Born With It

Why are we so judgemental about how others beautify themselves?

Do you wear eyeliner? Dye your hair? Ever gone under a laser, needle, or knife? When it comes to beautification, how far do you think is too far? And why are there such strong moral overtones to our conversations about where to draw the line?

From Instagram Face to pretty privilege, the male gaze to “anti-feminism”, cultural appropriation to the capitalist machine - a tour of the cosmetic cuts surprisingly deep.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
As an indie musician, trying to score press coverage is
a huge part of the job, and I remember being
so stoked and so nervous for one of my band's
first magazine photo shoots, with a professional photographer, proper wardrobe
on set, an actual makeup artist and everything. I usually
wear a blush an eyeliner, but the makeup treatment for

(00:26):
print photography is intense. Essentially, all of your features are
painted over lip pencil, brow pencil, eyeshadow, highlighter. It's like
a very thin mask of pastes and pressed powders. You
can't see the makeup artist's handywork while they're at it,
so you're just sort of left guessing how all of
these colors are combining on your head. The last step

(00:47):
is the false eyelashes. I remember this dude carefully gluing
them to my eyelids. Then it was time for the
big reveal. I was handed a mirror, but I couldn't
see myself because he'd accidentally glued my eyes shot, and
so instead of feeling like a movie star, I felt
like a fetal piglet. I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human.

(01:11):
Today is about beauty and ethics. And the intersection between
them stuff. I've personally spent a lot of time thinking
about why is beautification so ethically fraught. Celebrities take heat
for getting botox or lip fillers. Most of us have,
at some time or another been shamed for trying too
hard make up with the jim that's a hot button one,

(01:33):
or for not trying hard enough your teenage self getting
pestered into a haircut. Maybe plastic surgery is particularly likely
to evoke moral feelings, so let's start there. We begin
with a fire in the nineteen sixties. There was a

(01:57):
big circus fire where lots of lots of people died,
and there was a lot of burned victims, hundreds of
burned victims in the city of Nidoi, which across the
bay from me, the Genneiro, And it was just like
a big tragedy. It hit every single news headline. Mbers
Alvaro Harin is a professor of anthropology at College of
the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He's also author of The

(02:18):
Biopolitics of Beauty, which includes the story of the circus
fire and a man named Dr Evil Beat. He was
relatively young at the time he had to us return
from getting his medical degree, he had become specialized in
plastic surgery in Europe. Plastic surgery as we know it
developed in Europe to treat survivors of the world wars.

(02:38):
Shraplow wounds and trench warfare had created devastating facial injuries.
Plastic surgery has a deep tie to those victims of war, right,
And there was this sounds of light, we need to
help these people. With his foreign training, Dr Evil Beat
was a godsend. In the wake of the fire, he
treated the burn victims, many of whom were children, pro bono.
He started a clinic to train others surgeons and his techniques,

(03:01):
and Evil became a national hero. Brazil is now a
beauty capital of the world, performing sky high numbers of
plastic surgeries every year. Right, so if you go to
and you say, almost everybody knows what he is, right, really,
very very f Plastic surgery started as morally unassailable. Surgeons

(03:22):
were healers, treating people disfigured by violence and trauma, which
is not how we think about plastic surgery now. Being
I always kind of scrolling through Instagram, and it was
just something that I started noticing that a lot of
the women I was seeing on my Explore page and

(03:42):
who are getting a lot of likes and a lot
of hard eye emojis and a lot of praise for
their looks. Kind of all looks the same. That is
Kelly McGuinty, who recently published her masters thesis on what's
called Instagram face, a term popularized by writer you A.
Tolentino in an article for The New Yorker. In short,

(04:04):
Instagram face is a small nose with no bumps, full lips,
a sharp jawline, no double chin, high defined cheekbones, uplifted
cat like eyes and uplifted arched eyebrows and taught skin
like lifted and taught like you walked through a wind

(04:25):
tunnel and got stuck. If you know the platform, you
know the look. I think Bella Hadid, Chrissy Teagan, em Rata,
Kylie Jenner, and Kelly has collected some hard data on
the phenomenon. I took the top fifty most followed models
on Instagram, and I did a coding process where I
said yes or no, do they have this feature that

