Margaret Qualley Is Bringing Back Natural Beauty

This month, we created a viral video titled “The era when no one had the same face.” We gathered clips of early 2000s actresses with their natural noses, lips, and wrinkle-free faces, and it blew up with nearly 20 million views on TikTok. It’s obvious why.

Plastic surgery and injectables have created a generation of young women who look eerily similar to each other – beautiful, yes, but in a way that is so perfect and memetic that it erases individuality.

That’s why Margaret Qualley feels like a breath of fresh air to women like me. Her beauty is striking, but not in a way that feels…LA. She’s one of the few modern actresses who still looks exactly like she did years ago. You still see her mother, the talented Andie MacDowell, in her features. It’s rare to see that in Hollywood, and by just showing up as herself on the big screen, the 30-year-old has become a pushback against the cookie-cutter version of what a "female face" is supposed to look like.

The first time I saw Margaret Qualley was in The Leftovers. She was around 20, and even then I admired her beauty and acting. She was always naturally pretty. A decade later, her face has not gone under the knife (from what I can tell). I’ve yet to see Qualley with overfilled lips or a tiny, trendy Barbie nose you can get for $5k in Turkey.

And when The Substance premiered, close-ups of her face started trending on X (formerly Twitter). Not because she looked IG “flawless,” but because she had a slight gap between her two front teeth. Young women have been so relentlessly bombarded with images of veneers that seeing a natural smile in theater almost felt radical. With everyone sporting the same overly polished veneers – borderline dentures, if I'm being honest – Qualley’s teeth reminded everyone of how much character a natural set can bring to a face.

Yahoo also noted how the aftermath of The Substance carried into her next film, Kinds of Kindness, particularly when it came to her skin. The prosthetics from the former led to year-long breakouts. She could have covered them up, but Qualley embraced them, using the look to her advantage in her films. “And I was like, ‘Oh, this is actually kinda perfect. Like, I’m playing all these different characters,’” she said. “For one of them, we’ll really use all my crazy prosthetic acne.” Qualley did not shy away from her skin texture and, by doing so, added depth to her role.

The “Same Face” Problem

Love Island, Instagram, Influencers, and Hollywood have pushed a singular aesthetic, the kind of face you find on a Bratz doll. Lip flips, fillers, Botox, buccal fat removal, cat-eye lifts, and rhinoplasties have taken over social media platforms. As one Evie writer, Hana Tilksew, wrote in her piece on this topic, “This copy-and-paste appearance has been coined ‘Instagram face,’ not only because it’s found everywhere on the app, but also because social media is what made it so popular in the first place.”

Yes, these “quick fixes” are a byproduct of our era and are a natural trend. However, the rapid cycling of beauty standards – lip fillers one year, buccal fat removal the next – keeps women in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction, fueling a billion-dollar industry that thrives on our self-doubt and insecurities.

This isn’t the first time beauty standards have been dictated by surgical trends and Hollywood, either. Marilyn Monroe quietly altered her nose. Rita Hayworth underwent painful electrolysis to change her hairline. Victoria Beckham and Pamela Anderson defined the ’90s "it girl" with their exaggerated breast augmentations. Both have since removed their implants. Instagram Face is different because it isn’t just for celebrities anymore. Thanks to social media, the pressure to conform to these ever-changing ideals has trickled down to everyday women. Preteens are buying Drunk Elephant moisturizers at Sephora and posting videos about their anti-aging routine. Women are bringing photos of influencers to their surgeon's office as examples of the nose they want.

Aesthetic doctors on my ForYouPage are trying to convince me that I’ll prevent wrinkles if I start Botox in my 20s, while plastic surgeons are giving me the scoop on how the “undetectable” surgery look is in. There’s always something new to “fix,” as observed by how our language undermines the long-term repercussions of such permanent alterations.

“Cosmetic surgery is not 'cosmetic,' and human flesh is not 'plastic,'" as explained by author Naomi Wolf in her book The Beauty Myth. "Even the names trivialize what it is. It's not like ironing wrinkles in fabric, or tuning up a car, or altering outmoded clothes, the current metaphors. Trivialization and infantilization pervade the surgeons' language when they speak to women: 'a nip,' a 'tummy tuck.' ... Surgery changes one forever, the mind as well as the body. If we don't start to speak of it as serious, the millennium of the man-made woman will be upon us, and we will have had no choice."

Margaret Qualley, by contrast, exists outside of this billion-dollar plastic machine. 

Is the “Same Face” Era Ending?

Maybe that’s why Qualley’s face gives me confidence. She's a reminder of how beauty is supposed to be varied, expressive, and human. We don’t have to look AI-generated or airbrushed. Skin texture is normal. Small lips, big lips, small boobs, big boobs, flat nose, big nose – that's all great, it’s what makes us unique. 

The tides may finally be shifting – a little bit, anyway. More women are rethinking excessive enhancements. Many who jumped on the filler train are now dissolving them, including the lip-liner queen Kylie Jenner herself. Yet even tweakments like baby Botox follow a cycle. What happens when the pendulum swings the other way and natural beauty trends again? When Instagram Face becomes as outdated as early 2000s duck nails and circular implants? I have the answer to that: Beauty trends will always come and go, but those who stay true to themselves will outlast whatever the algorithm decides is "in" next.