Born With It

a very thin mask of pastes and pressed powders. You can't see the makeup artist's handywork while they're at it, so you're just sort of left guessing how all of these colors are combining on your head. The last step is the false eyelashes. I remember this dude carefully gluing them to my eyelids. Then it was time for the big reveal. I was handed a mirror, but I couldn't see myself because he'd accidentally glued my eyes shot, and so instead of feeling like a movie star, I felt

like a fetal piglet. I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human. Today is about beauty and ethics. And the intersection between them stuff. I've personally spent a lot of time thinking about why is beautification so ethically fraught. Celebrities take heat for getting botox or lip fillers. Most of us have, at some time or another been shamed for trying too hard make up with the jim that's a hot button one, or for not trying hard enough your teenage self getting

pestered into a haircut. Maybe plastic surgery is particularly likely to evoke moral feelings, so let's start there. We begin with a fire in the nineteen sixties. There was a big circus fire where lots of lots of people died, and there was a lot of burned victims, hundreds of burned victims in the city of Nidoi, which across the bay from me, the Genneiro, And it was just like a big tragedy. It hit every single news headline. Mbers Alvaro Harin is a professor of anthropology at College of

the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He's also author of The Biopolitics of Beauty, which includes the story of the circus fire and a man named Dr Evil Beat. He was relatively young at the time he had to us return from getting his medical degree, he had become specialized in plastic surgery in Europe. Plastic surgery as we know it developed in Europe to treat survivors of the world wars. Shraplow wounds and trench warfare had created devastating facial injuries.

Plastic surgery has a deep tie to those victims of war, right, And there was this sounds of light, we need to help these people. With his foreign training, Dr Evil Beat was a godsend. In the wake of the fire, he treated the burn victims, many of whom were children, pro bono. He started a clinic to train others surgeons and his techniques, and Evil became a national hero. Brazil is now a beauty capital of the world, performing sky high numbers of

plastic surgeries every year. Right, so if you go to and you say, almost everybody knows what he is, right, really, very very f Plastic surgery started as morally unassailable. Surgeons were healers, treating people disfigured by violence and trauma, which

is not how we think about plastic surgery now. Being I always kind of scrolling through Instagram, and it was just something that I started noticing that a lot of the women I was seeing on my Explore page and who are getting a lot of likes and a lot of hard eye emojis and a lot of praise for their looks. Kind of all looks the same. That is Kelly McGuinty, who recently published her masters thesis on what's called Instagram face, a term popularized by writer you A.

Tolentino in an article for The New Yorker. In short, Instagram face is a small nose with no bumps, full lips, a sharp jawline, no double chin, high defined cheekbones, uplifted cat like eyes and uplifted arched eyebrows and taught skin like lifted and taught like you walked through a wind tunnel and got stuck. If you know the platform, you know the look. I think Bella Hadid, Chrissy Teagan, em Rata, Kylie Jenner, and Kelly has collected some hard data on

the phenomenon. I took the top fifty most followed models on Instagram, and I did a coding process where I said yes or no, do they have this feature that aligns with Instagram face. Almost all of those top fifty female faces had the prized features of Instagram face. There was a singular aesthetic to which all of these accounts seemed magnetized. And this this isn't just a certain sort of face being made popular by social media. It's about

social media making new faces. So this specific look Instagram face is largely only attainable through cosmetic interventions like botox, fillers, things of that sort. Some people are, of course born with it, but it's really hard to tell who. Botox, botch a line and toxin A is one of the most poisonous biological substances known to science. It's sometimes called the miracle poison, and when injected in really small doses,

it paralyzes facial muscles to smooth out wrinkles. You can use it under the tip of your nose to lift it. If you have kind of a downturn nose. You can now get a little bit of botox injected there, and I think they call it a tinker bell tip lift.

That's what they call it in their advertising. Plastic surgery clinics leverage the looks of famous face is a bunch of them offer Kylie packages, a suite of procedures to help you look more like Kylie Jenner, who has upwards of three million followers on Instagram, and for the record, has publicly discussed getting lip fillers. Kelly herself wasn't immune to the appeal of all those marketing promises. All of us have probably wished we saw something different in the mirror.

