Strap In For My New Facelift
I have always been a fan of cosmetic intervention. And I mean always. Way back in Grade 6 at primary school there was a group class activity: each student had to describe how they saw their future and say something about it. I’m not joking (this really happened), I declared: “I refuse to get old. I’m going to do drugs and be a prostitute.” I would probably never use this term today, with all its judgemental associations of ‘the town pariah’. But as a kid, I was using vocabulary purloined from the secret magazines found under my mother’s bed. I wanted to be a sex worker because it sounded glamorous, like an actress. And the word prostitution was always used in the same sentence as money. I mean, how else am I going to pay for everything? As you can imagine, this blew everyone’s socks off.
Most kids were from super vanilla families and were reaching for the dictionaries. ‘What is this word?’ The teachers were in a panic. I was reframing sex work as this cool thing to do: beautiful ladies get to be glamorous, so it sounds like the life for me, I’m in! You could hear a pin drop. The teacher must have been twigging the fuck out.
This was before anyone knew what cosmetic surgery was or was even talking about it. In the eighties, that was the province of Hollywood actresses and rich biatches in Gstaad only. What the h ell was my mother exposing me too? I guess I just always knew – I was adamant as a child. My mum was probably a cautionary tale. She was gorgeous in her youth, but being poor wears you down and she drank too much. Add the nasty eighties era poodle perm and criminally awful Peter Pan collars and ageing really did her in. I felt for her and this taught me the importance of resources and resilience. I could see how hard life was when you didn’t have money and must have worked out that sex work would generate enough to rescue someone in my mum’s situation, so that’s the go.
I was escorting in my teenage years and early twenties, but cosmetic services were still not readily available or mainstream, even in that industry. Also, I wasn’t emotionally ready. I was too chicken and intimidated to get my boobs done, which is the usual gateway drug. I had peaked too early in my career and, let’s face it, extreme youth is its own reward and gets you through just about anything anyway. By my early 20s, I’d had a whiff of being the sex witch making bank as a measure, I guarantee that internationally and my identity was well formed. Then I got hugely waylaid by hooking up with a sadistic boyfriend and getting entangled in playing the game of male relationships for a decade.
This may be a life goal in every love ballad, but my experience was more like a punitive horror movie. The narcissistic abuse of my ex-partners pretty much annihilated my income, independence, sense of self-worth and feeling of safety and security (they were always threatening to expose my former occupation of escort to fuck with my custody rights, which created a permanent quicksand feeling). It swamped a decade of my life; I took a good long while to regroup and relaunch as Christine McQueen.
Once I really clocked how catastrophic it was to hook up with this bozo when I was 22, I saw things more clearly. I had a pheromonal sex appeal, but knew that I was not good looking enough to intimidate people. Randoms – from the elderly babysitter to passersby on the street – felt really comfortable dissing me. Shocking casual abuse came my way and I didn’t have the words to fight back. Mmm, but what if I had the lips?
I had to get a look together. Fact. Boobs and lips = power. Commercial beauty is a lever and I needed to pull it. For me, sending my look into the stratosphere was about both self esteem and my career as a star escort. It all played out. As soon as I started to pump the filler in, my position in life and work got better. The world reflected that back to me, which totally validated my decision.
There was an exception. One of my wealthiest exclusive clients, who eased me back into escorting, wasn’t keen on cosmetic intervention because he has been burned – if not traumatised – by his much older wife’s overdone work. And yes, she looked like a rag doll who had had the life sucked out of it by a Dyson, so he wanted me to avoid the whole thing. But getting a face fairy to perfect an already young pretty woman? It transforms her into a bona fide beauty. Being hotter equals better survival – way better than the living death I was living. Also, people assume that beautiful women must know how to be a bitch. I had low defences and had not developed a great vocabulary to handle whatever life threw at me. Being beautiful and aloof, having a new and polished look bought me the time and space to toughen up and keep people at a respectful distance.
Last but not least – it freezes ageing. When an agent once said to me, “I don’t give a shit how old you are as long as you look 25”, it was so liberating. So what if my age changes on paper, I’ll put in the maintenance and work on the exquisite illusion.
My love affair with fillers is fading. It’s like a new apartment build – temporary junk. At 34, my early experience of a mini facelift with small threading, which lifts what usually drops sky-high, entailed so much downtime and pain that I knew I may as well go large next time and pay double to get the big, permanent facelift. I don’t want to hold up my career with stop/start bullshit.
Everyone knows who I am and what I’m about. You’re either in or you’re out. Now that I’m on the juggernaut of online content, I’m as much a pornography producer as anything else. Onlyfans were screaming for Christine McQueen to hop on, and hop on I did.
Talk about added pressure. Greeting a client at the door in chiffon, bathed in candlelight, is one thing. But with video, what you see is what you get. I don’t care if there are 100 dicks in that shot, it’s the receding hairline that will piss me off. I’m bringing it back to me and what turns me on as a provider and participant. If someone thinks “I don’t like the facelift” or the idea of the facelift, it’s irrelevant. I’m also in the business of content creation: I must make these changes so that I myself can tolerate what I’m seeing. CMQ is on the cusp of becoming a content creation machine once more. I starved out my OnlyFans account because I didn’t want to make any more content that I would otherwise delete once I had new and improved faces and better people to work with. I wanted to hold off for three months, reshoot with proper male industry actors and showcase my new body and face.
I’m obsessed with getting this right. Sure, there is a strong argument to be made for my body dysmorphia, but I reserve the right to like my own head for my own porno. If I’m seriously doing this as a career, I think it’s healthy to make something that I myself would enjoy watching. Some clients think I’m crazy to finetune this much, but the numbers don’t lie. As a measure, I guarantee that there will be a huge spike. As much as everyone thinks that I’m their girlfriend and that they like me just as I am (aaaaaaaw), I have to do right by my business. CMQ rolls on. I want other people’s money – I want to look hot and look young enough to enjoy it. I always seem to be at work. Now I want to work smart, not hard. I want to sort out my financial position and set myself up. If someone else can relax and let it all hang out because they’re already rich, then fugly it up. Be my guest. But I just ain’t rich enough yet.
Men respond to a particular bracket of attractiveness. It now spans more than 80s and 90s magazine Cosmopolitan covers, which once dictated the market, so there is a larger aesthetic conversation happening now. But it still pivots on a beauty standard. When you know your look and the market responds favourably, you should deliver on that.
Essentially, the golden standard is the ‘snatched look’, defined as:
● Button nose
● Low forehead
● Razor sharp jawline
● Pointy sexy chin that will cut a room in half on entry
● A complete ban on Nasolabial folds and sags
● Orbital rims as smooth as a baby’s bum.
● Eyebrow lifts
We’re talking results as smooth and perfected as Madonna’s touch-up artist! So, in a matter of days, I am marching straight over to renowned Australian plastic surgeon Dr. Z to undergo the Deep Plane Facelift. It’s as intense as it gets. They move everything, pinning the muscles and shortening the sinew. That shit ain’t falling.
My only fear? That they don’t go far enough and I wake up livid. I’m not some regular urban bitch ‘doing it for her man’, some Eastern suburb Freddie to worry about. I am here for many, many men. I’ll be out of pocket about 70k but this is a golden investment in myself. New face, new life. I will no longer reside in the Emerald City. I have sat on every available
paying dick in Sydney, so it’s time to tour and travel. My new roaming address will be Perth/Melbourne/Brisbane/Canberra/Adelaide/Gold Coast. I’m going national permanently. For the next little while, I will be recovering in painkiller-induced splendour. When I remerge, it will be the same Christine, only bionically improved. See you on the other side…
