Among the many aliens invented by Gene Roddenberry and his creative progeny for the Star Trek universe, arguably the most intriguing were those species that existed without concrete form disembodied intelligence communicating through invisible mental links with corporeal humans.
We can no more imagine existing without a physical body than we can envision time travel. Defining the physical body seems to be an intrinsically human preoccupation, the manifestations of which are determined by time and culture. We mark, adorn, and otherwise manipulate our physical containers in order to announce our acquired or desired social affiliations, values, and beliefs. This process of self-definition repeats itself endlessly with each human being born. Physical alteration thus has many purposes beyond vanity and the search for beauty.
Nevertheless, for centuries the quest for beauty, or at least the quest to become less unbeautiful, has motivated individuals to alter their appearance. The cultural implications of this quest have been debated by many, from feminists to economists, resulting in a number of interesting but so far unanswered questions about cosmetic medical care.
For example, is cosmetic surgery a good thing or a bad thing? Are women cultural lemmings, hapless victims of marketing Svengalis, or are they exercising their rights to make decisions about their own bodies? What role do the media play in soliciting patients for cosmetic procedures? Are the media whores for advertisers, or is there really such a thing as independent content? How can a potential patient distinguish between hype and reality? What is the proper role of doctors on the pathway to cosmetic interventions? What risks should a person reasonably take to alter her or his appearance? Can beauty be defined?
A prospective cosmetic medical patient must be able to articulate a personal definition of beauty because patients and providers need to agree on aesthetic goals before determining if those goals can be achieved. Western ideals of beauty have traditionally been based on rules of proportion and balance developed by the Greek philosopher Plato and his followers, and from these rules artists and plastic surgeons developed aesthetic norms that are often used to determine ideal facial ratios for patients undergoing reconstructive or cosmetic operations. Yet when anthropologists measure faces generally considered to be beautiful, these beauties often do not “measure up.”
Their proportions fall outside the established ideals. Nonetheless, surgeons continue to use aesthetic norms when designing operations, and some still claim the classic Western proportions as the ideal. Only fairly recently have some cosmetic surgeons understood that all those brow-lift patients with the surprised appearance look that way because their eyebrows are simply up too far, partly as a result of surgeons using “ideal” measurements defined in the academic literature.
By the same token, it certainly does not make sense for a patient to request cosmetic surgery to look like, say, Brad Pitt, because it is impossible to re-create all of the physical nuances that in toto are recognized as Brad Pitt’s face.
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