I Feel Sad About Anne Hathaway's Eyebrows

Farewell to a parasocial friendship.

May 17, 2025

My parasocial relationship with Anne Hathaway started somewhere around 2004. Back then, I was an editorial assistant at Random House. One of the other editorial assistants, a girl from Long Island, asked me if people ever told me that I looked like Anne Hathaway.

“I went to high school with her,” she said, “and you really remind me of her.”

“Really?” I asked. “I always thought she was kind of annoying.”

“She is.” She stared at me pointedly.

Random House was a viper pit.

My mother came to visit me in New York that year. There was a film poster for The Princess Diaries 2 hanging in the subway tunnel. My mother stood contemplating it as we waited for the train.

“I’ve always thought you look like her,” she said. My mother stared a little longer at Anne’s face. “She’s past her prime. You can tell she bloomed early and she’s already fading.”

Anne and I were both 21 then. I was born in August 1982, while Anne was born in October. My mother is a viper pit. I stopped returning her calls later that year.

Comparisons to Anne continued. A grad school friend apologized before telling me I reminded him of her. “It’s just, I know some people find her annoying,” he said.

My manager at my first post-grad job told me one morning, “I was watching Brokeback Mountain last night, and it was so odd, Anne Hathaway’s mannerisms are so like yours, it felt like I was watching you.” (Considering some of the scenes Anne has in that film, that was awkward.)

Given that people like my mother were already criticizing Anne Hathaway for showing her age when she was barely old enough to legally drink, I guess it’s not a surprise that Anne debuted a revised face recently. I am not an expert on celebrity plastic surgery and spend no time speculating about it and usually have no feelings about it. People who do generally speculate about these things suspect that she had a “ponytail facelift.” All I know is that she had perfectly nice eyebrows before, and her eyes had a characteristic droop at the outer corners. Now, if you look at the Met Gala red carpet photos of her, her previously horizontal eyebrows have a distinct arch, and she looks perpetually surprised and painfully stretched. Sigh.

Every time I see a photo in my feed of Anne Hathaway with this newly surprised face, I feel sad. Up until recently, it felt like we were on oddly parallel trajectories. We got married around the same time. We had babies around the same time. I was comforted when she defended the concept of not losing the baby weight in this Instagram post. We both love a Coastal Grandmother aesthetic. The Architectural Digest photos of her house are refreshingly unpretentious, and look cozy and welcoming, a house I would totally want to live in.

But then somewhere between that body positive baby weight post in 2016 and now, our paths diverged. By 2022, Anne had become skeletally thin for her role in WeCrashed, with visible ribs peeking out from her Versace dress at the premiere. She talked publicly about the extreme raw vegan diet she adopted to prepare for the role. I started to worry about her clinically as an eating disorder therapist.

I still vaguely hoped she just lost the weight for that role, like she did for Les Mis, and might start eating again and regain some of the softness she previously had. Instead, she was possibly even thinner in The Idea of You. While I was getting older and fatter like an ordinary mortal, Anne rebranded herself as a sex symbol in a film about being hot enough to date much younger men. (Anne Helen Petersen unpacked that rebrand here.) It has been a couple of years since anyone said that I remind them of her.

When Anne arrived at the Met Gala with her new face, it felt like the culmination of a midlife crisis that has been playing out in public for the past few years. I have been having my own perimenopausal midlife crisis, but mine has involved rescuing a puppy and posting essays on Substack and embracing my identity as a previously thin and able-bodied woman who is now in a semi-disabled, larger body. I’ve been letting my gray roots grow out, while Anne has been getting ever-longer, glossier hair extensions. I have been going through my midlife crisis in blessed anonymity and invisibility, while Anne has been intensely scrutinized in the public gaze since late adolescence.

Imagining that kind of scrutiny makes me shudder. I will never know what that’s like. I feel sad when I look at her new face and her smaller body because it seems like evidence that my parasocial pal is caving to the immense pressure to look eternally young and fuckable, possibly to the detriment of her health. I want to shield her from the world’s criticism and say, “You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

But maybe she does have to do this to maintain her career? Maybe that little has changed in the entertainment industry that this is what it takes to keep getting offered roles as a woman after forty? There are a few notable exceptions to these rules, women I admire like Helen Mirren, Judy Dench, Keeley Hawes, Olivia Colman, and Pamela Anderson, but they are exceptions. (Is it a coincidence that my list is almost entirely British?)

I will admit that I am also disappointed. I feel a sense of loss because the illusion that we had a lot in common has been shattered. I had nurtured a vague hope that Anne would choose to age naturally—or, at least, get subtler plastic surgery. Perhaps she would serve as inspiration to aspire to “look like Georgia O’Keeffe,” like Justine Bateman. Of all the elder millennial stars, Anne seemed like a down-to-earth person who might resist the pressure. Her youthful brand was slightly goofy, with exaggerated facial expressions and unbridled enthusiasm; a little annoying, maybe, but also charming and funny. Now she seems like someone I wouldn’t want to talk to if we were introduced at a party.

I’m also disappointed because Anne’s choices uphold and reinforce white supremacist patriarchal beauty standards. Maybe this is what she has to do if she wants to continue to enrich herself with A-list Hollywood roles; but is it worth it? Ethically, I couldn’t stomach making body modifications to perpetuate these racist, sexist beauty standards. I am consciously making the opposite choice: to not cover my grays; to not get a tummy tuck; to do only the bare minimum of beauty labor. I acknowledge that it’s less risky for me to make this choice than it would be for other women as a cis het, fair haired, blue eyed white woman. I’m my own boss and don’t have to worry about age discrimination in the workplace. Even with these privilges, there is risk involved in divesting from beauty labor. It can be lonely to stand out from other women my age who look younger and thinner and prettier, but I firmly believe it’s the right thing for me to do. When I check in with myself about whether I should get Botox to smooth out my forehead, or a chin tuck, I cringe at what that would model for my daughter, or my young eating disorder clients. It’s not consistent with my values or the example I want to set. Other women might make a different choice for themselves for a variety of complicated reasons, and I’m not passing judgment on them; but the fact that Anne is choosing to go to the opposite extreme to adhere to these beauty standards further illustrates how little we actually have in common.

Meanwhile, Pamela Anderson is my hero for showing up at red carpet events with a bare face. As a pretentious teenager in the 90s, I never thought I would admire her. She represented my worst fear of being reduced to a dumb blonde sex symbol. Yes, she still very much fits into patriarchal beauty standards, even with a bare face, so eschewing make-up is easier for her to do than other, less conventionally attractive women. Sure. But Pamela is making a brave choice to invite criticism by boldly showing her naked face in public. Wouldn’t it have been cool if Anne had decided to set that kind of example, too? Maybe Pamela has less to lose at 57. Maybe in another fifteen years, Anne will have evolved, too; or will she just travel further and further down the path of body modification until she has the weird, bloated alien face so common in Hollywood?

I don't hear this sentiment often expressed, so I might be alone in this, but I feel a certain relief in looking visibly older. After a lifetime of being warned about how beauty fades and how awful it is to look old, there is relief in having crossed a certain threshold of visibly graying hair and deepening wrinkles. I'm not afraid now that this dreaded transition is upon me. Looking older is not really so scary after all. Women who are older than I am might be rolling their eyes because it's not so hard to embrace aging at 42. Maybe as I lose more youthful privilege, I will feel differently about it; but at the moment, I'm reveling in it. I'm not daydreaming about a ponytail facelift. I'm thumbing through my coffee table books of Iris Apfel photos and Advanced Style and thinking how great it will be once I'm old enough to really not give a shit what anyone thinks of how I look. Bring it on.

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