Speaker 1: As an indie musician, trying to score press coverage is
Speaker 1: a huge part of the job, and I remember being
Speaker 1: so stoked and so nervous for one of my band's
Speaker 1: first magazine photo shoots, with a professional photographer, proper wardrobe
Speaker 1: on set, an actual makeup artist and everything. I usually
Speaker 1: wear a blush an eyeliner, but the makeup treatment for
Speaker 1: print photography is intense. Essentially, all of your features are
Speaker 1: painted over lip pencil, brow pencil, eyeshadow, highlighter. It's like
Speaker 1: a very thin mask of pastes and pressed powders. You
Speaker 1: can't see the makeup artist's handywork while they're at it,
Speaker 1: so you're just sort of left guessing how all of
Speaker 1: these colors are combining on your head. The last step
Speaker 1: is the false eyelashes. I remember this dude carefully gluing
Speaker 1: them to my eyelids. Then it was time for the
Speaker 1: big reveal. I was handed a mirror, but I couldn't
Speaker 1: see myself because he'd accidentally glued my eyes shot, and
Speaker 1: so instead of feeling like a movie star, I felt
Speaker 1: like a fetal piglet. I'm Dessa, and this is deeply human.
Speaker 1: Today is about beauty and ethics. And the intersection between
Speaker 1: them stuff. I've personally spent a lot of time thinking
Speaker 1: about why is beautification so ethically fraught. Celebrities take heat
Speaker 1: for getting botox or lip fillers. Most of us have,
Speaker 1: at some time or another been shamed for trying too
Speaker 1: hard make up with the jim that's a hot button one,
Speaker 1: or for not trying hard enough your teenage self getting
Speaker 1: pestered into a haircut. Maybe plastic surgery is particularly likely
Speaker 1: to evoke moral feelings, so let's start there. We begin
Speaker 1: with a fire in the nineteen sixties. There was a
Speaker 1: big circus fire where lots of lots of people died,
Speaker 1: and there was a lot of burned victims, hundreds of
Speaker 1: burned victims in the city of Nidoi, which across the
Speaker 1: bay from me, the Genneiro, And it was just like
Speaker 1: a big tragedy. It hit every single news headline. Mbers
Speaker 1: Alvaro Harin is a professor of anthropology at College of
Speaker 1: the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. He's also author of The
Speaker 1: Biopolitics of Beauty, which includes the story of the circus
Speaker 1: fire and a man named Dr Evil Beat. He was
Speaker 1: relatively young at the time he had to us return
Speaker 1: from getting his medical degree, he had become specialized in
Speaker 1: plastic surgery in Europe. Plastic surgery as we know it
Speaker 1: developed in Europe to treat survivors of the world wars.
Speaker 1: Shraplow wounds and trench warfare had created devastating facial injuries.
Speaker 1: Plastic surgery has a deep tie to those victims of war, right,
Speaker 1: And there was this sounds of light, we need to
Speaker 1: help these people. With his foreign training, Dr Evil Beat
Speaker 1: was a godsend. In the wake of the fire, he
Speaker 1: treated the burn victims, many of whom were children, pro bono.
Speaker 1: He started a clinic to train others surgeons and his techniques,
Speaker 1: and Evil became a national hero. Brazil is now a
Speaker 1: beauty capital of the world, performing sky high numbers of
Speaker 1: plastic surgeries every year. Right, so if you go to
Speaker 1: and you say, almost everybody knows what he is, right, really,
Speaker 1: very very f Plastic surgery started as morally unassailable. Surgeons
Speaker 1: were healers, treating people disfigured by violence and trauma, which
Speaker 1: is not how we think about plastic surgery now. Being
Speaker 1: I always kind of scrolling through Instagram, and it was
Speaker 1: just something that I started noticing that a lot of
Speaker 1: the women I was seeing on my Explore page and
Speaker 1: who are getting a lot of likes and a lot
Speaker 1: of hard eye emojis and a lot of praise for
Speaker 1: their looks. Kind of all looks the same. That is
Speaker 1: Kelly McGuinty, who recently published her masters thesis on what's
Speaker 1: called Instagram face, a term popularized by writer you A.