I got lip fillers a couple of years ago under the same kind of delusion that I didn't think I was pretty. I thought having fullor lips would make me pretty and would make me happy and make people like me. Um it didn't and actually ended up happening. Is I just found something else about myself I didn't like and wanted to fix that too. There's also a racial subtext to this entire conversation. It's like if colonization had a

face that said it would be in Instagram. Power From a white woman, that is writer and thinker Cecily Bowen, who goes by Bad Fat Black Girl online, she explains that our standards of beauty are inherently racialized. Lighter skin, certain hair textures as in like looser curls and patterns, and prioritize over other ones than her noses. For example, I think is one example of a physical feature that

is often associated with whiteness and thus more desirable. It's like no one is ever getting a nose job to make their nose fuller or bigger. Our looks can affect big life outcomes. So beauty isn't just a frivolous concern When people talk about, for example, pretty privilege, that is

a real thing. You know. There's research that shows that people who are perceived as more you know, traditionally attractive, are more likely to be hired for jobs, are more likely to make more money as they go through their lives, are more likely they have different access to different things. They're less likely to be profiled at a store or treat it poorly by a law enforcement officer. Note the transitivity here. Privilege comes from beauty, and beauty comes from

proximity to white features. On a trip to India in my twenties, I remember seeing an ad on the side of a building. The woman with a zipper running down the center of her face. She was being unzipped to reveal a paler version of herself to sell skin bleach. My cosmetic brand that made the stuff was a big name when I probably patronized back home in parts of Asia, the preference for fair skin predates colonial influence, but this overt nous and this shamelessness of it felt very new

to me. Some moral objections to cosmetic interventions start here. People have argued that straightening afro tech stred hair is a concession to standards of beauty that prize whiteness. The same goes for double eyelid surgery, which is sometimes given us a gift to teenagers in South Korea, a surgery that critics say creates a more western looking eye. Ditto for laser procedures that turn brown eyes blue. Beauty does not stay in its lane the cosmetic style. It pervades

all of our conversations. I don't think that we can detach beauty from any public facing aspect of culture, because beauty and desirability politics are always at play in terms of who we allow to be in the front. People criticize folks who get plastic surgery right as being like vain or you know. The shallow vanity is probably the

most common moral charge leveled against beautification. People are self absorbed if they spend too much time or too much money on their appearance, and if they're getting surgery, then they're shouldering real health risks. To proof positive that they care way too much about how they look, and there are risks, particularly with the procedure and vogue known as

the BBL. A Brazilian butt lift is essentially a procedure where fat light bol is usually done on a different area of the body, so it can be either the abdomen, the back, or even the arms of the thighs, and then that fat is essentially moved around and placed in the hip and blood areas, and so it gives you more of like a coke bottle shape and just you know, some some cakes back there. So we are back to Brazil. Let's rejoin Dr Evil Pani, rising star in the wake

of the Circus fire. Voky was very savvy and yeah, he wrote this book The Right to Beauty that was incredibly well received and people to this day use the term like plastic surgery patients that I talked to the pop hospans yet they say, yeah, we have the right to beauty because of up tank. Right. He told us that the right to be beautiful, it is important and

we need to offer to everybody. Evil positioned beauty is a class issue, successfully arguing that public hospitals should offer plastic surgery for cheap or even free for the Brazilian working class. They see them as amazing humanitarians that are offering beauty to the poor and that arelifting entire populations that would otherwise be downtrodden because they're not beautiful, because

the Brazilians belief that beauty is important. It was unfair, said Evil, that only the rich could afford his techniques a tummy tuck, say, with a scar low enough to be hidden in a bikini bottom. Plastic surgery wasn't only a treatment for people disfigured by accidents or battle. It was also, to use his phrase, for those betrayed by nature. I'm thinking of like some of the conversations that you

had with the recipients of surgical procedures like um. A teenage girl who was interested in having breast augmentation felt a lot better about the green light that she got from her doctor. If she had like a medicalized diagnosis of small breastedness. It justified it in her eyes and particularly the guys of her mom, that this was a condition right, That she had an abnormality hypotrophy of the mammary glance, which really just means you have small breasts.

Medicalizing a condition strengthened the argument that the state should pay for it and distanced patients from any suggestion of vanity. A formal diagnosis clearly warranted intervention. This motive thinking essentially pathologized ugliness. It blurs the line between reconstructive surgery and cosmetic procedures, implies that you can be injured not just by shrapnel, but by your own genes. I talked about us cosmetic citizenship. They think that they can only belong

in the resilientation if they're beautiful. I had talked to a surgeon that had surgery on his own wife and his own mother. You know, they're they're they're strange creatures in the sense that they really normalize it for everybody. I'm trying to not have a moral reaction in my investigative conversation about moral reactions, but I'm making a face that's intense A difficult entanglements of instinct, intellect, and ethics call for a particular sort of professional. What we need

is a philosopher. My name is Claire Chambers and I'm a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Isn't beauty like definitionally necessarily non inclusive, that like, not everybody can be it in the same way that like the word beautiful functions the way that the word tall functions.

