A Hard Decision

Hi friend,

In May of 2007, the feminist blog Jezebel launched with a bold gambit. Submit an unretouched magazine cover image, and you’d get a $10,000 bounty.

Almost two decades later, few care about airbrushed magazine covers (but…can we talk about this one?). Instead of wondering what sort of post-production wizardry makes female celebrities look ageless and flawless in pictures, online commenters are examining real-life faces for evidence of “invisible” work like deep-plane facelifts.

That’s right. Everything old is new again, including people’s actual faces. There’s endless speculation about what the 42-year-old Anne Hathaway has or hasn’t done, for instance. And rampant gossip about child star Lindsay Lohan, who is back in the spotlight to promote the August release of the film Freakier Friday. As part of her promotional tour, she’s landed a retro-themed Old Navy ad campaign and appears on the latest cover of the latest issue of Elle magazine, with an interview from SNL star Chloe Fineman.

It’s a boring back-and-forth, but the two do discuss their skincare approaches and we learn that Lohan’s working on a skin line, that she believes “everyone does Botox,” that Fineman has done Fraxel, and that Lohan tried and didn’t like Morpheus8. Then, her publicist butts in and drops this:

“Yeah, but you know what the problem is with you being beautiful women — the second she looks any different, they assume she had her face lifted at 37 or 38, that she ripped apart this or that. It’s so mean…Yeah, I tried to figure that out, Linds, in the last three years, when you had time to do anything, because I know your schedule. So the haters can hate and be jealous. It just sucks that that’s where they go with women in today’s world. Women can’t just look good to look good and change their lifestyle to be more healthy.”

If you’ve ever done a celebrity interview, you likely have empathy for Fineman, who gamely replied to all of this: “It’s always so weird, like, ‘What are you doing?’ It’s like, ‘I’m just taking care of myself. Go fuck yourself.’ You know what I mean?”

We get the curiosity, though; we assume anyone 40+ understands it. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s a facelift or a combination of many different treatments, does it? (Though there is still a lot of stigma attached to facelifts.) But let’s dispense with calling painful lasers, Botox, or other expensive beauty-maintenance treatments “self care.”

Speaking of expenses, this week’s feature is all about how a recurring bill prompted one woman to finally make a major decision concerning her long-frozen embryos. Read on for that, plus a few recommendations for your weekend.

Bye,
Your friends at Gloria

It was 2011. I was living in London. Obama was President. The dance floor was alive with Rihanna’s “We Found Love.” It was entirely acceptable, even encouraged, to wear skinny jeans. And it was also the year I froze my embryos. 

Even though I was one of the lucky few that only needed one cycle of IVF to conceive, my path to pregnancy was littered with heartache and disappointment. If you’ve been through assisted conception, I don’t need to explain this because you already know. 

Eventually, I got my happy ending: healthy twins and five good quality embryos, made from my top quality 29-year-old eggs, grown to the blastocyst stage and screened using pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). 

When my kids were four, my husband and I briefly considered having another child. We got a dog instead, which suited us just fine. Since then, I rarely think of those frozen embryos or what to do with them, save for once a year when I get a storage bill for £390/$505 (roughly half, I’ve been told, of what American families pay for the same service). 

Each March when the reminder email hits my inbox, I spend a few days in contemplation. We are sure we don’t want any more children, which means our options are to (1) donate the embryos to another family (2) destroy them or (3) offer them up for research. To date, my choice every year has been (4): do nothing.

I’m not alone. No one knows how many embryos are being kept frozen around the world. In the US, estimates range from 400,000 to one million. In the U.K., they number around 500,000. Studies have shown that most people with frozen embryos are like me: indecisive.

This year, I decided it was time to actually explore my options. The law in the U.K. changed in 2022 to increase the maximum limit for embryo storage to 55 years. While inertia until the year 2066 sounded appealing, the idea of having to write a provision into my will of who was going to be responsible for my embryos after I died did not.

I approached the question of what to do with gusto and in my usual data-driven, spreadsheet-organized way. I wasn’t surprised to find a slew of politically and religiously motivated information, fraught with sometimes dubious “facts.” What I wanted, though, was guidance on a decision that should be, like any to do with my own body, down to family planning and personal choice.

As I set out to explore my options, there was one I was able to rule out almost immediately: donating my embryos to another family who would implant them, carry them to term, and raise them. Nonprofits exist, many of them religious, to facilitate what they call “embryo adoption.” These “snowflake babies” made national news in 2005 when George Bush invited 21 of them to the White House to demonstrate his opposition to stem cell research. 

While I don’t believe that life begins at conception, I do know many loving families, including many same-sex couples, who have benefited from egg donation. But even with that consideration in mind, donation was just not for me. Maybe it’s selfish, but I couldn’t imagine a world where my biological child existed without me as its parent.  

The second option, destroy them, was the simplest route but also felt weirdly emotional. It’s not because I’m necessarily attached to my embryos; but, even after almost 15 years, it’s easy to access the feelings of intense effort involved in the IVF process. I remember the daily injections, the horrible bloating, the nurse wishing me good luck just as my embryos were implanted, then lying on my sofa for 24 hours with hopes that my supine position would somehow make the whole process more likely to work. There was, quite literally, blood, sweat, and tears at each stage of the journey. And lots of money. I wasn’t prepared to cast that aside if there was still a chance my embryos could be used for something positive. 

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TO STREAM We’re very excited for the new HBO film Mountainhead, which is by the creator of Succession and comes out tomorrow. Little has been shared about it save for cast info and a light overview of the plot (described here); The New York Times calls it a “delicious satire of the tech right.” 

TO TRY The TikTok-famous Dubai chocolate bar hype is real, and this version by Charles Chocolates is the most delicious one we’ve tried. It’s the combo of the smooth dark chocolate and crunchy pistachio-and-shredded kataifi filling that makes them so good. We got them as a treat for ourselves, but they’d also make a great gift, particularly this set. Try all three versions here and get 15 percent with code GLORIA15. #partner

TO LISTEN In the avalanche of news, it’s easy to forget that the trial of the year — the century, maybe — is still ongoing in New York. We got caught up on the Diddy mess via this episode of the NYT’s podcast Popcast, which offers a helpful overview from reporters that are actually in the room, not virtual spectators.

TO SIP As the weather warms up, we find ourselves craving evening cocktails more often than we want to consume alcohol. We were recently gifted the St. Agrestis Phony Negroni Mix Pack and were pleasantly surprised by how real they tasted — bitter, complex, and totally satisfying. Our favorite was the Phoney Negroni and Phony White Negroni, but the mezcal version was able to nicely nail that smokey quality without the booze. We like to keep them stocked in the fridge for ourselves and to serve to sober friends.

Celebrating the return of the fro-yo shop. • “Inside the arms race to create a better lactose intolerance pill.” • On eating disorders and perimenopause. • Explaining the recent rash of high-profile crypto attacks. • Workday’s been sued for screening out candidates over 40.

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