Speaker 1: Tolentino in an article for The New Yorker. In short,
Speaker 1: Instagram face is a small nose with no bumps, full lips,
Speaker 1: a sharp jawline, no double chin, high defined cheekbones, uplifted
Speaker 1: cat like eyes and uplifted arched eyebrows and taught skin
Speaker 1: like lifted and taught like you walked through a wind
Speaker 1: tunnel and got stuck. If you know the platform, you
Speaker 1: know the look. I think Bella Hadid, Chrissy Teagan, em Rata,
Speaker 1: Kylie Jenner, and Kelly has collected some hard data on
Speaker 1: the phenomenon. I took the top fifty most followed models
Speaker 1: on Instagram, and I did a coding process where I
Speaker 1: said yes or no, do they have this feature that
Speaker 1: aligns with Instagram face. Almost all of those top fifty
Speaker 1: female faces had the prized features of Instagram face. There
Speaker 1: was a singular aesthetic to which all of these accounts
Speaker 1: seemed magnetized. And this this isn't just a certain sort
Speaker 1: of face being made popular by social media. It's about
Speaker 1: social media making new faces. So this specific look Instagram
Speaker 1: face is largely only attainable through cosmetic interventions like botox, fillers,
Speaker 1: things of that sort. Some people are, of course born
Speaker 1: with it, but it's really hard to tell who. Botox,
Speaker 1: botch a line and toxin A is one of the
Speaker 1: most poisonous biological substances known to science. It's sometimes called
Speaker 1: the miracle poison, and when injected in really small doses,
Speaker 1: it paralyzes facial muscles to smooth out wrinkles. You can
Speaker 1: use it under the tip of your nose to lift it.
Speaker 1: If you have kind of a downturn nose. You can
Speaker 1: now get a little bit of botox injected there, and
Speaker 1: I think they call it a tinker bell tip lift.
Speaker 1: That's what they call it in their advertising. Plastic surgery
Speaker 1: clinics leverage the looks of famous face is a bunch
Speaker 1: of them offer Kylie packages, a suite of procedures to
Speaker 1: help you look more like Kylie Jenner, who has upwards
Speaker 1: of three million followers on Instagram, and for the record,
Speaker 1: has publicly discussed getting lip fillers. Kelly herself wasn't immune
Speaker 1: to the appeal of all those marketing promises. All of
Speaker 1: us have probably wished we saw something different in the mirror.
Speaker 1: I got lip fillers a couple of years ago under
Speaker 1: the same kind of delusion that I didn't think I
Speaker 1: was pretty. I thought having fullor lips would make me
Speaker 1: pretty and would make me happy and make people like me.
Speaker 1: Um it didn't and actually ended up happening. Is I
Speaker 1: just found something else about myself I didn't like and
Speaker 1: wanted to fix that too. There's also a racial subtext
Speaker 1: to this entire conversation. It's like if colonization had a
Speaker 1: face that said it would be in Instagram. Power From
Speaker 1: a white woman, that is writer and thinker Cecily Bowen,
Speaker 1: who goes by Bad Fat Black Girl online, she explains
Speaker 1: that our standards of beauty are inherently racialized. Lighter skin,
Speaker 1: certain hair textures as in like looser curls and patterns,
Speaker 1: and prioritize over other ones than her noses. For example,
Speaker 1: I think is one example of a physical feature that
Speaker 1: is often associated with whiteness and thus more desirable. It's
Speaker 1: like no one is ever getting a nose job to
Speaker 1: make their nose fuller or bigger. Our looks can affect
Speaker 1: big life outcomes. So beauty isn't just a frivolous concern
Speaker 1: When people talk about, for example, pretty privilege, that is
Speaker 1: a real thing. You know. There's research that shows that
Speaker 1: people who are perceived as more you know, traditionally attractive,
Speaker 1: are more likely to be hired for jobs, are more
Speaker 1: likely to make more money as they go through their lives,
Speaker 1: are more likely they have different access to different things.
Speaker 1: They're less likely to be profiled at a store or
Speaker 1: treat it poorly by a law enforcement officer. Note the
Speaker 1: transitivity here. Privilege comes from beauty, and beauty comes from
Speaker 1: proximity to white features. On a trip to India in
Speaker 1: my twenties, I remember seeing an ad on the side
Speaker 1: of a building. The woman with a zipper running down
Speaker 1: the center of her face. She was being unzipped to
Speaker 1: reveal a paler version of herself to sell skin bleach.
Speaker 1: My cosmetic brand that made the stuff was a big
Speaker 1: name when I probably patronized back home in parts of Asia,
Speaker 1: the preference for fair skin predates colonial influence, but this
Speaker 1: overt nous and this shamelessness of it felt very new
Speaker 1: to me. Some moral objections to cosmetic interventions start here.
