Cosmetic Surgery Standard Of Beauty

Today’s teenagers live in a world in which people’s appearances can be synthetically altered through a series of operations to achieve the “most perfect” standard of beauty. Looking back over the ages, society has always prized and celebrated beauty: from foot-binding in China, to dangerously corseting waistlines in Victorian times, to neck elongations among the Masai tribe, humans have long since gone to various extremes to actualize some sought-after images of perfection. Given this age-old fixation with beauty, coupled with recent advances in medical technology, it may come as no surprise then that people have come to rely increasingly on cosmetic surgery as a way to achieve the most “noble” type of beauty. Only by “nipping and tucking”—going

A societal pressure to conform to western ideal of beauty has provoked Jessica Choi, an Asian girl who grew up in America, to desire the big blue eyes of the American and detest her small Asian eyes, after growing up with a lot of that stress, and that external pressure. Not surprisingly, in 2010, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons published that “13.1 million cosmetic procedures were performed in America, and 218,909 of those were performed on teenagers. More than 35,000 teenagers received nose jobs, 13,467 received Botox operations, and 8,525 received breast augmentation” (George). This disturbing trend shows that female Asian teenagers want to be less Asian and more westernized in appearance. Facial cosmetic surgery for Asians is no longer a means to renovate damaged tissues or an amelioration process to merely make them appear more attractive, but instead, a complete reconstructive process to look as “western” as possible. But these “so-called” western surgeries are far more insidious than simple cosmetic surgical procedures: the accentuation of Western beauty is another form of “cultural imperialism,” demeaning the value and unique characteristics only Asian people have. It is sad to see how people regard their own ethnic traits as unsatisfying and inferior to those from other countries. The overrepresentation of and conformity towards Western beauty not only dismantles

However, cosmetic surgery is a pernicious practice that not only galvanizes people’s minds to conform to society’s idealistic beauty standards by threatening ethnic diversity through the homogenization of races, but also brainwashes the public with an immutable metaphor that cosmetic surgery is the solution for gaining happiness and boosting self-esteem. To resolve this identity crisis and rescue females from falling into a state of addictive desperation for cosmetic surgery, the media industry must drastically cut down on the use of unrealistic models as definitions of ideal beauty. Instead of propagandizing the skewed images of ideal figures that are generously garnished by Photoshop, more diverse, well-balanced images of female models should be broadcasted to give a healthier psychological perception of reality that the common people can relate with. It is a sad truth that due to the authoritative control and inflexible nature of mass media, society will always have high standards for ideal beauty, which may be even worse in the future. However, given the deleterious effects that over-dependence on cosmetic surgery may bring to female teenagers, perhaps it would be preferable for female teenagers to turn to a safer, more wholesome way of achieving physical beauty: weight