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The Uncanny Valley is the name given to the unease one experiences when seeing images or creations in the likeness of humans that almost replicate the appearance. The valley is a metaphor for the gulf between what are clearly illustrations and on the far side images that are indistinguishable from actual people.

Some well-known examples are from the movie Rogue One: A Star Wars Story where computer-generated imagery was employed to recreate images of Peter Cushing’s character Tarkin and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia as they appeared in the original 1977 feature film. Neither CGI character was one hundred percent effective, looking very close to as the actors had appeared in the late ’70s but remaining disturbingly artificial.

With the advent of A.I.-generated images now flooding the internet and social media platforms, there is an even greater number of images that look almost perfectly human and yet are unable to climb out of the Uncanny Valley and emerge indistinguishable from actual photography of actual people.

Of course, on that far slope are actual people who naturally look like actual people. There are some people, and I feel the number is growing, who are inadvertently moving themselves into the Uncanny Valley because of a single substance, Botox.

Botox is the trademarked name for the drug derived from botulinum toxin, a powerful and potentially lethal neurotoxin produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum. In tiny therapeutic doses, Botox helps mitigate symptoms for people who suffer from spasms, locked muscles, migraine headaches and uncontrolled sweating. It was from the therapeutic uses that the effects of smoothing out wrinkled skin, by paralysis of the underlying muscles, were discovered, leading to the cosmetic version of the drug being approved.

Because our society prizes youthful appearances and even more so for women, cosmetic use of Botox is quite high, with a significant number of female actors and performers employing the drug to present a smooth and unwrinkled face.

Too smooth, too unwrinkled.

With the muscles under the skin paralyzed, people who have employed Botox can often have a frozen and expressionless countenance. A large portion of how we humans non-verbally communicate our emotions to one another is by way of micromovements of the muscles near and around the eyes, the very muscles that a smooth-browed Botox treatment paralyzes. When that non-verbal communication channel is faulty it reads to others as wrong and uncanny.

Lately, I have been watching a Nordic noir television series where one of the actors, playing the mother of a murdered teenager, has clearly had extensive Botox treatments. It is strange and wrong that, when the character is supposed to be in the grips of terrible and powerful emotions, the character’s eyebrows are frozen in place, utterly still and unmoving. This performer, in a quest to remain youthful, has slid from the human side of the Uncanny Valley into the Valley itself. The performer made the choice to have these treatments with their evident effects, but it cannot be discounted to greater pressures that culture has placed upon them.

It is a tragedy that our global entertainment culture punishes people, women in particular, for the natural course of their aging, prompting them to take such drastic actions as to damage their very human appearance.