Ugly Beauty

by Ruth Brandon

  Similar fears resurfaced in the economic crisis year of 2008. As always in a time of recession, the beauty business boomed. In America, a total of 12.1 million cosmetic procedures took place—despite the recession, a 3-percent increase over the preceding year. People were, however, less inclined to go for pure “bling”: Dr. Richard Baxter, a plastic surgeon in Washington State, noticed a marked decrease in the size of breast implants as the economy started to go downhill. Before the recession, fewer than a third of his clients chose a B cup implant; after, about half picked a B. “People have turned to more natural-looking things,” he said.21 But men as well as women now turned to the beauty industry in hopes that it might make them seem more desirable to employers. In 2008’s first quarter, one big U.K. cosmetic group reported a 17-percent rise in male face-lifts, while over 5,200 men consulted for other youth-enhancing procedures.22 In the last three months of that same year, a time when thousands of workers in financial institutions lost their jobs, there was a 10-percent rise in face-lifts for men countrywide as sacked bankers used their severance packages to buy plastic surgery.23 “There was this notion in the City [of London] where the older partners felt threatened by the younger partners,” said Dr. Glancey (who also saw a marked increase in the number of men coming to her for treatment). “They didn’t want to look too tired. That tells everyone you’re not going to be as good as a young person. If your face doesn’t give that message then perhaps they’ll forget how old you really are.”

  Naturally this becomes even edgier if everyone else in the office has had the signs of advancing years removed. It’s a classic example of positive feedback: once your competitors have had “work done,” the notion of what’s acceptable changes, and you’re obliged to go down the same route merely in order to stay in the game.

  For as youth increasingly becomes a necessary qualification for success, aging, even for the happily partnered and employed, has become frightening and unacceptable. “I’m not alone in thinking the idea of being 50 is an absolute outrage,” confessed journalist Christa D’Souza. “If you were to look at [my] photograph and tell me you see an attractive middle-aged woman (for that technically is what I am at 46) I’d not be merely insulted, I’d feel, on some level, that I had failed.”24 But at what? At holding back age itself? Does looking younger make people feel younger? It is true that as longevity increases, forty will genuinely become, as we’re constantly told, the new thirty. In 2000, the average German was 39.9 years old and could expect to live another 39.2 years; middle age could therefore be said to occur at age 40. But by 2050, the average German will be 51.9 years old and will live, on average, another 37.1 years, pushing middle age back five years.25

  Face-lifts, then, may help reconcile people not only to the inevitability of getting older, but of being old longer. Writer Linda Brown said that when she first had her face-lift she felt her face no longer really belonged to her—it was simply “the face.” “I wanted me back,” she said. “I couldn’t reconcile myself to the woman in the mirror—I just couldn’t relate to this woman at all.” That is easy to imagine, for we have all met that woman, and she is oddly unnerving: neither old nor young but rather, indefinably, outside age. Hers is the face of cosmetic surgery, the face of our times. And however familiar on others, to meet it in the mirror must inevitably be an odd experience. As the weeks passed, though, Brown got accustomed to it. “I now look like ‘me.’ I don’t care about the red marks, I think for the first time in my life I don’t have to compensate.”26

  I can personally attest to the irresistible allure of cosmetic surgery. I was brought up to assume that one made the best of what one had been given: in my case, large breasts. I’ve always hated them, but the thought of doing anything about them (other than wearing a good bra) never seriously crossed my mind. Perhaps that was stupid: Peter the surgeon thinks breast operations almost always leave the woman much happier than before. But my bikini-wearing days are over, nor do I any longer lust after strapless or spaghetti-strap dresses. It seemed inconceivable I would ever consider such an operation now.

  In a spirit of inquiry, however, and for the purposes of this book, I arranged a consultation with one of the cosmetic-surgery practices whose ads, plastered throughout the London transport system, encourage travelers to “Shape up for summer!” Adorned with photos of improbably self-supporting cleavage, the advertisers imply that buying new breasts is no more problematic or significant (though a little more expensive) than buying a new swimsuit. The ad gave a phone number and urged tube-riders to call for a free consultation. So I did.

  The practice was located in London’s Harley Street, the traditional address of Britain’s grander doctors, and one of the planet’s most expensive parcels of real estate. A quick trawl through the Internet revealed at least thirty-two different plastic-surgery clinics and practitioners located there, and even more in the surrounding streets. Presumably Harley Street’s aura of oak-aged respectability offers a counterweight to cosmetic surgery’s still somewhat tacky image, compounded of dubious outcomes, tasteless advertising (one such ad, urging customers to “Make Yourself Amazing,” offers £750 off breast augmentations if they take a late booking and fill a vacant slot), medical tourism, and easy finance.

