British Beauty Writers Sound Off On Surgery
If you’re a frequent online reader about cosmetic surgery, you’re probably all too familiar with the “age gracefully” versus “freedom to enhance” type arguments. The UK Observer recently published an opinion piece that sums up each position fairly well. British journalist Alice Hart-Davis and Grazia beauty director Annabel Jones offer contrasting arguments in response to the question “Can cosmetic surgery ever be a viable solution to aging?”
The question is inherently flawed – there is no “viable solution” to aging. Unless you’re very optimistic about regenerative medicine and stem cell research, the aging process is a fact that must be accepted. So, perhaps the word “solution” is misleading; cosmetic surgery doesn’t have a solution to aging, but it does offer many options.
Options for mitigating the effects of aging are wide ranging and highly individualized. One person may be satisfied simply with “great skincare, clever makeup, and an amazing haircut” – but that doesn’t mean you or I need to be. Individuality is key, and the ways in which cosmetic surgery affects a person’s individuality seems to be an underlying point of contention between these two journalists.
Jones asks rather naively, “What’s the point of having work done if you end up looking like an identikit version of every other woman in your doctor’s surgery?” She assumes that plastic and cosmetic surgeons aim for some objective, ideal form of beauty, and offer no concern for each patient’s autonomy or individual aesthetic. This assumption is way off the mark, as any good surgeon can attest.
When cosmetic surgery enhances a person’s individual beauty in accord with that person’s desires, it can actually serve as an expression of autonomy. Ideally, the end result should reflect a combination of three things: the patient’s goals, the patient’s natural characteristics, and the surgeon’s aesthetic sense. The aims of cosmetic surgery just aren’t as simple as many would lead you to believe.
Their arguments also beg the question, where do we draw the line between reasonable and excessive cosmetic interventions? Ms. Hart-Davis refers to “a slippery slope on which everyone will have their own stopping point,” and she’s correct; trying to make a distinction between cosmetic interventions that are deemed reasonable or excessive will likely use some arbitrary criterion, so the distinction must ultimately be made by the individual.
However, Jones employs the same “slippery slope” concept in absolute terms saying, “once you start [cosmetic surgery], there’s no going back.” It is unclear whether she means to argue that there is no “stopping point” or that there’s no returning to your “real” self once you’ve begun.
First of all, each individual can decide when enough is enough. Second, because aging and life change our bodies and selves over time, there’s no “going back” for any of us – cosmetically enhanced or not.