(04:48):
aligns with Instagram face. Almost all of those top fifty
female faces had the prized features of Instagram face. There
was a singular aesthetic to which all of these accounts
seemed magnetized. And this this isn't just a certain sort
of face being made popular by social media. It's about
social media making new faces. So this specific look Instagram

(05:11):
face is largely only attainable through cosmetic interventions like botox, fillers,
things of that sort. Some people are, of course born
with it, but it's really hard to tell who. Botox,
botch a line and toxin A is one of the
most poisonous biological substances known to science. It's sometimes called

(05:34):
the miracle poison, and when injected in really small doses,
it paralyzes facial muscles to smooth out wrinkles. You can
use it under the tip of your nose to lift it.
If you have kind of a downturn nose. You can
now get a little bit of botox injected there, and
I think they call it a tinker bell tip lift.
That's what they call it in their advertising. Plastic surgery

(05:57):
clinics leverage the looks of famous face is a bunch
of them offer Kylie packages, a suite of procedures to
help you look more like Kylie Jenner, who has upwards
of three million followers on Instagram, and for the record,
has publicly discussed getting lip fillers. Kelly herself wasn't immune

(06:19):
to the appeal of all those marketing promises. All of
us have probably wished we saw something different in the mirror.
I got lip fillers a couple of years ago under
the same kind of delusion that I didn't think I
was pretty. I thought having fullor lips would make me
pretty and would make me happy and make people like me.
Um it didn't and actually ended up happening. Is I

(06:42):
just found something else about myself I didn't like and
wanted to fix that too. There's also a racial subtext
to this entire conversation. It's like if colonization had a
face that said it would be in Instagram. Power From
a white woman, that is writer and thinker Cecily Bowen,

(07:08):
who goes by Bad Fat Black Girl online, she explains
that our standards of beauty are inherently racialized. Lighter skin,
certain hair textures as in like looser curls and patterns,
and prioritize over other ones than her noses. For example,
I think is one example of a physical feature that
is often associated with whiteness and thus more desirable. It's

(07:32):
like no one is ever getting a nose job to
make their nose fuller or bigger. Our looks can affect
big life outcomes. So beauty isn't just a frivolous concern
When people talk about, for example, pretty privilege, that is
a real thing. You know. There's research that shows that
people who are perceived as more you know, traditionally attractive,

(07:55):
are more likely to be hired for jobs, are more
likely to make more money as they go through their lives,
are more likely they have different access to different things.
They're less likely to be profiled at a store or
treat it poorly by a law enforcement officer. Note the
transitivity here. Privilege comes from beauty, and beauty comes from

(08:18):
proximity to white features. On a trip to India in
my twenties, I remember seeing an ad on the side
of a building. The woman with a zipper running down
the center of her face. She was being unzipped to
reveal a paler version of herself to sell skin bleach.
My cosmetic brand that made the stuff was a big

(08:39):
name when I probably patronized back home in parts of Asia,
the preference for fair skin predates colonial influence, but this
overt nous and this shamelessness of it felt very new
to me. Some moral objections to cosmetic interventions start here.
People have argued that straightening afro tech stred hair is

(09:01):
a concession to standards of beauty that prize whiteness. The
same goes for double eyelid surgery, which is sometimes given
us a gift to teenagers in South Korea, a surgery
that critics say creates a more western looking eye. Ditto
for laser procedures that turn brown eyes blue. Beauty does
not stay in its lane the cosmetic style. It pervades

(09:23):
all of our conversations. I don't think that we can
detach beauty from any public facing aspect of culture, because
beauty and desirability politics are always at play in terms
of who we allow to be in the front. People
criticize folks who get plastic surgery right as being like
vain or you know. The shallow vanity is probably the

(09:50):
most common moral charge leveled against beautification. People are self
absorbed if they spend too much time or too much
money on their appearance, and if they're getting surgery, then
they're shouldering real health risks. To proof positive that they
care way too much about how they look, and there
are risks, particularly with the procedure and vogue known as
the BBL. A Brazilian butt lift is essentially a procedure

(10:14):
where fat light bol is usually done on a different
area of the body, so it can be either the abdomen,
the back, or even the arms of the thighs, and
then that fat is essentially moved around and placed in
the hip and blood areas, and so it gives you
more of like a coke bottle shape and just you know,

