctuated even slightly – caused harsh self-criticism. “When you’re bulimic, your face tends to bloat,” she said. “So when I finally did get better in my early 20s, my face went back to normal. Then, suddenly, all the comments were about whether I’d had buccal fat removal or not. You can never win.”
No matter how well I’m doing, even if silent and barely noticeable, it’s always there.
Sialadenosis, or ‘bulimia face’, occurs when the salivary glands become swollen from repeated exposure to stomach acid as a result of purging. The parotid glands – which sit behind our buccal fat pads – swell, causing puffy cheeks. As someone who, like Sophie, had bulimia as a result of poor body image, it makes me sad to think of 21-year-old me, desperately trying to slim down a face which may have been extra-bloated as a result of the eating disorder she was keeping a secret from everyone around her.
After a decade of desperately trying to bronze, buff and blend my buccal fat away, perhaps it’s time I took a leaf out of the Gen Z book of progressive beauty. More importantly, I hope the millions of women and girls consuming content on ‘getting a thinner face’ know that the size of their buccal fat pads doesn’t define them. Just like it doesn’t define me.
For more from GLAMOUR’s Website Director and Body Talk columnist, Ali Pantony, follow her on Instagram @alipantony.
For advice or information on the topics mentioned in this article, contact Beat, the UK’s leading eating disorder charity, on 0808 801 0677.
