Dissecting Beauty | #THINKINGHUES
Cosmetic surgery and aesthetic procedures are on an explosive rise, what are the unintended consequences to society globally? What if humanity loses it's merits of self-love and self-acceptance?
“around one in five South Korean women have had work done, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (that number climbs to one in two among twenty-something women in Seoul).” — Standford scholar traces the roots of South Korea’s cosmetic surgery surge, Standford School of Humanities and Sciences, 2018.
“In Experiment 1, emotion perception was significantly impaired in people who had received a cosmetic procedure that reduces muscular feedback from the face (Botox)…” — Embodied emotion perception: Amplifying and dampening facial feedback modulates emotion perception accuracy, American Psychological Association, APA Psych Net, 2021.
When I was an awkward insecure preteen, I dreamt of becoming like the women in Seventeen magazine, Teen People, and Teen Vogue. I wanted to look like the women on the pages of my aunt’s Cosmopolitan magazine. I wanted a body with slim and limber limbs like the women in my mom’s exercise DVDs. I also aspired one day to be like the cool girls on shows like ‘The OC’ or the women on MTV, who unknown to me, were often an adult cast hired to play teenagers.
The allure of the American dream and the palpable Western ideals of beauty and body norms unsurprisingly infiltrated the minds of generations of women worldwide. Without realising, I, along with other audiences worldwide started to condition ourselves to a very specific standard of beauty.
The Standards of beauty are manufactured.
What these magazines and TV shows failed to share, with a teenage girl living in Southeast Asia dreaming about American life, was how these gorgeous models and celebrities alike had an entire beauty team of experts and skillful production crews behind them to make them look that good. Most certainly did not wake up looking like how they looked on those pages or scenes.
The standard of beauty these magazines and shows sold were by definition manufactured. Yet, unknowingly to myself and the other millions of teens and young audiences globally was the reality of everything that went on behind the scenes. Out of sight and out of mind, the details of beautification were rarely comprehended.
Diversity, transparency, awareness.
In recent years there has been an encouraging global movement to endorse more diversity and transparency in beauty and media. People are less seduced by the media’s standards of beauty and are embracing global influences. There is positive momentum towards body positivity, diverse representation, and the championing of holistic health. Thankfully the ideas around what’s beautiful are evolving. From diversity in race, ethnicity, abilities, sizes, heights, looks, and all, celebrating the variety of real people is the new benchmark.
From Pamella Anderson being celebrated for attending Paris fashion week makeup-free, to Ashley Graham, a plus-size model, who has won the covers of Vogue and Sports Illustrated alike, to the popularity of K-pop stars like BLACKPINK, to global phenomenons like the South Korean actors of Netflix’s Squid Game going mainstream. Yes, aesthetic ideals and the soft powers that control them are shifting. Inclusivity and awareness of diversity have improved a lot, especially in terms of more transparency, inclusivity, and more accurate representations.
Yet, there’s another side to the spectrum that’s brewing. While the knowledge of photoshopping and expert beautification teams are more familiar to the public, there is a new army of beauty queens and impossible norms that’s dominating this era’s new rhetoric on beauty. While on one side, unique niches of beauty are finally celebrated, these mico communities ruled by this generation’s ‘celebrities’ of social media influencers and content creators are also creating ever-increasing expectations for perfection.
Anyone can become a ‘celebrity.’
Now anyone can become a ‘celebrity.’ While social media democratises the opportunities for fame and growing personal brands, it has also created a world where more of your neighbour next door can become the next ‘it’ sensation. Whether someone you know goes viral or has built a lasting empire online, these aspirational lives are no longer of a distant unrelatable celebrity, they’re often the lives of someone you know.
From front-row seats at Paris Fashion Week, to supersized brand deals with Nike to Gucci, to self-branded merchandise and media events— influencers are the new celebrities of this generation. Collectively these digital creators command more authority than any celebrity of past eras because the fandom that social media creators accumulate inherently feels much more personal. It’s not a publicist communicating to you, it’s your idols themselves sharing intimate moments with you— daily. Not only in the depiction of aspirational lives and in the promotion of beauty itself but also in the quest to attain perfection– every day.
