'Beauty' is revealing in more ways than one
Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery, By Alex Kuczynski, Doubleday, 290 pp., $24.95
In Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray ," an attractive young man who worships his own beauty seems to stop aging, while a portrait that he keeps hidden grows old, wrinkled, hideous, and cruel. In
But when a friend's death coincides with long-held plans to plump her upper lip, she realizes that she, too, has become a kind of monster under the surface.
Kuczynski figures that she can go to the funeral, get her injection, and be back in time to commemorate her friend's life. Then, her lip swells up. She goes home and drinks vodka out of a mug. The next day she watches the morning news shows, mentally critiquing Charles Gibson 's "droopy nasolabial folds."
It is a repulsive scene.
"I had grown as vain and silly as any teenage pop star with lip implants and a bad boob job," she writes. "Worse still, my very perception had become warped."
In Kuczynski's wide-ranging look at the booming cosmetic surgery industry, that perception stylishly (and sometimes disturbingly) underlies the stories about the psychology, health risks, and financial aspects of contemporary vanity.
While consumer society has made cosmetic surgery a recreational activity that figures in reality-TV shows and dramas, Kuczynski points out that it was once purely reconstructive. As medicine improved, more soldiers return ed alive from war, but often "mutilated beyond recognition," with horrific injuries including entire faces that needed to be rebuilt.
But as vanity and capitalism have intervened, the possibilities have exploded. We are now offered a litany of beautification procedures that can be almost mesmerizing. The GORE -TEX used in your raincoat can also be used to smooth your wrinkles. A foot doctor in New York fields constant requests from women who want to look good in their Jimmy Choo s. Surgeons can "lift" just about anything -- including genitals.
"Beauty Junkies" scrutinizes beauty addicts, doctors, fraud s , and occasional tragedies from all angles. Kuczynski approaches the topic with sarcasm and a critic's eye and even manages a bit of empathy for the self-obsessed beauty addicts she profiles.
But there is a strange dynamic through the book as she slips from a reporter scrutinizing the beauty industry to a person who has bought into the rhetoric.
She bemoans her puffy eyelids but says she is only "relatively obsessed" with her looks. She lives in a world where even her cleaning lady has had an eye lift. Even after liposuction, an eye lift, and lots of Botox, Kuczynski takes time to "marvel at my restraint" when she finally decides to swear off any more procedures.
And in the last pages, she writes a defense of cosmetic surgery that rapidly veers into bizarre and grandiose terms. "But perhaps it is merely part of the evolutionary cycle that those who survive their beautification process . . . flourish and pass their genes on to the next generation," she writes. "Ultimately, most arguments for cosmetic surgery pivot on the notion of choice. . . . And, really, the most ignorant of human conditions is the act of imposing tyranny over another person."
Nose jobs and eye lifts as a kind of modern-day natural selection? Our right to Botox as a defense against tyranny?
It's a disturbing moralizing message, one that seems bound to deepen any reader's frown lines.
