After some thought I've decided that I am against vanity operations, and the reason why might not be what you think.
Just now I was watching some before and after videos on Youtube. Some were about nosejobs, one was a slightly sickening celebration of beautiful people, one was dedicated solely to Mickey Rourke.
This man of amazing facial flexibility has looked like an Asian/Hispanic/Eastern European/vaguely Italian mob boss, a grandmother, a handsome man, a war torn gladiator, Johnny Handsome, a bowl of porridge poured into a ball sack, and what Bruce Willis would look like if you folded his face seven times and let angry cats unfold it.
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| "My strange and multi-colored facial hair is my only constant". |
Watching his video I thought "Okay, this is back when he was hired for his good looks. This part is from when his looks started to fade, but he still shouldn't have any trouble getting work. This part is post op for sure. He looks like a wedding cake three days after consumption".
As a socialist and the offspring of a parental hippie generation who didn't think they were hippies I have this knee-jerk mental reaction to plastic surgery where I just assume it will always be a disaster. Just please don't ask people like me about re-constructional surgery. We tend to fold when confronted with the dilemma of wanting to improve people's lives, and wanting everyone to remain completely natural looking.
Now girls of my particular political stance might be a little more ambivalent towards the entire situation considering that they artificially improve their looks with make-up every day and thus understand the issue a little better.
(Holy monkey I can rant. Maybe I should go for a career as an angry ranting comedian).
Here comes the part that challenges my view a little bit: After his mangled face traumatizes my screen, his next face pops up, and it looks absolutely amazing!
He got the terror removed from his face, kept the improvements, and restored the originally awesome parts back to their originally awesome state.
This is the part where a die hard believer would say "He still shouldn't have done it. He should just have kept his natural looks", but it's also the part where I, and other people who fear they may have been wrong all these years, say "Huh. That actually looks really great, and there's massive pressure on this man to look good. So maybe it's not all bad."
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| Jack White is cool, and I needed something to break this wall of text. |
However: After the good picture rolled up, another one was right around the corner, and yet again he looked like that really creepy cougar imitating lady. I don't know if the surgery went bad, if he wanted it that way, or just what the hell happened.
He went sort of back and forth for a while, until he couldn't really be repaired, and I don't think anyone really knows what he would look like today without all the surgery. It's a shame really, but at the same time it really, really, really, really made him a perfect choice for The Wrestler.
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| You want a botox freak with huge muscles, a worn out voice and expired plastic surgery? That's me man. |
Like so many vanity surgery posts this seems to have turned out to be a Mickey Rourke post. I could go with Michael Jackson, but come on. He has already been pushed to death, and I don't want to kick a lego-man when he's down.
I looked at some other videos too, and most of them seemed to have one major theme, besides plastic surgery, namely nose-jobs.
Celebrities, actors, people who want to be celebrities, and people who used to be celebrities all seem to have one need in common: Smaller noses.
Some just want the wings clipped a little. Some want to get rid of that bump, some want a smaller bridge, some want their nose to point in another direction, and some just want their entire breathing/temperature stabilizing facial device, (look it up), to be smaller.
Some times small changes made a lot of difference. One guy looked like a clown in the before shot, and the suave, evil twin of James Bond in the after shot, and all he did was make small parts of his nose a little thinner.
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| "I'm 650$ away from seducing my way into the movie industry" |
On the other hand we have Megan Fox, who got praised for her down-to-earth great looks and decided, perhaps out of spite, to grind her face into a disgusting paste and have a surgeon smear it back on her skull.
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| "Hey Megan, it's Michael. Listen, would you be interested in being the co-star of 'Transformers: Everything ends for seriously this time, I swear. And explosions'. I really need you for this one". |
Was that too harsh? Whatever, it's fun.
Back to the issue at hand.
Plastic surgery can go really well, and it can go horrible wrong, like most surgeries really. The thing is that even if the surgery goes perfectly, and the person now has everything they ever wanted in regards to looks. They still often come back to screw everything up.
Nothing is ever perfect. That's a good mentality to have, and accepting that fact might have prevented some of these disasters.
There's always going to be some things you want to tweak, twist and tamper with to improve your looks just a little bit, and as anyone who's used to improving pictures in Photoshop will tell you: It's incredibly easy to go way too far and then go a little further because you wrongly believe you haven't gone far enough.
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| This is what uncle Danny's vacation photos look like if he loses his reference point. Seriously, over-editing is a very easy mistake to make, even for professionals. |
Reason one why I am generally against vanity surgery: It creates a very unrealistic standard, and I don't believe we would see the same flaws in our looks if plastic surgery didn't make it possible to fix those perceived flaws. It "fixes" a problem it helped create.
Reason two why I am generally against vanity surgery: It means that my kind and I have to try a lot harder to stand out in awesomeness.
In the near future, plastic surgery is cheap, perfect, and available to everyone, yet I have a bumpy, sort of long, bulbous, freckled asymmetric nose. I have huge joints on my hands, I have cheeks that makes those annoying folds around my mouth, I have toes that look like fingers, I have a strange face that looks fat from one angle and skinny from a slightly different angle.
Now not only will I have to look like this in a world where super-models are mistaken for their assistants, I will also have to justify why the hell I look this way when I can easily become the übermench in no more than 30 minutes.
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| Rich Hall declares this block of text too long! After this you should check him out on Youtube. |
What do I say then? "I think surgically altering your looks makes people unhappy", but no, because it's the norm these days, and it's very safe too! You'll still be the same, but better looking. Okay then, what about "If I go under the knife people won't know truly know me, but befriend me based on how I look", but won't I still be me? Friends aren't family, you can just ignore the ones you don't like.
I honestly can't find any reason why I would not go under the knife, except that I don't want to.
"AHA!" My stupid mind thinks "That's reason enough. Good for you. Being an individual and all that!", except that it might not be enough at all.
It certainly isn't a good enough to go under the knife now, so why would it be good enough when the operating tables are turned?
If you didn't bother reading the last part I don't blame you. Short version is: I don't want to deal with everyone looking better than me all the time. I'm beautiful by comparison, and the ones that beat me I talk shit about, and I don't want that to change.
