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The fairest of all...

beauty matters
Last Updated 06 July 2013, 15:43 IST

From cosmetics to fad diets, we try everything to keep ourselves looking our best. But what are we really doing, and why? Does beauty really matter? Can it be acquired and retained? Or, are we just fighting the inevitable?Lakshmi Palecanda attempts to find answers

Have you ever been at a hospital when an emergency case is brought in? Do you remember the horror and pity you felt for the poor patient? A few days ago, I felt the same way. However, I wasn’t at a hospital; I was at a beauty parlour. A woman had had a facial go horribly wrong. It left her with blotches instead of a golden glow, just two days before her son’s wedding.

This tragedy set me thinking: why are we so conscious of our looks? Does this attitude change with age, and how? Why do we sometimes go to extremes to look good to others?

Let us face the truth: beauty matters. The more homely among us may say ‘Handsome is as handsome does’, but scientific evidence by and large points out that animals of every species look for certain physical attributes when it comes to socialising and, more importantly, selecting mates. Man, being a social animal, has been and will always be dependant on body shape and decoration to guide the likes and dislikes of his fellow beings to some extent or the other. Every culture, every civilisation, at every point in history, has had significant ideas of beauty, whether it was body piercing, dental mutilation, tattooing or other stranger forms of body art. Even children between three and six months of age gaze longer at an attractive face than a more homely one. Scientific research has even shown that there are certain traits that are commonly regarded as attractive by people all over the world. As a biology paper titled ‘Teeth, Beauty, Biology and Health’ states, ‘Regardless of nationality, age, or ethnic background, people universally share a sense of what is attractive.’

Size zero

So, what is attractive? The first and foremost attribute of all creatures attractive is good health. Ill health and deformity are never appealing. Good sleep is also linked to good looks. Sleep deprivation tends to lower health, and also beauty. The next features are symmetry and balance, which are linked to genetic diversity. Though human faces and forms are never completely symmetrical, the more symmetrical you are, the better you look. Curiously enough, humans seem to prefer people who are average in looks over people who are extraordinary-looking.

It is also true that attractive people tend to be more successful in life. Called the ‘halo effect’, due to the perfection associated with angels, attractive people are generally thought to do well in their careers, as well as socially. Therefore, the bottom line appears to be that beauty matters. So, striving to be beautiful or attractive is not just for the sake of vanity, but for getting ahead in life, pretty much day by day.

Now that we have established that all of us are entitled to worry about our looks, let us get down to the details. Generally speaking, attractiveness is based on a few broad categories, like height, girth, skin colour, facial features and hair characteristics.
Let us take height to start with. Here is one characteristic none of us can tamper with. Like it or not, the height that we attain in our lifetime comes prepackaged in our DNA. Don’t like how tall or short you are? Well, tough. You are going to have to live with it. Or, do you?

The first historical evidence for high heels comes from a 9th century ceramic bowl from Persia which depicts horse riders wearing high-heeled shoes. They were meant to be functional as they helped hold the rider’s foot in the stirrup. English aristocracy wore heels too, but high heels really came into fashion after the Second World War. High heels are worn mostly to make people appear taller, and women appear sexier. However, research has shown that any heel causes unnecessary stresses on the bones and joints of the foot. In extreme cases, the calf muscle could shorten, while the Achilles tendon becomes thicker and stiffer. Yet, many women don’t think twice about making this sacrifice on the altar of a sexist society!

Being endowed with enormous flat feet (like Mam’zelle Dupont in Enid Blyton’s Mallory Towers series), the high-heels fad leaves me unfazed. But today’s obsession with losing weight hits me hard, just where it matters — at my waistline. Like most middle-aged people, I grew up in the days when snack foods were few and far between. While most of the world transformed after globalisation, my person transformed with the easy availability of snack foods. Once, holige was available only at festival times and at weddings. Now they are hawking holige at practically every street corner, and I have got to have my fix.

While I gorge myself on various sources of empty calories, I look around and see girls who look like they’re starving... wait a minute, they are starving! Many people’s idea of dieting is to buy three heavy books on best diets, and their idea of perfect exercise is to get a membership to a gym. Their faith is obviously misplaced, like that of students who sleep with textbooks under their pillow in order to ace examinations. And, granted, staying at your ideal body weight is an important part of a healthy lifestyle. But then, again, obsessing about losing weight in order to be fashionable is totally counterproductive. For, girls today are constantly going on diets and ‘gyming’ to fit into fashionable clothes. Well, they can’t be blamed, I guess.

