Cultural Influences
The public is assaulted continually with a barrage of articles in newspapers, fashion magazines, and self-improvement books about plastic surgery and the “miracles” that can be achieved by the physical reworking of one's body. Health columnists in community and national newspapers publicize any new procedure possible on faces, hips, and breasts—no matter how incremental or untested. Advertisements for colored contact lenses, permanent eyeliner, collagen injections, leg veins, and liposuction fill the back pages of Sunday newspaper magazine sections. While one may shake his or her head ruefully and dismiss all of this as postmodern folly, we cannot ignore the antiquity and ubiquitous nature of invasive procedures done for personal beautification.
The art of body enhancement by making physical change is described in most primitive groups and essentially all of the higher cultures. Tribesmen in Brazil wear disks and plugs as jewelry in perforated and progressively stretched lips and earlobes. Scarification of the skin as a method of beautification or a mark of distinction is commonplace in African tribes. In ancient Athens, women bound their chests tightly to produce atrophy of the breasts since the small, firm breast was associated with poise and grace. In Chaucer's day, the voluptuous breast was found only on peasants, and women of the upper class resorted to continuous chest binding to produce breast wasting. From this small sampling of hundreds of instances of manipulation of the appearance, it becomes clear that not only are people prepared to embark on physical interventions but also this is not done to meet an objective standard of beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and man's concept of ideal beauty seems to be relative and heavily influenced by his cultural environment.
In addition to varying from culture to culture, and from society to society, concepts of beauty are dynamic and change over time. In America, the idealized female face has changed form the soft, round, baby-doll features of the 1930's to the more angular and strong face we see in today's attractive woman. The idealized male face has gone from the chiseled-looking, pencil-mustached matinee-idol regularity of Tyrone Power or Clark Gable to the far-from-classic unkempt looks of Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. And even as society at large changes its perceptions of its “ideal” or most attractive members, so do the individual members adjust the context in which they see themselves.