Plastic Surgery: Racial Self-Doubt or Pursuit of Better Self?

Plastic Surgery: Racial Self-Doubt or Pursuit of Better Self? It is a women’s face, perfectly proportioned, looks neither Asian nor western. Straight nose bridge along with flat cheek bone, wide eyelids combines with flat brow and Chin protrudes in a weird way. This is a typical face you will see on the billboard in the major street of Beijing in China. Over the decades, more and more Chinese start to join the “army” of plastic surgery and made their way to a more Western like face. There are a number of factors that have contributed to increased facial aesthetics in Asian countries. Most of this factors are directly attributed to the advances in technology especially the internet. Women in Asian countries are doing all they can to make sure they are getting the ‘average face look’. It also difficult to know how they women arrived at the conclusion that there is an ‘average face look’. In this essay, a broad discussion on facial aesthetics by Asian women will be carried out. The information in this essay will help us understand why people who have lived in a country with 5000-year history should start to change their aesthetic standards. Asians are renowned for their love of cosmetic surgery, which produces almost the same appearance: straight nose, big eyes, V-shaped face. You may say that this is a face-seeing era, the good-faced people will live a better life and love career. Yes. So what determines the criteria for a good face? Judith H. Langlois, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, USA, experimented with children aged 2-3 and 6-8 months in 1991. Two facial photographs judged as beautiful and ugly by adults were placed in front of their eyes (Wang, 42). The study found that babies stared at photos judged as beautiful by adults for a longer time. This study suggests that human discrimination of facial beauty and ugliness may be a congenital mechanism. Perhaps this can be the main reason why people are always pursuing facial aesthetics. They are always looking for ways of making sure that their faces are attractive and the people they meet will be attracted to them. Scientists have found that average face is a way for human beings to seek an aesthetic paradigm. In 1990, researchers at the University of Texas used computer technology to get synthetic daces and put forward the ‘average face hypothesis’. This hypothesis suggests that the ‘average face’ produced by synthesizing faces with various appearance difference is more attractive than the original face. Experiments by other scientific teams have come to a similar conclusion – most people believe that approaching the average face makes the face more beautiful (Heyes, 67). The fact of the matter is that all of us are born with different faces. Every day, you will be meeting faces that are quite different from each other. It is very difficult for the brain of a human being to integrate each part of the face together and compare it with another beautiful face you might have seen somewhere. Therefore, this clearly shows that the most attractive face is the average face and not the average face based on the perceptions of the public. Zed Nelson, a British photographer, has spent five years visiting 17 countries to see how people in different countries pursue external beauty. As a result, he finds that aesthetics around the world seems to be well regulated, acting in accordance with Western Caucasian aesthetic standards (Jablonski, 76). Asian women generally like European and American faces, according to Barbie dolls. In addition to economic and cultural advantages, the aesthetic value of Westerners defeated the psychological defense of Asians ultimately, possibly because the increase of cross-cultural contacts reduced people's prejudice against external groups, and also reduced the suggestion that local culture was predominant in the formation of aesthetic values. In most cases, when people from different cultures meet. They will get to interact and get to understand the culture of each other. This will often lead to a decrease of the prejudice that one holds against another culture. In some cases, this cross-cultural contact can lead improve the aesthetic evaluation of another group (Murray and Price, 65). The great differences between eastern and Western races result in the difficulty of reconciling the two aesthetics. Nancy Etkov, a psychologist at Harvard Medical School, once said, "With the help of movies, fashion magazines and the Internet, the prevailing aesthetic standards in the West have swept the whole world, especially in Asia. We do live in a technological era and people are exposed to different messages at different times. The internet and television has always been blamed by most researchers for portraying the aspect of beauty which has made most of the people to think that beauty means “blonde, blue-eyed, white-skinned Western men and women”. To see how Western aesthetic standards, affect the proper direction of cosmetic surgery in our thinking, we have to start with Korea, the master of this field. In the 1950s, the Korean War (1950-1953) left Korea in a mess. At that time, there was no cosmetic surgery in Korea, and the Korean people were basically single-eyed. In 1954, American plastic surgeon Ralph Millard came to Korea with the US Marine Corps stationed in Korea to assist in the treatment of Korean people who were accidentally disfigured by car accidents and burns. This doctor is very interesting. Help others to the end. You disfigured me and made you look better when I restored your appearance. Give you a knife of double eyelids. This is the first case of double eyelid surgery in Korea. Millard said he wanted to help Asians better integrate into the international economic arena by creating a more Westernized face. "Asians' eyelids give a negative impression, which symbolizes the indifference and restraint in Eastern culture (Luo and Wei, 45). Millard’s first customer were Korean prostitutes who wanted to attract the attention of American soldiers. Eyelid amputation soon became popular, Korean people of all kind start to seek for this double-eyelid effect. Later on, more procedures of this kind has been invented to westernize Asian people’s racial characters including rhinoplasty and chin implants. In 1961, Korea’s first cosmetic surgery clinic opened. To this day, double eyelid is still the most popular cosmetic surgery in Korea, and rhinoplasty ranks second. From the above, we can clearly see that there is a certain form of negative resistance to the racial characteristics of the individuals. They are looking out for ways of ‘smoothening; their faces so that they can look like what they perceive as an ‘average’ face. American scholar Dr Eugenia Gao once put forward the phenomenon of "self-racial prejudice". Her research paper Medicalization of Racial Characteristics focuses on how Asian Americans perceive themselves and how they are influenced by cultural perspectives. She believes that, under the observation of Western culture, ethnic characteristics of Asian peoples often turn into negative characteristics, and women are likely to make changes through surgery. In Asian aesthetics, the double eyelids are better than the single eyelids, and the high nose is better than the round nose. However, it is interesting to note that the trend of "V-shaped face" is not in line...