Friends alum Courteney Cox recently decided to go au-naturel and had all her fillers dissolved. Fillers are injected into the skin to fill in wrinkles and therefore promote a smooth, youthful complexion. Most fillers are temporary, because they are absorbed by the body over time.

As Cox attests, fillers aren’t the miracle treatment that they’re sometimes made out to be. Although fillers smooth out wrinkles in the short term, they eventually stretch out the skin tissue even more by weighing it down. The skin can’t bounce back as quickly as it did when you were younger, so fillers end up making you age faster over time. As a result, more and more filler is needed with each subsequent procedure to achieve similar results. It’s a never-ending battle that you just can’t win. Fillers can also shift beneath the skin, making the face look distorted.

Cox says she feels way better now that her fillers are gone; she thinks she looks more like herself again. She acknowledges that aging is an inevitable part of life, and it’s normal for some things to change over time. The actress believes trying to stop the aging process through plastic surgery just made her look “fake.” She’s learned to embrace her natural looks, noting that her so-called wrinkles are really just smile lines.

Photo source: The Tracking Board