Tailored perfection

The beauty business is booming. Advertisers and consumer goods manufacturers have joined hands to promote the ideal of perfection and are laughing all the way to the bank. Some serious questions need to be asked - at what cost do these assembly line beauties attain the perfect smile, glossy hair and flawless skin that make them clones of one another? In an age where empowerment is through the freedom of choice, surely goals should be more worthwhile, says VISA RAVINDRAN.

MANY readers, seeing the photograph of the latest Miss World and the two runners-up, commented on how similar the three women looked. Small wonder, when their beauty conforms so closely to prescribed norms that have experts working on their teeth, hair, figure, posture, skin and presence including their "inner beauty".

India Today's cover story for December 20, 1999, describes the various inputs in producing "the complete woman": dentists push the gums up to avoid gummy smiles, align the teeth by sawing off rough edges, surgically reshape jaws and artificially whiten teeth; the cosmetic surgeon provides dermabrasion to slough off dead skin, rhinoplasty for sharp and straight noses, surgery for perfect chins, silicon injections for a sexy pout of the lips; then comes the fitness expert who creates "a more sculpted look" with muscle toning and weight training, increases the bustline with a machine that builds up tissue in the breasts and uses liposuction to remove flab and then the etiquette teacher rounds off everything by helping the candidate to be focussed, achieve grace through dance training and inner beauty through mantras, meditation and Vedic diets. As fitness expert Ramma Bans is reported to have said, "Today, all a girl needs is good height and a reasonably pretty face. We can do the rest." "Miss World is therefore a highly prized/priced product produced from an assembly line of highly-skilled body tinkerers with the support of an avid group of advertisers and consumer goods manufacturers. While we shall not discuss here the import of "designer smiles" or the durability of speedily generated inner equilibrium, it is important to read the signals this whole industry sends to others.

April Eichmeir, writing on beauty pageants, says, "What young girls and women learn from pageants is that success, happiness, intelligence and worth requires one to be 'perfect' looking. Self-esteem and self-worth are more than appearance." Cottle says, "You don't have to be a rabid feminist to understand the downside of encouraging females to view nice teeth and glossy hair as indicative of a person's worth." Compare this with the fitness expert's confident boast - "If a girl can smile warmly, has good eye contact and a glowing aura, you have a winner." With India edging out Venezuela in the beauty sweepstakes, not only are all the vested interests delirious at the prospect of continuing to design winning products and raking in the profits, but the desire to win fame and fortune by this route is spreading to smaller towns and younger generations caught by the bug of "attaining beauty". Becoming Miss World, an ad suggests, is related even to getting lice out of your hair!

The questions that arise are - Do we all want to look alike? When so much work and support go into it, what is the winning beauty's own contribution? Can people really be taught "inner beauty" and urged "to smell the flowers"? Won't the spending of so much time and effort to enhance a natural attribute and turn it into a money spinner divert young minds from more worthwhile pursuits, undermine their self confidence and engage their time inordinately in the pursuit of beauty? Not forgetting older women tracing every wrinkle on their faces and rushing off to seek remedies out of the shiny jars in the supermarkets....

An important element of feminist discourse has been the danger of fragmentising of women's bodies (and of social roles too though that is the subject of another article). Beauty pageants and advertisements are constantly telling women that their bodies can be fragmented into different areas and worked on to achieve the "right" shape or size. Commenting on this, Ros Coward says, "We are set to work on an ever increasing number of areas of the body, labouring to perfect and eroticise an ever increasing number of erotogenic zones. Every minute region of the body is now exposed to this scrutiny by the ideal. Mouth, hair, eyes, eyelashes, nails, fingers, hands, teeth, lips, cheeks, shoulders, arms, legs, feet - all these and many more have become areas requiring work. Each area requires potions, moisturisers, conditioners, night creams, creams to cover up blemishes. Moisturise, display, clean off, rejuvenate - we could well be at it all day, preparing the face to meet the faces that we meet." The message is "measure up or you stand to lose, you have no choice."

This constant urge to rework oneself is multiplied several fold in aspiring for beauty crowns. When empowerment is about increasing choice, those working towards an artificially imposed ideal are moving towards a standardisation of looks that militates against natural diversity. Surely there are better goals than striving, breathless and half-starved, towards willowy figures, high cheekbones and pearl-drop nostrils! And the common oblivion into which most beauty queens retire into should be enough proof of how great a waste all that frenetic effort is for a brief moment of doubtful glory.

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