The End of Natural Beauty?

This article is reprinted from American Sexuality magazine.

Sixteen was a particularly hard year for me. And not because I was still almost five feet tall, stuck in an Elita, my mouth paying eerie homage to a small cityscape during the industrial revolution. It was because sixteen was the year my mother's daily suggestion to remove the make-up off my moustache, the unkind effect of stale Covergirl foundation atop adolescent peach fuzz, finally got to me. So began our monthly mother-daughter appointments at the aesthetician's house, my upper lip swathed in Emla and Saran Wrap (an unlikely pairing only for the most naïve and hairless) to rid via electrocution every single follicle comprising my hateful orange stache.

A decade later, I couldn't be more thankful. Nor can I help but speculate the impact whiskers might have had on my life thus far. Would I be as successful? As happy? What about my love life? Would my husband have fallen in love with the original, mustached me?

Not a freakin' chance.

Which makes me wonder: Have our standards become too high? Is natural beauty a thing of the past?

"We are beginning to expect to see bodies that have been modified in significant ways, and we are less surprised by bodies that look explicitly manufactured," said Dr. Victoria Pitts-Taylor, associate professor of sociology at City University of New York and author of Surgery Junkies: Wellness and Pathology in Cosmetic Culture. According to Pitts-Taylor, over the past twenty odd years, Western notions of beauty have made a decisive shift toward a new "technological aesthetic."

"What counts as natural changes in every culture and epoch," she explained. "I believe we are now undergoing a transformation in our conception of the natural to accommodate high-tech surgery and continual, life-long regimens of cosmetic surgery (and beauty procedures)."

In other words, my husband is either blissfully unaware of my Sasquatch past, or merrily saving for the day we have a daughter of our own.

This prickly dose of reality should come as no surprise; altering our physical appearances to fit the style of the day, or more tellingly, to attract a mate, is a hallmark of Western beauty. Add a slew of plastic surgery makeover shows to the fray (The Swan, Extreme Makeover, and Dr. 90210), and it's a wonder women haven't all shorn their labia yet.

The advent of cosmetic procedures and plastic surgery, while raising our standards of what is (and is not) considered attractive, certainly didn't create them in the first place. Birmingham-based plastic surgeon and blogger Dr. Rob Oliver is quick to point out that "Baywatch Breasts" are not necessarily a new look.

"The 'mature' ptotic female breast (read: droopy boobs) has never been really celebrated ... Corsets and bras dating back to the French courts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were all designed to push up and augment the breast the same way a Wonderbra or implants do now."

To be sure, certain physical qualities in women -- rounded breasts, ample bottoms, small feet, and pouting lips -- have been consistently prized over the centuries. From an evolutionary perspective, such essentially female traits serve as markers of gender, differentiating the sexes and providing a mechanism to allure potential mates. Ergo, by exaggerating what is essentially feminine (or decidedly unmasculine) women can up their attractiveness ante.

Consider the ante officially upped. Today, women across the country (and to a lesser degree men) are approaching their beauty goals with a manic fervor once reserved for Tom Cruise, a couch, and Oprah.

"People judge you by the way you look, and looking well put together gives the impression that you know what you are doing," said *Lesley Jacobs, a fashion merchandiser from Montreal who is seemingly bent on erasing every last hirsute trace of Israeli ancestry from her lithe, twenty-seven-year-old frame. "Plus, guys talk to beautiful girls more."