Throughout human history, manifestations of beauty have often been interpreted as good and ugliness as representing inferiority, or evil. Philosophy, literature, and myths frequently reflect this bias. Keats wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”2 During the Victorian era, women of good breeding were expected to maintain beauty in the home and to take responsibility for exposing children to the arts.
Some felt that women were also obligated to enhance their physical beauty in order to fulfill their role as the keepers of all that was beautiful and good; others felt that true beauty was an inner quality and that artificial physical enhancement was immoral. In terms of social engineering (if it was intended as such), those who promoted the inner beauty philosophy were not particularly successful. Women who could afford it had elaborate garments made and servants or slaves to maintain their elaborate hairstyles; those who could not afford such expense enlisted family members to help when it was time to be seen in public.
Religion has often had a practical impact on how physical beauty and adornment are judged. For example, the Puritans tried to enforce sumptuary laws that prohibited citizens from purchasing fancy apparel. Still, despite the limited influence of the Puritans’ asceticism and moral repressiveness, many people alive today were raised by parents and grandparents whose moral foundations were established around a framework of similar conservative values and whose influence feeds an undercurrent of discomfort with the present popularity of cosmetic medicine.
During the last one hundred years, given the legacy of the Puritans and the popular influence of the theories of Freudian psychoanalysis with their focus on body functions and shame, our society has been destined to argue about bodies, nudity, sex, vanity, and cosmetic interventions, even as all of those once covert subjects have gained exposure in everyday life. Recent polls indicate that vanity, at least, is no longer a cause for alarm. It appears that Americans consider vanity to be a minor sin at worst, and most people deny committing it. Certainly the popularity of cosmetic medicine today indicates that few people worry about being labeled vain.
Social attempts to define physical beauty can lead to ugly consequences, and this fact perhaps more than any other formed the historical foundation of today’s cosmetic medical business. There is a long, and at times unsavory, human tradition of efforts to classify beauty and other human attributes according to measur able physical characteristics. Visual categorization of certain features, such as noses, ears, and breasts, has often led to bias based on a person’s presumed ethnic or racial origins. Phrenology and physiognomy are two examples of ideas once popular, in which an “expert” supposedly could determine an individual’s nature based on an analysis of that person’s skull and facial features. A nose shape, for example, might indicate strength, refinement, commercialism, or weakness, and partic ular shapes were usually and unsubtly labeled to correspond with particular ethnic groups.
Someone during the early twentieth century even dreamed up the idea that providing cosmetic surgery to criminals would completely alter their personalities to the degree that they would “go straight.” As unlikely as this might seem today, the theory was so persistent that the authors of a textbook on cosmetic surgery of the nose published in 1951 actually felt compelled to address the topic: “There has been much overemphasis on the restoration of facial contour for the relief of character and personality defects, and it has been extended even to the attempted reclamation of criminals. Anyone who has seen the courage and splendid adjustments of . . . thousands of maimed soldiers . . . will find it almost impossible to believe that facial or nasal deformity in itself creates criminals.”
These theories of “anatomic predestination” influenced early cosmetic surgeons. In a paper published in 1887 and widely acknowledged, Dr. John Roe listed categories of noses: “Considered from the profile point of view alone, noses are classified according to their shape by students of physiognomy into five main classes: (1) the Roman noses; (2) the Greek noses; (3) the Jewish noses; (4) the Snub or Pug noses; and (5) the Celestial noses. These classes of noses, considered in the light of the characteristics of the race or class to which they are peculiar, are observed to indicate prominent traits of character . . .”
Physiognomy’s emphasis on the superiority of small, delicate features undoubtedly influenced the approach of many surgeons to rhinoplasty. It was decades before surgeons finally realized that a blueprint operation would not do and that the nose had to be harmonious with the face to which it was attached. It was in fact revolutionary when some of the most accomplished surgeons started to teach others that it was often necessary to add tissue in a cosmetic rhinoplasty rather than simply to reduce and narrow the nose.
On a broader scale physical beauty becomes social and economic currency. Physical attractiveness enhances a person’s appeal in all kinds of social relationships. In historical and present-day cultures where women are dependent on men for economic survival, a woman’s beauty enhances her value in the marriage market.
Physical beauty and fashion used to be concerns mainly of the upper classes. A servant who was caught trying to look fashionable might be punished for overstepping her “place” or perhaps for appearing to mock her superiors.
The industrialization and social forces that swept America at the turn of the twentieth century changed the social hierarchy of beauty. Widespread dissemination of images of beauty and feminine ideals ultimately democratized beauty and brought hairstyling and makeup advice to the masses. The “beauty parlor” era had begun. Beauty shops sprang up in back rooms and tiny storefronts everywhere; these small businesses brought women of all ages out of their homes to a place where anyone could get a professional manicure or “hairdo.”
Fabrics became affordable, pattern companies published the latest styles, and women could make fashionable clothes that previously would have been affordable only to the rich. Women could even consider cosmetic surgery. No longer was beauty and glamour the privilege only of the wealthy. Anyone could get a makeover.
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