It's in comparison to a collective average. But then there should be no shame and not being beautiful, right, So if beauty was just one way of succeeding or one way of excelling amongst others, then that might be fine to say that, you know, not everybody has to be beautiful. But that's not generally how we use it. It's a value that really takes on much more weight than it should. Nobody's exempt, but the own is to be beautiful ways

more heavily on some than others. Typically, women and girls are expected to be beautiful to a higher sort of standard of beauty than men and boys. Men conversely, can be stigmatized for being too image conscious, for preening or wearing guyliner. I'll note here, though, that these gendered norms have not always been so. In other times and places, beautification was more of the domain of dudes. Claire recently wrote a book It's called Intact, A Defense of the

Unmodified Body. You mentioned a procedure that I've never heard of in your book. What is a vampire facial? Basically, a vampire facial is when you have a facial which injects into your face platelets that are extracted from your own blood, hence the vampire idea. And I it's supposed to do something sort of magical to the texture of your skin. Because there's all these kinds of really quite gruesome proceiegures that have been all the time for beauty.

Japanese women have blackened their teeth, Dino's flattened their foreheads, Victorian ladies self administered poisons to dilate their eyes. But there's no need to venture to the extremes for ethical complexities. Consider the standard issue department store cosmetic counter. In the nineteen twenties, when makeup really took off in the US, Revalon was marketing cosmetics as Hope in a jar. Makeup, which is a product designed to change the way you look,

is often marketed for its undetectability. People won't know you're wearing it. It'll seem natural. We'll use the word natural usually to refer to things that we want to say, Ah good, it feels like my face is allowed to look like, it's not wearing makeup, but it's just not

allowed to look like my face, right, exactly, It's exactly it. Yeah, and if they're doing it successfully, and that we can't tell their wearing makeup, right, what the rest of us looking at them think is Wow, those other women's faces naturally don't have whatever it might be, dark circles, red patches, whatever the thing is that you're you're concerned about. So other women just look so much better than me, Naturally,

my face must be really bad. I once did a photo shoot for a cosmetic line, a pretty awesome one. I'm out Let's run independently and cruelty free, and helped to donate proceeds to a charity that supports women's literacy. And I remember receiving the first round of images, intensing they had been noticeably airbrushed since I was a kid. The tear trops beneath my eyes have been dark, sort of sunken. But the woman in the picture was smooth

and bright. She looked like me, but well, prettier, fresh faced, not so tired. The thing is, I do look tired. I am, in fact tired, and I felt guilty about suggesting otherwise I asked that the effect be dialed back, but I admit I didn't push to remove it all together. With daily wear makeup, most of us are cautious not to overcorrect to the point of conspicuousness. Looking totally fake would be bad, not just undesirable, but like morally bad.

Consider your own reaction to seeing someone selfie that's been obviously processed by a filter. Yeah, that's not even her real phase. It feels like a deception. But maybe makeup is just an Instagram filter you wear on the skin, and botox is just to filter that you were beneath it.

It almost feels like like cheating. So there are times when we think that what the body needs is it needs effort, right, what is virtuous is to spend effort on our bodies, And so maybe it's something like liposuction looks like we haven't spent enough effort or the right kind of effort. It's like, if you get plastic surgery, you're not earning beauty the way that you're supposed to. But I mean, it doesn't really best of class greets

me because undergoing surgery right is a huge effort. In many ways, we should not be creating a society where what are the huge sources of anxiety for people is that we don't look good enough, we don't look acceptable. If you've watched more than like twenty minutes of television, you've probably seen beauty products marketed as self esteem builders. They bring out our best selves, help us walk tall while striding into boardrooms in slow motion. Kelly, who researched

Instagram face, isn't convinced. I've gotta say I'm not really either. For me, I think that feeling empowering and being empowering are two different things. This equivalence of beauty and power is predicated on some pretty garbage ideas. I think it has origins to the history of how women have been placed as objects of desire for men self. For example, if we're sitting in a restaurant, we begin to picture what we look like sitting in that restaurant. We're taking

on this outside gays and imposing it on ourselves. This is what's called the male gaze. But now at the same time, it's not just men perpetuating it. It's women too. It's just thinking of yourself as a collection of parts that you can use. You know, your consumer power to buy and to change rather than thinking of yourself as a whole, living person. So if you're gonna go tinkerball for Instagram if it gives you confidence, like, okay, that's fine, but just don't claim it as this sort of empowered

feminist act. We're on some tricky philosophical ground here, so I'm going to baby step it. If feminism is a movement that fights for women's rights to lead self determined lives, to expand their choices, does it necessarily follow that any choice a woman makes is an exercise of feminism? Or can women make choices that, even if they benefit them personally, run opposite to feminist values? Does participating in beauty culture help me as an individual but also perpetuate lousy ideas

that hamstring women generally? And then on the flip side, isn't criticizing a woman's choice, particularly as it relates to her own body like quintessentially anti feminist? The people you've heard here don't seem interested in judging women on their personal choices, but that doesn't mean they're not critical of the culture that incentivizes them. Growing older for women is a particular challenge to borrow a Brazilian phrase men age, but women decay, you know or rocked Back to Alvaro

