In his first and only Substack post to date, Australian popstar, Troye Sivan, laid bare his insecurities over his appearance and the tension between “being woke” and embracing aging and succumbing to the pressure to “fix” what is “wrong” with his face. 

Nothing he says is necessarily new, but Sivan contextualizes his feelings with the Instagram Reels he sees about himself. One video where a plastic surgeon pointed out the “volume loss” beneath Sivan’s eyes in recent years rightfully struck a cord with him. Sivan wrote, “What good is money and modern medicine if not to fix all these flaws that this random sicko fucko plastic surgeon told me I have in an instagram reel?” And that “hearing this unsolicited medical advice given publicly by a doctor I do not know” pushed him towards succumbing to the pressure to get work done. 

He continued that after seeing that video his algorithm preyed on his moment of insecurity feeding him video after video about deep plane face lifts and ads for unapproved GLP-1 pills, an experience anyone online can relate to.

Videos of plastic surgeons speculating about what procedures celebrities got done and what procedures they should get done are an insidious and inescapable corner of the internet. The ethos of these videos are that aging is bad and any so-called imperfection can be fixed by going under the knife.

These videos make the average viewer feel bad about their appearance and it’s encouraging to see a celebrity that these videos are made about to be candid about their impact. But after Sivan’s post, the plastic surgeon apologized and deleted the video. As a result, Sivan backtracked in a postscript writing, “the doctor in the aforementioned video removed it, and sent a really thoughtful and sweet message apologising … No hard feelings from my side whatsoever.” 

The removal of one video doesn’t change the systemic issue with these accounts posting what’s “wrong” with people’s faces. There should be hard feelings from everyone — especially the people whose faces they use to breed self-consciousness —towards these insecurity vultures!

For more on the ecosystem of plastic surgeons on TikTok and Instagram Reels check out Bustle’s breakdown of the most popular accounts.

DESCRIPTION OF MEN WATCH

New segment alert! Altar Boys always keeps an eagle eye on the myth-making of men and in this recurring section, I’ll put writers on watch for just how much they bolster these men up. In this edition we’re taking a look at the New York Times profile of Morris Katz, a political strategist who worked on Mayor Mamdani’s campaign. 

This guy isn’t even a celebrity and the NYT said all this: “Morris Katz attended the Beacon School, a prestigious public school in Hell’s Kitchen, where he was a Woody Allen-watching, Philip Roth-reading, Bob Dylan-listening occasional truant who dreamed of becoming a screenwriter.”

Obviously gender isn’t real etc. etc., but if we reframed this to be about a girl and she liked stuff a lot of teen girls like, I don’t think anyone would find it special. And as always this whole article is about how special this guy is. 

I WATCHED DYLAN O’BRIEN ON ROYAL COURT, SO YOU DIDN’T HAVE TO

I’m so sorry, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Even I have my limits. 

Former Skins cast members, anyone Irish, British actors whose breakout role was “playing gay,” rappers from Kentucky, and men in Ocean’s Eleven (and their codependent best friends) are all fair game.

A$AP ROCKY is Altar Boy of the week due to his delightful appearance on Celebrity Substitute, a YouTube series I previously hated. Rocky teaches a class of fourth graders at Harlem’s PS 125 how to rap, but more importantly he instills a sense of confidence in each student and gives them liscence to be weird, creative, and wholly themselves. If you’re able to ignore how obviously sponsored by Amazon the video is, you could get a little emotional watching it!

HARRY STYLES showed up to The Grammys on his birthday in whatever the hell he wanted to. He presented Album of the Year to Bad Bunny and gave his all to pronouncing DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOTos. I guess he had nothing left in him for his look. Harry’s outfit was something you might wear when playing dress up in your mom’s closet ahead of an unfortunately themed spirit day. He threw on some jeans, an ill-fitting sparkly denim blazer, and seafoam green ballerina slippers. Not exactly the clue into Kiss All The Time. Disco, Occasionally.’s aesthetic that I’d hoped for. 

MATT AND BEN’s The Rip press tour continues with their most charming bullshit video to date, GQ’s Friendship Test. Ben lights up and becomes a total motormouth when he gets to talk about his guy. He laughs about Matt’s turn as Anton Schill in a high school production of The Visit, praises Matt’s parenting, and jokes about Matt’s “unimpressive acting.” 

LEWIS PULLMAN’s GQ profile lets the reader in on how The Testament of Ann Lee was made. They did what he described as, “humiliation therapy” where the actors, “cooed and cawed and did all sorts of alien shit for hours,” of course! 

NIALL HORAN released a forgettable song with British singer-songwriter Myles Smith.