Speaker 1: People have argued that straightening afro tech stred hair is
Speaker 1: a concession to standards of beauty that prize whiteness. The
Speaker 1: same goes for double eyelid surgery, which is sometimes given
Speaker 1: us a gift to teenagers in South Korea, a surgery
Speaker 1: that critics say creates a more western looking eye. Ditto
Speaker 1: for laser procedures that turn brown eyes blue. Beauty does
Speaker 1: not stay in its lane the cosmetic style. It pervades
Speaker 1: all of our conversations. I don't think that we can
Speaker 1: detach beauty from any public facing aspect of culture, because
Speaker 1: beauty and desirability politics are always at play in terms
Speaker 1: of who we allow to be in the front. People
Speaker 1: criticize folks who get plastic surgery right as being like
Speaker 1: vain or you know. The shallow vanity is probably the
Speaker 1: most common moral charge leveled against beautification. People are self
Speaker 1: absorbed if they spend too much time or too much
Speaker 1: money on their appearance, and if they're getting surgery, then
Speaker 1: they're shouldering real health risks. To proof positive that they
Speaker 1: care way too much about how they look, and there
Speaker 1: are risks, particularly with the procedure and vogue known as
Speaker 1: the BBL. A Brazilian butt lift is essentially a procedure
Speaker 1: where fat light bol is usually done on a different
Speaker 1: area of the body, so it can be either the abdomen,
Speaker 1: the back, or even the arms of the thighs, and
Speaker 1: then that fat is essentially moved around and placed in
Speaker 1: the hip and blood areas, and so it gives you
Speaker 1: more of like a coke bottle shape and just you know,
Speaker 1: some some cakes back there. So we are back to Brazil.
Speaker 1: Let's rejoin Dr Evil Pani, rising star in the wake
Speaker 1: of the Circus fire. Voky was very savvy and yeah,
Speaker 1: he wrote this book The Right to Beauty that was
Speaker 1: incredibly well received and people to this day use the
Speaker 1: term like plastic surgery patients that I talked to the
Speaker 1: pop hospans yet they say, yeah, we have the right
Speaker 1: to beauty because of up tank. Right. He told us
Speaker 1: that the right to be beautiful, it is important and
Speaker 1: we need to offer to everybody. Evil positioned beauty is
Speaker 1: a class issue, successfully arguing that public hospitals should offer
Speaker 1: plastic surgery for cheap or even free for the Brazilian
Speaker 1: working class. They see them as amazing humanitarians that are
Speaker 1: offering beauty to the poor and that arelifting entire populations
Speaker 1: that would otherwise be downtrodden because they're not beautiful, because
Speaker 1: the Brazilians belief that beauty is important. It was unfair,
Speaker 1: said Evil, that only the rich could afford his techniques
Speaker 1: a tummy tuck, say, with a scar low enough to
Speaker 1: be hidden in a bikini bottom. Plastic surgery wasn't only
Speaker 1: a treatment for people disfigured by accidents or battle. It
Speaker 1: was also, to use his phrase, for those betrayed by nature.
Speaker 1: I'm thinking of like some of the conversations that you
Speaker 1: had with the recipients of surgical procedures like um. A
Speaker 1: teenage girl who was interested in having breast augmentation felt
Speaker 1: a lot better about the green light that she got
Speaker 1: from her doctor. If she had like a medicalized diagnosis
Speaker 1: of small breastedness. It justified it in her eyes and
Speaker 1: particularly the guys of her mom, that this was a
Speaker 1: condition right, That she had an abnormality hypotrophy of the
Speaker 1: mammary glance, which really just means you have small breasts.
Speaker 1: Medicalizing a condition strengthened the argument that the state should
Speaker 1: pay for it and distanced patients from any suggestion of vanity.
Speaker 1: A formal diagnosis clearly warranted intervention. This motive thinking essentially
Speaker 1: pathologized ugliness. It blurs the line between reconstructive surgery and
Speaker 1: cosmetic procedures, implies that you can be injured not just
Speaker 1: by shrapnel, but by your own genes. I talked about
Speaker 1: us cosmetic citizenship. They think that they can only belong
Speaker 1: in the resilientation if they're beautiful. I had talked to
Speaker 1: a surgeon that had surgery on his own wife and
Speaker 1: his own mother. You know, they're they're they're strange creatures
Speaker 1: in the sense that they really normalize it for everybody.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to not have a moral reaction in my
Speaker 1: investigative conversation about moral reactions, but I'm making a face
Speaker 1: that's intense A difficult entanglements of instinct, intellect, and ethics
Speaker 1: call for a particular sort of professional. What we need
Speaker 1: is a philosopher. My name is Claire Chambers and I'm
Speaker 1: a professor of political philosophy at the University of Cambridge.