Harim Brazil and the strange story of Dr Evil. He had kind of a weird eric about it. He argued that it would somehow if you gave plastic surgery to people that were criminals. He had this kind of criminological argument, it would somehow help them become better people. The halo effect is our propensity to assume that people with one sort of positive trait, like good looks, have all sorts of other virtues too. And Evil here seems to be suggesting that a halo can be surgically sown in place.

Brazil also conceives of plastic surgery is self care. It sort of understood us upkeep of the body right. People told me it's like, I mean, brushing your teeth. You know, it's a hygiene. Why wouldn't you get a facelift after you turn fifty? The legacy of Dr Evil is complicated.

Remember talking to a nurse at the Evil Patanie Institute, and she was very upset because she said, when I began working here twenty years ago, it was mostly reconstructive, was mostly reparative, and now it's mostly aesthetic and I don't understand. And she was upset that the fact that like a job that she really was proud to be part of has become something very different. It can be easy to judge the culture of invasive, painful, Sir Trees, but I think any of us in that position would

probably say yes to it. We get to say no because we have certain privileges to say no to those kind of things and to be more critical of it. So patients saw it as It's interesting they were so critical of what they called the dictatorship of beauty. Some people use that term at the same time that they were acquiescing to participate in it. In my twenties, back from India, I wanted to reject beauty culture, feminine ideals,

to go hardline aesthetic, explaining it's my mom. I told her, beauty has nothing to do with a person's character and it's fleeting anyway. It's foolish to get too attached. Your voice is beautiful, my mom said, you don't get to keep that forever, either, So what you shouldn't sing. As my musical career progressed, photo shoots became commonplace, and I've walked an uneasy line. It's fun to the glamorous, but it's also like a drug that's too good to use

too often. And I've made these little rules, like I'm allowed to wear blush every day, but not foundation. If I post a flattering, dulled up picture, I've got to post another planer one just to keep one foot on solid ground. These rules are getting harder to follow as I grow older. I asked cecily A k a bad fat black girl about her regimen. I absolutely like I wear makeup. I give myself a little bit of contour, do my eyebrows almost religiously every day so that they

look more neat. I wear about a hundred different hairstyles per year. I hey, whether they're wigs, whether their extensions, whether they're you know, whether they're crochet. You know. So like I'm a hundred percent participating a man, Is there any part of you that resonates with people who would have the concern that's like, um man, we are feeding into a capitalist system that just asked us to spend a lot of money on doing this right that like

thrives off a hundred percent. I just dropped five hundred dollars during the safora sale. Part of me thinks about like, um, like traffic, that's something that we all complain about, but we all are it too, And I feel like culture is sometimes it's like it's very difficult to completely divorce from personal choices because it's personal choices and mass that

help create culture. Yes, everyone hates traffic, but everyone is Traffic is a h true, but we are also talking about people still having to get where they need to go, and so who built the road to only have three lines instead of seven which created a floor traffic that is now terrible for everyone. You get what I'm saying. Who decides what is view full and what is not and what people deserve who are beautiful and what people who are beautiful don't deserve. It will always come back

to that. For me, we love beauty, but we dried vanity. Many of us think that beauty is over indexed, but you're still not supposed to cheat that broken game, like lunges are okay and light bulb is not. Natural is better than the artificial, but it's hard to know where to draw the line between them. Participating in beauty culture only makes it worse. The whole thing balanced on gross racial ideas, and yet non participation seems kind of futile.

Showing a bare face at the office might just elicit concern from your colleagues who keep asking if you're under the weather. Here are a few lyrics from a song I wrote while ruminating on this stuff, with a little radio in it. I think beauty muck to suck. It's like sugar in the natural world. We never get this much, and so the appetite is bottom. Let's call Mabeline anonymous by narcissists. Of all of us, we never get enow, but still we get into the car because we've got

someplace to be. So check your lashes in the mirror and you turn the engine over. Deeply Human is a BBC World service in American public media co production with I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Medessa. Find me online at Dessa on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter. Next time on Deeply Human. If sleep is so important to our health and well being, then why does so many of us struggle to go down and stay down for a full night of rest. Join Medessa and asking why do we suck? It's sleeping