While body positivity, transparency, representation, and health are movements that exist too, on the other side of the coin beauty still holds onto unaddressed residues of the unrelenting insecurities of the past. The generational conditioning of narrow definitions of beauty has not disappeared. When social media came along the leftover residue persists in this new age of micro-influence. But, the difference is now women have greater access to not only other women’s curated portrayals of beauty, but also access to an excess of digital tools, aesthetic procedures, cosmetic surgery, and other invasive and non-invasive methods to alter how they look.
The wounds run deep.
The issue here is multidimensional. First, social media platforms for more than a decade have established a higher value on aesthetics, where images and video content are king. With a greater priority on visuals, naturally, society in general has shifted to also place more value on appearance. Most will consequently feel more pressure about how they look because that’s what’s glorified and rewarded.
Secondly, there’s a knock-on effect, as social media is a globalised platform that doesn’t discriminate. More people are becoming more aware of the range of beauty out there. Where before you might only see the beautiful women in your immediate networks, now you have access to the beautiful library of women globally. This seismic shift in perspectives cannot be underestimated, as it consequently creates a distortion field.
With every swipe and scroll, social media audiences, especially young women are being bombarded with ever-growing numbers of flawless faces, sculpted bodies, and augmented features. These are no longer just celebrities and models with teams of experts behind the scenes, these are your girls next door— looking increasingly more immaculate than ever before.
From preteens to teenagers, to full-grown adults, people are generally looking better– especially those who are sharing their lives on social media, skewed towards those who are also popular on these platforms.
The legacy issues around beauty ideals.
The ideals of beauty today sit on the backbone of the years of conditioning that came before. While women are only just starting to recover from the unrealistic expectations of beauty standards from the past, the dominant narratives of unrealistic unrelenting ideals have yet to change. Yet on top of those legacy issues of beauty, the context now is convoluted with the dramatic reach, frequency, and dynamism of social media, its influencer industry, its ever-changing algorithms, and its priority on aesthetics.
These issues are systemic. It cannot be solved by a single individual, neither is it the responsibility of a single entity, as the root of the problem— the glorification of perfection— has yet to be addressed. The wounds are deep. The solutions cannot be one-sided.
While on one side of the spectrum, women are liberated with self-love, self-acceptance, and holistic health, on the other side, where the core issues have yet to be addressed, women are still caged within the expectations of unrealistic ideals— and the problem is getting significantly worse.
Unassuming, unprotected minds.
Like the unassuming young women of the 2000s, young women today are fed similar messages of beauty on top of the additional exposures to the extremes of perfection. The distribution of such information is also at overwhelming speeds, accessibility, frequency, and extremities— as with the progress of technology, also comes the advancements in beauty and the cosmetic industries too.
While some influencers and celebrities try to be more transparent about their augmentations, most feel it’s too taboo. They are more comfortable pretending— like is the case with the iconic pop star Madonna and plenty of other stars like her too.
But, it’s important to acknowledge that improving one’s looks is nothing new. Either with makeup, clothes, hair color, or other forms of alterations to your appearance has been a normal practice through various civilizations.
The worrying trend though is the intensification of this desire in the era of social media and advanced cosmetics. The dominant beauty standard is starting to show greater reluctance to nurture self-acceptance, self-love, and internal validation first over self-modifications, which is having a significant impact on the mental health and self-esteem of young women worldwide.
The escalation.
The main issue is not when adult women are making informed decisions and voluntarily altering how they look, as beautification to some degree is normal. Rather what’s critical to recognise is the escalation of pressures women now feel. By continuing on this path, more and more women will start to think that the only way to feel accepted, validated, belonging, and praised is by some level of alteration or going under the knife.