Speaker 1: Isn't beauty like definitionally necessarily non inclusive, that like, not
Speaker 1: everybody can be it in the same way that like
Speaker 1: the word beautiful functions the way that the word tall functions.
Speaker 1: It's in comparison to a collective average. But then there
Speaker 1: should be no shame and not being beautiful, right, So
Speaker 1: if beauty was just one way of succeeding or one
Speaker 1: way of excelling amongst others, then that might be fine
Speaker 1: to say that, you know, not everybody has to be beautiful.
Speaker 1: But that's not generally how we use it. It's a
Speaker 1: value that really takes on much more weight than it should.
Speaker 1: Nobody's exempt, but the own is to be beautiful ways
Speaker 1: more heavily on some than others. Typically, women and girls
Speaker 1: are expected to be beautiful to a higher sort of
Speaker 1: standard of beauty than men and boys. Men conversely, can
Speaker 1: be stigmatized for being too image conscious, for preening or
Speaker 1: wearing guyliner. I'll note here, though, that these gendered norms
Speaker 1: have not always been so. In other times and places,
Speaker 1: beautification was more of the domain of dudes. Claire recently
Speaker 1: wrote a book It's called Intact, A Defense of the
Speaker 1: Unmodified Body. You mentioned a procedure that I've never heard
Speaker 1: of in your book. What is a vampire facial? Basically,
Speaker 1: a vampire facial is when you have a facial which
Speaker 1: injects into your face platelets that are extracted from your
Speaker 1: own blood, hence the vampire idea. And I it's supposed
Speaker 1: to do something sort of magical to the texture of
Speaker 1: your skin. Because there's all these kinds of really quite
Speaker 1: gruesome proceiegures that have been all the time for beauty.
Speaker 1: Japanese women have blackened their teeth, Dino's flattened their foreheads,
Speaker 1: Victorian ladies self administered poisons to dilate their eyes. But
Speaker 1: there's no need to venture to the extremes for ethical complexities.
Speaker 1: Consider the standard issue department store cosmetic counter. In the
Speaker 1: nineteen twenties, when makeup really took off in the US,
Speaker 1: Revalon was marketing cosmetics as Hope in a jar. Makeup,
Speaker 1: which is a product designed to change the way you look,
Speaker 1: is often marketed for its undetectability. People won't know you're
Speaker 1: wearing it. It'll seem natural. We'll use the word natural
Speaker 1: usually to refer to things that we want to say,
Speaker 1: Ah good, it feels like my face is allowed to
Speaker 1: look like, it's not wearing makeup, but it's just not
Speaker 1: allowed to look like my face, right, exactly, It's exactly it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and if they're doing it successfully, and that we can't
Speaker 1: tell their wearing makeup, right, what the rest of us
Speaker 1: looking at them think is Wow, those other women's faces
Speaker 1: naturally don't have whatever it might be, dark circles, red patches,
Speaker 1: whatever the thing is that you're you're concerned about. So
Speaker 1: other women just look so much better than me, Naturally,
Speaker 1: my face must be really bad. I once did a
Speaker 1: photo shoot for a cosmetic line, a pretty awesome one.
Speaker 1: I'm out Let's run independently and cruelty free, and helped
Speaker 1: to donate proceeds to a charity that supports women's literacy.
Speaker 1: And I remember receiving the first round of images, intensing
Speaker 1: they had been noticeably airbrushed since I was a kid.
Speaker 1: The tear trops beneath my eyes have been dark, sort
Speaker 1: of sunken. But the woman in the picture was smooth
Speaker 1: and bright. She looked like me, but well, prettier, fresh faced,
Speaker 1: not so tired. The thing is, I do look tired.
Speaker 1: I am, in fact tired, and I felt guilty about
Speaker 1: suggesting otherwise I asked that the effect be dialed back,
Speaker 1: but I admit I didn't push to remove it all together.
Speaker 1: With daily wear makeup, most of us are cautious not
Speaker 1: to overcorrect to the point of conspicuousness. Looking totally fake
Speaker 1: would be bad, not just undesirable, but like morally bad.
