“You are beautiful and they throw stones at you, you are ugly and they throw stones at you!”
Thus sang Antoine and Gian Pieretti way back in 1967. The pursuit of beauty and the contrast between ugliness and beauty go hand in hand, embedded in a vicious circle. Beauty is a constantly evolving concept, as standards vary according to different historical and socio-cultural moments. The same can be said for ugliness. Ugliness is associated with the unpleasant and the negative, so to counteract it, our ancestors already used makeup to look their best. In ancient Rome, hair dyes were prepared with natural ingredients, while the Egyptians used a sort of black charcoal to outline their eyes. Both men and women. How can we forget Cleopatra's magnetic gaze in depictions and later portrayed in blockbuster films ? Beauty is connected to caring for the body and its constituent parts. The strategic relationship between the body and society allows the body itself to transition from a natural object to a cultural object, thus it is socially constructed (Stella, 2001), or rather, it is a socially organized given (Sassatelli, 2005), influenced by various factors. The body as a sociological category is the structure that allows for action, uniting the subject's personal history with the impact of the social element (Lombardi 2005; 2008).
In search of beauty
Every day, women from all countries resort to cosmetics, dyes, botox, tanning lamps, interventions to appear attractive, tidy, or more simply, they follow diets to look at oneself satisfied in the mirror. The American philosopher Susan Bordo (1993) defined theanorexia a social phenomenon and a cultural malaise: fortunately, more and more space has been conquered by the so-called women curvy (in practice, those who wear a size 44 and above), positively reinforcing the image of curvy women. Beyoncé and Jennifer Lopez have globally accepted prominent butts as a quality, not a physical flaw to be improved. Between skinny and Mediterranean, where do "normal" women fit in? Too many labels define body shapes that, even in 2018, are at the center of conflicts, conditioning, and desires, both authentic and driven by current trends. In this scenario, the medicalization of beauty intervenes, proposing a stereotypical idea: a standardization of what is attractive, supported by the ever-increasing use of cosmetic surgery proceduresImproving one's appearance is a good thing, but how much does an intervention depend on one's own vision of what is pleasant and how much on socio-cultural and media conditioning? According to ISAPS, International Society of Aesthetic Plastic SurgeryIn 2016, Italy returned to the top five for the number of cosmetic procedures, ranking fourth after the USA, Brazil and Japan: a total of 957.814 procedures. The expression "cosmetic procedures" includes plastic surgery (including breast augmentation, liposuction, blepharoplasty, abdominoplasty, rhinoplasty) and non-surgical aesthetic procedures (for example, the use of botulinum toxin, hyaluronic acid, laser hair removal). Gender differences also emerge in this area: worldwide, out of a total of approximately 23 million aesthetic procedures, 86,2% of requests are by women (ISAPS, 2017).
What happened to uniqueness?
A small parenthesis regarding thevirtual beautificationThere are numerous applications capable of modifying images, slimming, rounding, and camouflaging supposed facial and body imperfections. All for social media use. Once again, the realms of reality and the virtual intersect. In short, the pursuit of beauty can be interpreted in three ways (Russo, 2015):
1) a strategy to colonize the woman's body;
2) a manifestation of self-determination based on a subjective vision;
3) an expression of a choice motivated by discomfort.
The myth of beauty still exerts influence on the female universe , as if this prerogative were capable of opening social doors that would otherwise remain closed to insignificant and plain people (Morgan, 1991): the body appears as material to be shaped and reshaped to avoid failure (Zanardo, 2010). Thus , the use of stratagems to beautify oneself, whether or not exceeding the limits of excess, is a palliative that likely conceals something else. Who knows if the sense of uniqueness will ever come back into fashion . Both its merits and its flaws.
Arianna Caccia
With a degree in Health and Lifestyle Sociology, I have a strong interest in the study and analysis of social phenomena. Always ready to learn and improve, I love reading, writing, Vasco Rossi and Rino Gaetano, and long walks in the countryside.
