Unnatural Beauty (From Hereford Times)

Unnatural Beauty

4:48pm Wednesday 7th March 2007

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Cosmetic surgery has been in the national news again this week. Mintel’s UK based research revealed that 50% of women surveyed would consider plastic surgery. I found this news disturbing.....

Surgery is a painful, risky process. But now, amid the frenzy to look unnaturally ‘good’, an increasing number of people, mainly women , think the benefits outweigh the risks.

When I ventured onto the net to find out more I came across an even more disturbing statistic. In Seoul, South Korea, the ‘nip and tuck’ capital of the world, 50% of women in their 20s have had some form of cosmetic surgery. I just don’t understand why so many beautiful young women in their prime would be willing to go under the knife? Does an eyelid operation to change an eastern looking eye to a western looking eye really make a person more beautiful? What is beauty anyway, physical appearance or a quality you exude?

What started out as a technique to repair an unsightly birth defect or an injury, in order to help people appear normal, is now being used to defy nature. It is not natural for a fifty year old to have a wrinkle free face or for a petite woman to have breasts like balloons.

It occurred to me that what is happening at the level of the individual is being mirrored at a planetary level. We are tampering with nature, ignoring her laws and creating unhealthy, unnatural situations. Interventions are becoming more dramatic and ugly mistakes are being made.

We have created a society in which a large percentage of women are unhappy in their skins and we have built a huge industry that trades on their unhappiness. It’s an unsustainable view of beauty propped up by and unsustainable industry.

We seem to have forgotten that we are part of nature and that nature is profoundly beautiful. If we could just remember this maybe we wouldn’t be so willing to mutilate ourselves nor would we be so willing to mutilate the planet.

Shirley Ali-Khan