  The group with which I had my appointment started out twenty years ago with one clinic. Now it has sixteen nationwide. In the waiting area, which takes up the entire ground floor, every seat was occupied, with a six-deep queue at reception. Most of the patients were women, though there were a couple of young men. (In fact, I was told, 40 percent of this group’s clientele is now male.) Many of those waiting were clearly habitués, in for a quick touch-up: “Vicky, you know your way downstairs—thank you, honey,” the receptionist trilled. I had never met her, and was there to discuss what is in fact quite a serious operation, but I, too, was unhesitatingly greeted by my first name: “Hallo, Ruth.”

  When I got to see the nurse I was quite open about my reason for being there, and assured her there was little chance I would actually have the operation. But we agreed that she would nonetheless take me through the consultation as though I were one of her more usual customers—who generally, once they’ve saved up the money, can’t wait to get it done. The booklet she gave me to take away urged patients to “take a period of 7–14 days to consider,” which must mean that many don’t. We began with pictures—befores and afters—and then the nurse explained what the procedures would be, and the costs. With one night in hospital, a breast reduction would cost me £5,720 ($9,180), with two nights, £5,990 ($9,600), plus another £300 ($480) for a subsequent necessary injection. That is serious money, for which I have other uses. But as we went on, and against all expectation, I found myself wondering whether, perhaps, I mightn’t have the operation after all. Was it too late, even now, to release my inner Venus de Milo? If I’d still been in the spaghetti-strap market, I’d almost certainly have done it.

  Vanity, vanity. But research shows that this desire to attain something nearer one’s ideal physical self is more than that. Our preference for attractive people over plain ones is hardwired. When newborn infants as young as one day old are shown pairs of photographed faces, one judged attractive by adult subjects, one judged plain by the same subjects, the babies spend more time looking at the attractive face.27 Such innate preferences must affect how others judge us, yet until now we have never been able permanently to alter our less attractive physical characteristics.

  Which would seem to imply that the real gift is age
ncy: the fact that we are now able to take the necessary action. A 1995 study of cosmetic surgery included one woman whose breast augmentation went disastrously wrong, leading to multiple correctional operations and scarring. But she was still pleased she had had the procedure done. Before it she had seen life as a downward spiral over which she had no control; after, she felt determined to keep going.28 Next time, it would turn out better. In our age of infinite choice, a new and better possibility is always available, in bodies as in everything else. And there can always be a next time. And another. And another. . .

  III

  But if new bodies, and new faces, are available off the rack, how will we choose which to select? Who sets the fashionable ideal?

  The answer is: some enviable, powerful other. The look of the eighteenth-century French court, for example, was not only clownish but dangerous. Everyone knew that the skin-whitening paste called ceruse, made from lead, was a deadly poison that ruined the skin it covered and could cause death. But the king painted his face in this way; and rather than risk losing their social position by appearing outlandishly unpainted, members of the court made themselves up to match.

  More recently the choice has often been a matter of race. Sometimes, as with those who sought urgent nose jobs in Nazi Germany, “passing” can be a matter of life and death. More often people simply want to look like the majority, because that majority holds the social and economic power. “Trying to succeed in a white world is very, very difficult,” said Sami, a young Malaysian man living in Britain. “It’s hard enough if you’re white—but even harder if you’re black.” Sami was about to spend 40,000 euros on a leg-lengthening operation because he felt his present height—5’2”, nothing unusual in Malaysia, where the average male height is 5’4”—made it impossible to be taken seriously in a society where the average man is 5’9” tall. And from mere practicality—aping the looks of the powerful because that will make life easier—it is a short step to finding those looks aesthetically preferable.

  It is thus not surprising, though still depressing, that America’s first black self-made millionaire, Sarah Breedlove, aka Madam C. J. Walker, made her money by developing hair-straightening products such as the hot comb. “Hair pressing was a ritual of black women’s culture of intimacy,” wrote the black author and historian bell hooks. “It was a world where the images constructed as barriers between one’s self and the world were briefly let go. . . . I was overjoyed when mama finally agreed I could join the Saturday ritual.” Later, hooks abandoned straightened hair, wearing her “natural” as a political declaration. But “For years I still considered it a problem. . . . It has been only in recent years that I have ceased to worry about what other people would say about my hair.”29 Similarly, flat-chested Asian girls living in Caucasian societies seek breast enlargements to conform to the white notion of what is beautiful, while big-bosomed black women seek reductions for the same reason.

