This book must bemuse some of our
fellow citizens who think only in terms of market and appearance. As any other
element acting in a free market, one has to be a "marketable" person:
Good (looking) enough for being hired, watched on TV, married or simply better
liked by the family and friends, aesthetically speaking, and that beyond makeup.
To rise an eyebrow hearing that, to question these trends, and to try to get
under their glossy skin might seem uncannily, unhelpfully, probably denoting
misanthropy or whatsoever could serve someone to put the author in a corner of
nowadays’ beautiful social life. In fact, the reader will learn that the
price for such beauty is high, not only financially, that the risk is not as negligible
as it might seem, and that many "good" public appearances stand in
fact for what might be called a disastrous intimate life or individual
development.  

Although it is hardly fitted to a
brief review, this book has a relatively simple story. Launched in the late19^th
century, plastic interventions on the body reached a high level of
democratization on the eve of 21^st century, when even those from
lower middle-class (at least in the West) can have fairly complex surgical
jobs, more complex than, for example, extirpating a mole. "How different,
ultimately, is cosmetic surgery from the story of, say, Sleeping Beauty, who
goes to sleep a young, isolated maiden and wakes up to love and perfect
happiness forever after?" [p. 4] asks the author. There are many questions
one may ask before and after a surgical intervention on the body, and the
author gives many. If it doesn’t work, can I regain my old face?  This is
probably one of the most important questions that one should ask before
proceeding. Being a more and more important part of the
beauty industry, cosmetic surgery has lots of backlashes. There are
risks, beyond that of making the patient uglier (or looking "like an
alien," as one has noticed). There are also
strong reasons to question the necessity of such brutal interventions, and here
a balance between psychological gains and physical ones is reached by sheer
subjectivity.

After posing problems and rising
questions, the author makes a more complicated subject using quotes from the
interviews with plastic surgeons, commenting on novels
and movies, magazine ads and the usual star-hunting activity of the press. This
results into a panoply of cases, which can lead the curious reader to an entire
array of data regarding the implied sides, the relations and the trends created
in this field. Once the plastic surgery has become affordable to middle-class
people, almost every flaw, ethnic or simply unwanted trace can be hidden, and
for many people touched by "the culture of cosmetic surgery" it must be hidden.
Docs seems to have a pill for making you uglier (in order to catch you as a
patient), they are often in competition with each other, and their tools to
show in preview how you will look after surgery are more and more
sophisticated. Again, there are sides. Some doctors blame the former surgeon;
others have conditions for "doing" the patient; here one surgeon is "specialized"
in celebrities; there another tries to convince relatives that they need
plastic surgery. It became very hard to tell where the limit of necessity is in this domain, as the experts have very different
professional standards, provisions, skills and perspectives.

Another good observation is that
we have 85 % of the plastic surgeons are males, and 89 % of their patients are women. At least
these were the numbers in 2000. It seems a suitable distribution for this
domain, as on the route from psyche to body and back women are more undecided than
men, and always in search for more exciting things. According to statistics, in
2000 roughly 2 millions "risked death" for the sake of their
appearance. Yes, as the author keeps emphasizing, there are risks in these
operations. Maybe not the same kind of risks as one takes when crossing
the street, but risks nonetheless. The Hollywood problem is another interesting
core of the book. Plastic surgery is not a niche domain anymore. TV shows,
serials, and big screen movies took care of the subject and, given that,
changing your look through cosmetic surgery it is now a tritely action. There
are many movies in which some of the leading
characters are cosmetic surgeons, opening faces, making lifts, etc. In other
words, they "do" patients. The magazines are replete with the most recently surgical improvements of the star
shapes. More than that: we have the Internet, and the computer games. Now one
can shoot stars, or "peacefully" just steal their beauty. Why? To
become a celebrity. From here on things get complicated, and it becomes harder
and harder to give an explanation for the psychological mechanisms driving
people in the vicious circle of surgically acquired beauty (or ever-lasting youth), which demands more and
more, as soon as one makes the first step. It seems, indeed, that it is all
about making people "marketable."

However, the author avoids drawing conclusions and issuing diagnoses on the
state of society. We can find, here and there, very interesting conjectures, for
example: "Plastic surgery functions as an
apparent cultural solution to the very identity crises it embodies," but
no comment on the large concepts implied: in this case, "cultural solution"
and "identity crises." There are numberless jargon terms, like the old "lift" or the new (by
sense) "doing." If I were to find a weak point in this endeavor, I
would criticize the artificial stopping of the
implicational chain. The author doesn’t cover, for example, the fields of jokes
(and there are a lot about hiding the age, especially with women-subjects) or
that of job market, focusing rather on aesthetics, but not as an aesthetician,
but as a social critic. It’s true, the further you go following such implicational
chains, the wider the work becomes. Besides, any reader can trace some of these
implications by themselves. Thus, it might be said that the book does not offer sufficient arguments that we live in a "tyrannical"
culture of cosmetic surgery, but for sure there are enough leads to get the
reader in every corner of the culture affected by
trying-to-be-beauty-with-any-price trends. And there are a lot such corners.

As an outraged feminist, as she
calls herself, Virginia Blum succeeds in depicting a "state of the culture",
as far as the human bodily aesthetics is concerned. She has embarked on not so
easy a mission, that of studying the society
under scalpels’ beset. The result is a book soaked by information on the
subject, with many interconnections between them, clever questions and subtle
emphasis on the hot topics. Perhaps a more elaborated logical blueprint of her
endeavor would have served some readers better, taxonomically speaking.
Nevertheless, the book is well structured, and the chapters
naturally interlinked and increasing in attractiveness page by page. In
conclusion: A well-written book, deeply comprehensive, full with wise looks and
turns of the problems raised by the culture of cosmetic surgery, this book will
probably be revisited, definitely not for "cosmetic surgery," but for
a necessary limb upgrade imposed by nowadays’ stupendous technology.

Ó 2006 Viorel Zaicu

Viorel
Zaicu, Ph.D., Bucharest, Romania

Categories: Ethics, General