(10:34):
some some cakes back there. So we are back to Brazil.
Let's rejoin Dr Evil Pani, rising star in the wake
of the Circus fire. Voky was very savvy and yeah,
he wrote this book The Right to Beauty that was
incredibly well received and people to this day use the
term like plastic surgery patients that I talked to the

(10:55):
pop hospans yet they say, yeah, we have the right
to beauty because of up tank. Right. He told us
that the right to be beautiful, it is important and
we need to offer to everybody. Evil positioned beauty is
a class issue, successfully arguing that public hospitals should offer
plastic surgery for cheap or even free for the Brazilian
working class. They see them as amazing humanitarians that are

(11:17):
offering beauty to the poor and that arelifting entire populations
that would otherwise be downtrodden because they're not beautiful, because
the Brazilians belief that beauty is important. It was unfair,
said Evil, that only the rich could afford his techniques
a tummy tuck, say, with a scar low enough to
be hidden in a bikini bottom. Plastic surgery wasn't only

(11:37):
a treatment for people disfigured by accidents or battle. It
was also, to use his phrase, for those betrayed by nature.
I'm thinking of like some of the conversations that you
had with the recipients of surgical procedures like um. A
teenage girl who was interested in having breast augmentation felt

(11:57):
a lot better about the green light that she got
from her doctor. If she had like a medicalized diagnosis
of small breastedness. It justified it in her eyes and
particularly the guys of her mom, that this was a
condition right, That she had an abnormality hypotrophy of the
mammary glance, which really just means you have small breasts.

(12:18):
Medicalizing a condition strengthened the argument that the state should
pay for it and distanced patients from any suggestion of vanity.
A formal diagnosis clearly warranted intervention. This motive thinking essentially
pathologized ugliness. It blurs the line between reconstructive surgery and
cosmetic procedures, implies that you can be injured not just

(12:41):
by shrapnel, but by your own genes. I talked about
us cosmetic citizenship. They think that they can only belong
in the resilientation if they're beautiful. I had talked to
a surgeon that had surgery on his own wife and
his own mother. You know, they're they're they're strange creatures
in the sense that they really normalize it for everybody.
I'm trying to not have a moral reaction in my

(13:02):
investigative conversation about moral reactions, but I'm making a face
that's intense A difficult entanglements of instinct, intellect, and ethics
call for a particular sort of professional. What we need

(13:26):
is a philosopher. My name is Claire Chambers and I'm
a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
Isn't beauty like definitionally necessarily non inclusive, that like, not
everybody can be it in the same way that like
the word beautiful functions the way that the word tall functions.
It's in comparison to a collective average. But then there

(13:51):
should be no shame and not being beautiful, right, So
if beauty was just one way of succeeding or one
way of excelling amongst others, then that might be fine
to say that, you know, not everybody has to be beautiful.
But that's not generally how we use it. It's a
value that really takes on much more weight than it should.
Nobody's exempt, but the own is to be beautiful ways

(14:11):
more heavily on some than others. Typically, women and girls
are expected to be beautiful to a higher sort of
standard of beauty than men and boys. Men conversely, can
be stigmatized for being too image conscious, for preening or
wearing guyliner. I'll note here, though, that these gendered norms
have not always been so. In other times and places,

(14:33):
beautification was more of the domain of dudes. Claire recently
wrote a book It's called Intact, A Defense of the
Unmodified Body. You mentioned a procedure that I've never heard
of in your book. What is a vampire facial? Basically,
a vampire facial is when you have a facial which

(14:53):
injects into your face platelets that are extracted from your
own blood, hence the vampire idea. And I it's supposed
to do something sort of magical to the texture of
your skin. Because there's all these kinds of really quite
gruesome proceiegures that have been all the time for beauty.
Japanese women have blackened their teeth, Dino's flattened their foreheads,

(15:15):
Victorian ladies self administered poisons to dilate their eyes. But
there's no need to venture to the extremes for ethical complexities.
Consider the standard issue department store cosmetic counter. In the
nineteen twenties, when makeup really took off in the US,
Revalon was marketing cosmetics as Hope in a jar. Makeup,

(15:36):
which is a product designed to change the way you look,
is often marketed for its undetectability. People won't know you're
wearing it. It'll seem natural. We'll use the word natural
usually to refer to things that we want to say,
Ah good, it feels like my face is allowed to
look like, it's not wearing makeup, but it's just not
allowed to look like my face, right, exactly, It's exactly it. Yeah,