For, fashion designers make their clothes mostly in Small and Extra Small sizes. Making dresses for curvier, and more ‘real’ people requires ingenuity and hard work, and it doesn’t generate a big pay off. That is why you are in the dressing room trying on umpteen dresses; of course, none fit, and you come out wanting to either hit the gym or get hit by a bus. Fashion designers tell the media, and the media tells the wannabe crowd that Size 0 to 2 is perfection. Women carrying the thinness gene (still unidentified), or who have a low self-esteem (easily identified), latch on to this idea of perfection and give the rest of us who are enjoying ghee masala dosas dirty looks while drinking expensive mineral water and pretending to enjoy themselves. Even if they do not go to the extent of becoming anorexic or bulimic, they lose out on one of life’s greatest pleasures — eating.

However, of all these physical characteristics that we strive to achieve, few are more important to the average Indian than skin colour. India’s obsession with skin colour is all too well known. To be fair to the average colour-obsessed Indian, it is true that all of Asia is crazy about fair skin. Even so, it irks me every time Indians talk of racism and racial discrimination in other parts of the world, while it exists in its vilest form right here, at home.

Fair and... lovely?

Nowhere else in the world do people discriminate against their own children based on skin colour. The fairer child is dearer to parents while the darker child is sighed over, especially if it is a girl. As far as the marriage market goes, the darker one is pretty much doomed. Using the fairness, or at worst, the euphemistic ‘wheatish’ complexion requirement, people often reject girls with more ‘dalia-ish’, ‘rajma-ish’ and ‘black-gram-dal-ish’ complexions. Women, and to a smaller extent, men too, become aware of this at a very young age, and this obsession stacks up on top of other ubiquitous factors, such as family economics, language problems and today’s cut-throat competition, to undermine their confidence.

“But wait!” say cosmetics companies. “We have the answer to your problems. Use our skin lightening cream, and you’ll become fairer, get a job where you are required to be a mere sex object, win inane beauty contests, and marry the jerk who turned you down when you were darker! Obviously, we don’t promise you exactly the same things if you are a guy, but we can promise you that ‘dream job’ which called for fairer skin colour and not the right qualifications.” Put that way, we are halfway to the store before the advertisement even ends, obviously on a triumphant note.

You have to give it to these multi-billion dollar companies: they do a really convincing job. Half-baked theories on how the cream is going to work, cross-sections of human skin that you remember vaguely from high school biology, the biggest current faces in movie business — they give us the whole works. What they fail to tell us though is that skin whiteners, bleaches, why, even red bricks don’t really work. Sorry, people, there is no layer of fair skin buried under your Indian complexion. If you scrub your face raw, you may look fairer for a day or so. Beauty ‘professionals’ are unanimous in that, with fairness creams, you may hope to become just one shade lighter than before, and also that the effects of skin lightening last only for 6 to 8 weeks, and that too only if you keep using them. In an interview, the CEO of a company that manufactures these creams clearly states that, at the most, you will become only as fair as you were as a baby.

Not only that, skin bleaches and lightening creams are made up of harmful chemicals like mercury that can damage kidneys and seep into the placenta during pregnancy. Also, women who use skin whitening creams don’t always use any sunblocks, increasing their chances of skin disease and sun exposure.

And whatever colour lightening is achieved, it is only relative. You want to become fair-skinned, but how fair is fair enough? For example, I am considered fair-skinned in India, but when I went to the United States, I found that I looked really dark. However pale I got during winter, my competition, i.e., the average American of Caucasian descent, got paler, so I could never hope to achieve their colouring. Believe me, there is a lesson here.

The age old battle with change

Obsession with looks is also throwing up many other different phenomena. For example, when the current crop of old people die out, there will no longer be people with white hair. Even if you want to be natural and let yourself go grey, people older than you won’t allow it. Pretty soon, there will be laws against graying, believe me. And, I won’t go into the number of enhancers there are — lip, butt, breast, crotch, and so on, both invasive (extremely painful) and non-invasive (still painful, this time to the wallet). Sufficeth to say that, out there, there is more (or less) than meets the eye, even more so than in the old days, and definitely things are not what they seem, including bra sizes, hair thickness or beautiful teeth.

Unfortunately, when all is said and done, age and gravity are going to win, no matter what you do. There you will be, celebrating another birthday, while going about your normal business, when you look down suddenly and see that all your physical attributes are hanging around your knees, no matter what you do.

Idea of perfection

The question that underlies the trials and tribulations we undergo to look good is this: why do we do it? If we are honest, we will acknowledge that it is because we constantly compare ourselves to others. We consider ourselves imperfect and not worthy of admiration or love as we are. While it is true that we are imperfect, it has to be remembered that perfection is only an idea, and doesn’t really exist. And all of us are worthy of admiration and love by our fellow men, in the same way as all of us can admire and love something in each other.

Recently, I read a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning where she says that love shouldn’t be based on looks or emotions, because they are both liable to change. If thou must love me, let it be for nought/ Except for love’s sake only... that evermore/ Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

Oh well, what else can you expect from Elizabeth B B? Those days, there was no concept of ‘Fair and lovely’!

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(Published 06 July 2013, 15:43 IST)

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