A beautiful exterior bolsters your self-esteem and thereby helps keep you healthy

Apr 23 2005

A beautiful exterior bolsters your self-esteem and thereby helps keep you healthy. This is a common argument in favor of beauty surgery, which has been scrutinized in a dissertation from Linköping University in Sweden. Beauty surgery, or aesthetic surgery, is a rapidly growing business. The first clinic in Sweden opened in the 1980s. Today there are more than 30 clinics that offer aesthetic surgery.

“They run a business that arouses strong feelings in many people,” says Anita Andersson, who just took her doctorate at Theme Health, Linköping University.

She studied how beauty surgery is presented in order to achieve cultural legitimacy. What arguments are used to make it seem like a feasible, plausible, attractive, and meaningful practice?

Her material consists, on the one hand, of the clinics’ own presentations and, on the other hand, articles in the weeklies and tabloid press. It’s a matter of creating a justification and credibility for these activities and to make them seem attractive to the general public.

Anita Andersson maintains that three culturally viable values are central here: freedom, health, and naturalness.

“Both advocates and critics of beauty surgery relate to these universal values, but they fill them with different meaning.”

To advocates, freedom is precisely the right to choose what you look like. To critics, freedom is to feel that you are good enough as you are, not to have to live up to some ideal of beauty.

Naturalness, to advocates, is to be able to choose a body that looks natural, that you feel good in, even though it was created by surgical operation. To critics, bodies that have not undergone aesthetic surgery are more natural.

Health, finally, is associated with self-esteem and mental well-being. To advocates of aesthetic surgery, this is achieved precisely by correcting your imperfections and feeling that you are a more beautiful person. Critics, on the other hand, claim that the business creates poor self-esteem in people by emphasizing looks so much.

Proponents of aesthetic surgery maintain that beauty can be determined objectively, regardless of shifting fashions and cultural peculiarities. There is an objective ideal­-and it is now technologically possible to realize it. At the same time, the business argues for a subjective freedom of choice. Thanks to aesthetic surgery, everyone can now look the way they want to look; you don’t have to be satisfied with the body you were given.

Aesthetic surgery has the potential to grow even more, according to Anita Andersson.

“Traditionally the major target group has been women, but now the marketing is turning to men. Looks are presented as visual capital that is important in how successful we are in our social lives and in our careers.”