  Recently, L’Oréal has used two nonwhite women as its “face”: singer Beyoncé Knowles and Freida Pinto, who starred in the film Slumdog Millionaire. In both cases, however, the pictures used in the ads showed them paler than in real life. When a storm of protest was raised by the sudden lightening of Beyoncé, L’Oréal said it was “categorically untrue that L’Oréal Paris altered Ms. Knowles’s features or skin tone in the campaign.” But the fact remained: the image they used was lighter than any other photo of Beyoncé. If L’Oréal Paris had not done the alteration, someone most certainly had. Presumably it was thought the main customer-base was not yet ready to emulate anyone more than slightly coffee-colored.2

  Above and beyond the thorny issue of race, however, the lightening of Beyoncé raises interesting questions. They concern the relations between photography and the beauty industry; for not only do the age of mass cosmetics and the age of universal photography coincide, they are inextricably intertwined. Powerful new technologies inevitably affect our perceptions. The arrival of the gramophone changed the way we listened to music. And in the same way, the arrival of photography revolutionized the way we visualized ourselves. For the first time in history, we could obtain, at any moment, a record of ourselves as others saw us—and use that image to experiment with ways of improving what they saw. From then on, the camera dictated the way we wanted to look. And despite the camera’s deceptive instantaneity, that look was always far from nature.

  Photography has always been an art as much as a recording device. Because the earliest photographic films were more sensitive to blues than reds, and so didn’t properly register flesh-tones, the detail of early portraits had to be manually adjusted after the event. And when both films and cameras became more efficient, a new problem arose. The super-sharp images were wonderful for landscapes and buildings, and also for portraits when the intention was documentary, as in pictures of relentlessly weathered Native American braves or aging, bewhiskered prime ministers. But a pitiless record of every pore was not what a lady required. Often, therefore, photographers inserted a kindly blurring, softening the focus until blemishes were obscured in a gentle fuzz. After the small photographs known as cartes-de-visite became de rigueur in the 1860s, every woman visualized herself as she might be when posed in soft focus against a studio background.

  It was this photo-face, painstakingly smoothed and prepared, that Helena Rubinstein presented to her customers, both in her advertisements and in all the other extensive publicity she engineered. Madame, as she appeared in those photos, was everything implied by the word soignée, her hair glossily in place, her skin matte, white, and flawless, her lips a perfectly outlined scarlet jewel, her face—even in her sixties and seventies—preternaturally devoid of wrinkles. Often pictured in her lab coat, she looked calm, dignified, smooth, youthful, elegant, an image of perfection that was far from the chaotic and substantial reality. “I had to airbrush inches from her waist!” moaned photographer Cecil Beaton after snapping the distinctly rotund Madame of the 1930s; and snapshots taken at less guarded moments show how much of this ideal look was achieved by a combination of skillful makeup and photographer’s artifice. But the alteration had a significance over and above vanity. It was the photographs, not the unretouched reality, that defined the look women wanted to emulate; and the cosmetics those photographs sold gave them the means to do so.

  Other cosmetics companies of course used their own endorsers, chosen from among society’s enviable strata—which at first meant socialites. During the 1920s, Pond’s Cold Cream divided these ladies into two classes—$1,000 people and $500 people—approaching them for endorsements around the twentieth of the month, when their allowances were getting depleted. They also recruited some genuine aristocrats from Europe—the Duchesse de Richelieu, Lady Mountbatten, and Queen Marie of Romania “a bargain [who] endorsed for $2,000, two silver boxes, and a miniature of herself by de Laszlo.”30 There, under a misty photograph, nestled the illustrious name; but you would have been hard put to identify its original if you passed her in the street.

  Soon, however, these blurry socialites were supplanted by a new, specifically photographic aristocracy: film stars. Traditionally, actresses had been classed with courtesans, and had ranked similarly low in society. But photography—and, a little later, and definitively, cinematography—transformed them into goddesses, their images known and worshipped across the world. Constance Talmadge, one of the great stars of the silent screen, was said to have posed for 400 testimonial photographs in one day, “showing a set of white teeth due to the exclusive use of Pepsode
nt, Iodent, Kolynos, Dentyne, Ipoma, Squibbs, Lyon’s, Colgate’s or Pebeco.”31 Between takes, maids would help change her outfit, and stagehands would rearrange the settings.

  These endorsement photographs were quite obviously posed. But soon a different class of pictures entered the public’s photographic consciousness: the off-duty “snapshots” that became such an important part of Hollywood publicity. These photographs, the public was given to understand, represented the movie gods and goddesses in their casual, offscreen moments. The truth, of course, was that nothing could have been less casual: those perfectly clear complexions with their carefully graded highlights, those huge, mascaraed eyes, those big scarlet lips, that hair glowing with improbable brilliance and color, were the result of careful makeup, endless posing, skillful lighting, and, usually, extensive retouching.