Like in South Korea, which has now been coined the cosmetic surgery capital of the world, where “around one in five South Korean women have had work done, according to the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (that number climbs to one in two among twenty-something women in Seoul).” Women are also feeling the need for plastic surgery to better their job prospects, referred to as “chwieop seonghyeong” (“employment surgery”). What happens if such trends go global? What happens when such norms continue to proliferate worldwide unchecked— how will these deep-rooted issues compound as the years progress?
As plastic surgery, botox, and other cosmetic procedures become increasingly prevalent and socially accepted, this entire culture of prioritising aesthetics over internal value cultivates a culture of unrealistic ideals, unhealthy comparison, and increasing levels of inadequacy. Instead of teaching women self-acceptance, self-love, internal validation, and appreciation of their natural beauty, what’s gone mainstream worldwide is the unrelenting expectation of doing what it takes to gain external perfection first. If such ideals are perpetuated then the message is that self-alteration is what’s necessary to attain success, happiness, confidence, societal validation, belonging, acceptance, praise, and worthiness.
What happens to humanity’s future?
While the days of photoshopping talents were the worst of what young women in the 2000s had to deal with, the young women of today have an entirely different set of distortions to confront. Knowingly or unknowingly, social media platforms are creating a narrow vacuum of ever-increasing unrelenting beauty standards. Like the teenagers of the 2000s, who were unaware of what goes on behind the scenes of movies and magazines, many young minds are being conditioned daily to ever-increasing unrealistic ideals of beauty.
Over time, if influencers and the people who gain the most traction, approval, reward, and validation are the ones who have enhanced their appearance through more extreme means, either the digital or the surgical kind then humanity will start to erode the ideals of what real beauty is.
Extending beyond the individual psyches of young women, this issue touches all demographics vulnerable to the influence of social media. Like how many women suffered from eating disorders and debilitating insecurities from the influence of old media, what will happen to the young women of today and the women of tomorrow in today’s context?
When Humans try to play God.
The other concern is also whenever humans try to play God, what’s rarely considered are the long-term secondary effects that follow. Science has even revealed that those who voluntarily receive “a cosmetic procedure” to reduce “muscular feedback from the face” by using Botox, showed significant signs of emotion perception impairment. In other words, these people lost their ability to read other people’s emotions— their ability for empathy. If such minor changes can impede such a critical trait to humanity, I wonder what the collective impact of multiple augmentation does not only to individuals but to humanity as a collective.
When Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed the dire weaknesses of its algorithms biases, which created an echo chamber of opinions that heightened polarisation and discrimination, the world suddenly awoke to the significant implications of social media on society and politics— yet ten years too late.
Now, faced with the explosion of digital augmentations, cosmetic surgery, body modifications, and unrelenting ideals and pursuits of perfection, what will a decade of promoting these values and beauty trends result in? Will all these facial modifications lead to a less empathetic society? Will it completely alter the trajectory of evolution in dangerous ways we have yet to comprehend or predict? What kind of interruptions to society are we not anticipating?
I only hope we won’t be a decade too late.
https://jiyeo.com/drawonme
The State of Girls’ Mental Health and Self-Confidence, in Charts | Education Week
Embodied emotion perception: Amplifying and dampening facial feedback modulates emotion perception accuracy | American Psychological Association | APA Psych Net
Standford scholar traces the roots of South Korea’s cosmetic surgery surge, | Standford School of Humanities and Sciences
A note…
This was a difficult article to write. Not only because I feel this issue is personal, but also because I feel a personal responsibility towards these matters. I also feel a sense of urgency when I think about the kind of world my nieces are growing up in.
I won’t pretend to have all the answers, nor do I believe I have adequately covered every issue that touches the complexity or scale of this problem. But, I hope this opinion piece gets you thinking, and more importantly about the role you want to play.
I’ve also decided to make this entire article accessible to all, so freely share, as I think these issues are important and urgent.
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