Speaker 1: Consider your own reaction to seeing someone selfie that's been
Speaker 1: obviously processed by a filter. Yeah, that's not even her
Speaker 1: real phase. It feels like a deception. But maybe makeup
Speaker 1: is just an Instagram filter you wear on the skin,
Speaker 1: and botox is just to filter that you were beneath it.
Speaker 1: It almost feels like like cheating. So there are times
Speaker 1: when we think that what the body needs is it
Speaker 1: needs effort, right, what is virtuous is to spend effort
Speaker 1: on our bodies, And so maybe it's something like liposuction
Speaker 1: looks like we haven't spent enough effort or the right
Speaker 1: kind of effort. It's like, if you get plastic surgery,
Speaker 1: you're not earning beauty the way that you're supposed to.
Speaker 1: But I mean, it doesn't really best of class greets
Speaker 1: me because undergoing surgery right is a huge effort. In
Speaker 1: many ways, we should not be creating a society where
Speaker 1: what are the huge sources of anxiety for people is
Speaker 1: that we don't look good enough, we don't look acceptable.
Speaker 1: If you've watched more than like twenty minutes of television,
Speaker 1: you've probably seen beauty products marketed as self esteem builders.
Speaker 1: They bring out our best selves, help us walk tall
Speaker 1: while striding into boardrooms in slow motion. Kelly, who researched
Speaker 1: Instagram face, isn't convinced. I've gotta say I'm not really either.
Speaker 1: For me, I think that feeling empowering and being empowering
Speaker 1: are two different things. This equivalence of beauty and power
Speaker 1: is predicated on some pretty garbage ideas. I think it
Speaker 1: has origins to the history of how women have been
Speaker 1: placed as objects of desire for men self. For example,
Speaker 1: if we're sitting in a restaurant, we begin to picture
Speaker 1: what we look like sitting in that restaurant. We're taking
Speaker 1: on this outside gays and imposing it on ourselves. This
Speaker 1: is what's called the male gaze. But now at the
Speaker 1: same time, it's not just men perpetuating it. It's women too.
Speaker 1: It's just thinking of yourself as a collection of parts
Speaker 1: that you can use. You know, your consumer power to
Speaker 1: buy and to change rather than thinking of yourself as
Speaker 1: a whole, living person. So if you're gonna go tinkerball
Speaker 1: for Instagram if it gives you confidence, like, okay, that's fine,
Speaker 1: but just don't claim it as this sort of empowered
Speaker 1: feminist act. We're on some tricky philosophical ground here, so
Speaker 1: I'm going to baby step it. If feminism is a
Speaker 1: movement that fights for women's rights to lead self determined lives,
Speaker 1: to expand their choices, does it necessarily follow that any
Speaker 1: choice a woman makes is an exercise of feminism? Or
Speaker 1: can women make choices that, even if they benefit them personally,
Speaker 1: run opposite to feminist values? Does participating in beauty culture
Speaker 1: help me as an individual but also perpetuate lousy ideas
Speaker 1: that hamstring women generally? And then on the flip side,
Speaker 1: isn't criticizing a woman's choice, particularly as it relates to
Speaker 1: her own body like quintessentially anti feminist? The people you've
Speaker 1: heard here don't seem interested in judging women on their
Speaker 1: personal choices, but that doesn't mean they're not critical of
Speaker 1: the culture that incentivizes them. Growing older for women is
Speaker 1: a particular challenge to borrow a Brazilian phrase men age,
Speaker 1: but women decay, you know or rocked Back to Alvaro
Speaker 1: Harim Brazil and the strange story of Dr Evil. He
Speaker 1: had kind of a weird eric about it. He argued
Speaker 1: that it would somehow if you gave plastic surgery to
Speaker 1: people that were criminals. He had this kind of criminological argument,
Speaker 1: it would somehow help them become better people. The halo
Speaker 1: effect is our propensity to assume that people with one
Speaker 1: sort of positive trait, like good looks, have all sorts
Speaker 1: of other virtues too. And Evil here seems to be
Speaker 1: suggesting that a halo can be surgically sown in place.
Speaker 1: Brazil also conceives of plastic surgery is self care. It
Speaker 1: sort of understood us upkeep of the body right. People
Speaker 1: told me it's like, I mean, brushing your teeth. You know,
Speaker 1: it's a hygiene. Why wouldn't you get a facelift after
Speaker 1: you turn fifty? The legacy of Dr Evil is complicated.
