The Mystery of Liam Payne’s New Look Isn’t Really a Mystery at All

You know why you’re here. You’re here because you’ve seen Liam Payne’s face on Twitter, and it’s stopped you in your tracks. You were mindlessly scrolling when you saw that red-carpet snap. You saw Liam’s mouth or cheeks or jaw, and you put your phone really near your face and thought, What’s going on here? You’re here because you want to answer the myriad questions his face has raised. You want to de-puzzle his enigmatic features. You want to speculate.

My feed is ablaze with rumination. Is Liam’s (seemingly) new look from filler, maybe? Or too much Botox? Or Botox in the wrong places? Has he got Ozempic face from losing weight too fast? Has he had that hypermasculine jaw surgery that’s sweeping Grindr Manhattan? Has he had his molars removed, destabilizing the foundations of his face? Has the work been too extreme? Has he gone too far too quickly? Or has he simply waited too long to augment? Or…was he just clenching his jaw? Gnashing his teeth? Was it a weird angle? Did he stumble into weird light? Isn’t this how we all look in all the selfies we don’t publish? He just couldn’t control the edit. Wait, wait, wait—was he simply just tired?

As we all pursue the plausible procedures that would lead to that particular pic, I’m still trying to work out how his face is any of our actual business. Like, how have we all become so invested in the maintenance of a boy-bander’s bonce? I keep coming back to the fact that he’s hot and he’s famous and these two things make him fair game.

The question is, why would Liam want to change his face? Time passes and we get older; this is not a revelation. Wear and tear is inevitable, and decay is part of being alive. (I’m not suggesting for a second that 29-year-old Liam is worn and torn.) But we do live in a youth-centric society pirouetting on incarnations of newness—new people, new places, new things. This desire is a driving force in human evolution—we adapt, we adventure, we invent—but there’s a drawback to it too. Deep down, we all fear losing our luster, leading us to want to feel new in some way. This is most quickly fixed by buying new things…. And that’s capitalism, folks. But, joking aside, celebrities are also commodities that we want refreshed, or to remain in stasis while they titillate us with new material—new films, new dresses, new reality TV spats. In Liam’s case: new album, please, but same face, same youthful vitality. We all know female pop stars have been subjected to this standard for decades. We all know that women more generally have been too.

In turn, we’re fascinated with the ways that people, especially famous people, hold onto their youth. We assess the calibrations of their maintenance in order to either mimic or dismiss it—see Gwyneth’s bone broth lunch debacle for more details. And we civilians get a kick out of celebrities getting it wrong; it’s straight-up schadenfreude. Celebrities have so much more than us—money, success, fame, glamour—so we gleefully, shamefully enjoy it when they (it’s Liam Payne this week) seem to squander or mismanage their advantages. It makes us feel better about not having those advantages in the first place. We love to gossip about the hows and wheres when things have gone to extremes, ignoring the fact that it’s our own speculation powering celebrities’ superfluous self-consciousness.

The questioning of Liam’s face isn’t about to stop, in the same way that we’re not going to stop caring about A-list actors’ skin routines or superfoods, or flatteringly cut skirts. The truth about Liam Payne’s face is simple—it reminds us that, regardless of our circumstances, regardless of our genetics, or cash, or access to tweakments, we all move toward older rather than away from it. Weathering time is simply the human condition. The truth about Liam Payne’s face is that we all age in one direction.