AS a woman who hated how she looked, my options for immediate change were limited. There was little I could do that was permanent – other than piercing my nose, shaving my head or changing my makeup. Today, quick fixes are less benign. If you find yourself lacking, unhappy with what you see in the mirror, this is the year you can get botox and fillers while you shop. Injectables, as they’re shudderingly called, are coming to the high street.

The health and beauty giant Superdrug has announced plans to offer the cosmetic service in its stores, many of which already provide eyebrow threading and manicures in a recent departure from selling just products. Starting with a soft launch at the flagship store in The Strand before rolling out nationwide, customers will be able to nip in for shampoo and leave with a new face. A medical questionnaire and telephone consultation are required first, but it’s undeniably more accessible than most other “medical aesthetic” treatments.

This announcement coincides with news of an increase in young people seeing cosmetic surgeons because they want to look like a Snapchat filter. Some doctors claim the image-enhancing apps are responsible for a new social-media subtype of body dysmorphia. There is some concern that making these treatments more accessible will fuel a further degradation of women’s already low self-esteem. While I agree that injectable perfection can inflame body image issues, we’re fundamentally laying blame at the wrong door.

Image-enhancing apps are not directly causing body dysmorphia. Exacerbating it, sure, intrinsically part of the current spike even, but they’re not the root of the problem. After all, the condition existed long before we could send pictures of ourselves with anime proportions or dog ears.

Body dysmorphia is a mental disorder where an individual obsesses over a perceived physical flaw and goes to extraordinary lengths to conceal or correct it. As long as appearance is placed at the apex of social value, body dysmorphic disorder will continue to be a problem. Beauty standards and a society that tells women their worth is directly related to it are to blame, not just a quick hit of botox. Procedures are the symptom that perpetuates the problem, not the problem itself.

When I first started to hate myself, it was magazines. I would pore over the flawless, enhanced pictures and agonise over the distance between their bodies and mine, why they deserved to be on magazine pages and people like me had to admire them. In my young head, better bodies = better people. That continues to be the thought-error that shames people into doing whatever they can, whatever they can afford, to get some relief.

Beauty standards reflect our cultural ideals, and these are being shaped by being saturated in edited images. This is a case of new tech, same problem: a standard of bodily perfection, but one dictated by an algorithm. Mathematical perfection that we have no hope of meeting, in a society that values beauty above all else. Until we rewire that thinking, take a step back to see what we’re really striving for, there will be some version of this scenario. Vulnerable people will take extreme, expensive measures to remake themselves because they believe it will make them happier.

I’ve got 20 years of this under my belt, so let me assure you – it won’t. There’s no physical action you can take that will make you feel good enough if your brain is still holding on to beauty as your worth. There is no magic pill, no injection, no peel or snip that will do what you really need it to. A procedure might make you happier temporarily, it might give you a shortcut to confidence, but it will not help you to be at peace with your body because we cannot remove ourselves from our culture. We cannot ban procedures or doctored images, and nor do I think we should take up a defensive position or retreat into seclusion because these beauty standards exist.

What we need to do is learn to manage our minds, to detangle notions of worth from our bodies so that we can still swim around in this toxic soup without imbibing too much of it. The real freedom from beauty standards comes not when we abolish them, but when we don’t place our value on them. When that happens, they cease to have a hold over us and become irrelevant.

I realised about ten years in that I didn’t actually want to be thin and it was an epiphany. I just didn’t want to think about my body at all. That was revelatory, but it’s taken another ten years to learn how to apply it to my own thinking and to stop hating what I see.

So many people want to love their bodies and can’t because the distance from their starting point is too great to travel. Feeling agnostic about your body isn’t such a leap. There’s no objective truth that you’re attractive or not, and it’s not determined by anyone’s opinion, your own or otherwise. Start from there, looking at your body without adjectives. It’s far easier to move from acceptance to love than it is to 180 overnight. It takes a lot of time and effort to learn how to interrupt your own negative thoughts, but when you figure it out it’s cheaper, and the effects last far longer, than any procedure.