(16:00):
and if they're doing it successfully, and that we can't
tell their wearing makeup, right, what the rest of us
looking at them think is Wow, those other women's faces
naturally don't have whatever it might be, dark circles, red patches,
whatever the thing is that you're you're concerned about. So
other women just look so much better than me, Naturally,
my face must be really bad. I once did a

(16:26):
photo shoot for a cosmetic line, a pretty awesome one.
I'm out Let's run independently and cruelty free, and helped
to donate proceeds to a charity that supports women's literacy.
And I remember receiving the first round of images, intensing
they had been noticeably airbrushed since I was a kid.
The tear trops beneath my eyes have been dark, sort

(16:47):
of sunken. But the woman in the picture was smooth
and bright. She looked like me, but well, prettier, fresh faced,
not so tired. The thing is, I do look tired.
I am, in fact tired, and I felt guilty about
suggesting otherwise I asked that the effect be dialed back,

(17:08):
but I admit I didn't push to remove it all together.
With daily wear makeup, most of us are cautious not
to overcorrect to the point of conspicuousness. Looking totally fake
would be bad, not just undesirable, but like morally bad.
Consider your own reaction to seeing someone selfie that's been
obviously processed by a filter. Yeah, that's not even her

(17:31):
real phase. It feels like a deception. But maybe makeup
is just an Instagram filter you wear on the skin,
and botox is just to filter that you were beneath it.
It almost feels like like cheating. So there are times
when we think that what the body needs is it
needs effort, right, what is virtuous is to spend effort

(17:53):
on our bodies, And so maybe it's something like liposuction
looks like we haven't spent enough effort or the right
kind of effort. It's like, if you get plastic surgery,
you're not earning beauty the way that you're supposed to.
But I mean, it doesn't really best of class greets
me because undergoing surgery right is a huge effort. In
many ways, we should not be creating a society where

(18:14):
what are the huge sources of anxiety for people is
that we don't look good enough, we don't look acceptable.
If you've watched more than like twenty minutes of television,
you've probably seen beauty products marketed as self esteem builders.
They bring out our best selves, help us walk tall
while striding into boardrooms in slow motion. Kelly, who researched

(18:36):
Instagram face, isn't convinced. I've gotta say I'm not really either.
For me, I think that feeling empowering and being empowering
are two different things. This equivalence of beauty and power
is predicated on some pretty garbage ideas. I think it
has origins to the history of how women have been

(18:57):
placed as objects of desire for men self. For example,
if we're sitting in a restaurant, we begin to picture
what we look like sitting in that restaurant. We're taking
on this outside gays and imposing it on ourselves. This
is what's called the male gaze. But now at the
same time, it's not just men perpetuating it. It's women too.

(19:19):
It's just thinking of yourself as a collection of parts
that you can use. You know, your consumer power to
buy and to change rather than thinking of yourself as
a whole, living person. So if you're gonna go tinkerball
for Instagram if it gives you confidence, like, okay, that's fine,
but just don't claim it as this sort of empowered
feminist act. We're on some tricky philosophical ground here, so

(19:42):
I'm going to baby step it. If feminism is a
movement that fights for women's rights to lead self determined lives,
to expand their choices, does it necessarily follow that any
choice a woman makes is an exercise of feminism? Or
can women make choices that, even if they benefit them personally,
run opposite to feminist values? Does participating in beauty culture

(20:07):
help me as an individual but also perpetuate lousy ideas
that hamstring women generally? And then on the flip side,
isn't criticizing a woman's choice, particularly as it relates to
her own body like quintessentially anti feminist? The people you've
heard here don't seem interested in judging women on their

(20:29):
personal choices, but that doesn't mean they're not critical of
the culture that incentivizes them. Growing older for women is
a particular challenge to borrow a Brazilian phrase men age,
but women decay, you know or rocked Back to Alvaro
Harim Brazil and the strange story of Dr Evil. He

(20:50):
had kind of a weird eric about it. He argued
that it would somehow if you gave plastic surgery to
people that were criminals. He had this kind of criminological argument,
it would somehow help them become better people. The halo
effect is our propensity to assume that people with one
sort of positive trait, like good looks, have all sorts

(21:10):
of other virtues too. And Evil here seems to be
suggesting that a halo can be surgically sown in place.
Brazil also conceives of plastic surgery is self care. It
sort of understood us upkeep of the body right. People
told me it's like, I mean, brushing your teeth. You know,
it's a hygiene. Why wouldn't you get a facelift after

(21:31):
you turn fifty? The legacy of Dr Evil is complicated.
Remember talking to a nurse at the Evil Patanie Institute,
and she was very upset because she said, when I
began working here twenty years ago, it was mostly reconstructive,
was mostly reparative, and now it's mostly aesthetic and I
don't understand. And she was upset that the fact that

(21:51):
like a job that she really was proud to be
part of has become something very different. It can be
easy to judge the culture of invasive, painful, Sir Trees,
but I think any of us in that position would
probably say yes to it. We get to say no
because we have certain privileges to say no to those
kind of things and to be more critical of it.
So patients saw it as It's interesting they were so

(22:13):
critical of what they called the dictatorship of beauty. Some
people use that term at the same time that they
were acquiescing to participate in it. In my twenties, back
from India, I wanted to reject beauty culture, feminine ideals,
to go hardline aesthetic, explaining it's my mom. I told her,

(22:35):
beauty has nothing to do with a person's character and
it's fleeting anyway. It's foolish to get too attached. Your
voice is beautiful, my mom said, you don't get to
keep that forever, either, So what you shouldn't sing. As
my musical career progressed, photo shoots became commonplace, and I've

(22:57):
walked an uneasy line. It's fun to the glamorous, but
it's also like a drug that's too good to use
too often. And I've made these little rules, like I'm
allowed to wear blush every day, but not foundation. If
I post a flattering, dulled up picture, I've got to
post another planer one just to keep one foot on
solid ground. These rules are getting harder to follow as

(23:20):
I grow older. I asked cecily A k a bad
fat black girl about her regimen. I absolutely like I
wear makeup. I give myself a little bit of contour,
do my eyebrows almost religiously every day so that they
look more neat. I wear about a hundred different hairstyles

(23:42):
per year. I hey, whether they're wigs, whether their extensions,
whether they're you know, whether they're crochet. You know. So
like I'm a hundred percent participating a man, Is there
any part of you that resonates with people who would
have the concern that's like, um man, we are feeding

(24:04):
into a capitalist system that just asked us to spend
a lot of money on doing this right that like
thrives off a hundred percent. I just dropped five hundred
dollars during the safora sale. Part of me thinks about like, um,
like traffic, that's something that we all complain about, but
we all are it too, And I feel like culture

(24:26):
is sometimes it's like it's very difficult to completely divorce
from personal choices because it's personal choices and mass that
help create culture. Yes, everyone hates traffic, but everyone is
Traffic is a h true, but we are also talking
about people still having to get where they need to go,

(24:50):
and so who built the road to only have three
lines instead of seven which created a floor traffic that
is now terrible for everyone. You get what I'm saying.
Who decides what is view full and what is not
and what people deserve who are beautiful and what people
who are beautiful don't deserve. It will always come back
to that. For me, we love beauty, but we dried vanity.

(25:15):
Many of us think that beauty is over indexed, but
you're still not supposed to cheat that broken game, like
lunges are okay and light bulb is not. Natural is
better than the artificial, but it's hard to know where
to draw the line between them. Participating in beauty culture
only makes it worse. The whole thing balanced on gross

(25:37):
racial ideas, and yet non participation seems kind of futile.
Showing a bare face at the office might just elicit
concern from your colleagues who keep asking if you're under
the weather. Here are a few lyrics from a song
I wrote while ruminating on this stuff, with a little
radio in it. I think beauty muck to suck. It's

(26:00):
like sugar in the natural world. We never get this much,
and so the appetite is bottom. Let's call Mabeline anonymous
by narcissists. Of all of us, we never get enow,
but still we get into the car because we've got
someplace to be. So check your lashes in the mirror
and you turn the engine over. Deeply Human is a

(26:24):
BBC World service in American public media co production with
I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Medessa. Find me
online at Dessa on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter.
Next time on Deeply Human. If sleep is so important
to our health and well being, then why does so

(26:45):
many of us struggle to go down and stay down
for a full night of rest. Join Medessa and asking
why do we suck? It's sleeping