Speaker 1: Remember talking to a nurse at the Evil Patanie Institute,
Speaker 1: and she was very upset because she said, when I
Speaker 1: began working here twenty years ago, it was mostly reconstructive,
Speaker 1: was mostly reparative, and now it's mostly aesthetic and I
Speaker 1: don't understand. And she was upset that the fact that
Speaker 1: like a job that she really was proud to be
Speaker 1: part of has become something very different. It can be
Speaker 1: easy to judge the culture of invasive, painful, Sir Trees,
Speaker 1: but I think any of us in that position would
Speaker 1: probably say yes to it. We get to say no
Speaker 1: because we have certain privileges to say no to those
Speaker 1: kind of things and to be more critical of it.
Speaker 1: So patients saw it as It's interesting they were so
Speaker 1: critical of what they called the dictatorship of beauty. Some
Speaker 1: people use that term at the same time that they
Speaker 1: were acquiescing to participate in it. In my twenties, back
Speaker 1: from India, I wanted to reject beauty culture, feminine ideals,
Speaker 1: to go hardline aesthetic, explaining it's my mom. I told her,
Speaker 1: beauty has nothing to do with a person's character and
Speaker 1: it's fleeting anyway. It's foolish to get too attached. Your
Speaker 1: voice is beautiful, my mom said, you don't get to
Speaker 1: keep that forever, either, So what you shouldn't sing. As
Speaker 1: my musical career progressed, photo shoots became commonplace, and I've
Speaker 1: walked an uneasy line. It's fun to the glamorous, but
Speaker 1: it's also like a drug that's too good to use
Speaker 1: too often. And I've made these little rules, like I'm
Speaker 1: allowed to wear blush every day, but not foundation. If
Speaker 1: I post a flattering, dulled up picture, I've got to
Speaker 1: post another planer one just to keep one foot on
Speaker 1: solid ground. These rules are getting harder to follow as
Speaker 1: I grow older. I asked cecily A k a bad
Speaker 1: fat black girl about her regimen. I absolutely like I
Speaker 1: wear makeup. I give myself a little bit of contour,
Speaker 1: do my eyebrows almost religiously every day so that they
Speaker 1: look more neat. I wear about a hundred different hairstyles
Speaker 1: per year. I hey, whether they're wigs, whether their extensions,
Speaker 1: whether they're you know, whether they're crochet. You know. So
Speaker 1: like I'm a hundred percent participating a man, Is there
Speaker 1: any part of you that resonates with people who would
Speaker 1: have the concern that's like, um man, we are feeding
Speaker 1: into a capitalist system that just asked us to spend
Speaker 1: a lot of money on doing this right that like
Speaker 1: thrives off a hundred percent. I just dropped five hundred
Speaker 1: dollars during the safora sale. Part of me thinks about like, um,
Speaker 1: like traffic, that's something that we all complain about, but
Speaker 1: we all are it too, And I feel like culture
Speaker 1: is sometimes it's like it's very difficult to completely divorce
Speaker 1: from personal choices because it's personal choices and mass that
Speaker 1: help create culture. Yes, everyone hates traffic, but everyone is
Speaker 1: Traffic is a h true, but we are also talking
Speaker 1: about people still having to get where they need to go,
Speaker 1: and so who built the road to only have three
Speaker 1: lines instead of seven which created a floor traffic that
Speaker 1: is now terrible for everyone. You get what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: Who decides what is view full and what is not
Speaker 1: and what people deserve who are beautiful and what people
Speaker 1: who are beautiful don't deserve. It will always come back
Speaker 1: to that. For me, we love beauty, but we dried vanity.
Speaker 1: Many of us think that beauty is over indexed, but
Speaker 1: you're still not supposed to cheat that broken game, like
Speaker 1: lunges are okay and light bulb is not. Natural is
Speaker 1: better than the artificial, but it's hard to know where
Speaker 1: to draw the line between them. Participating in beauty culture
Speaker 1: only makes it worse. The whole thing balanced on gross
Speaker 1: racial ideas, and yet non participation seems kind of futile.
Speaker 1: Showing a bare face at the office might just elicit
Speaker 1: concern from your colleagues who keep asking if you're under
Speaker 1: the weather. Here are a few lyrics from a song
Speaker 1: I wrote while ruminating on this stuff, with a little
Speaker 1: radio in it. I think beauty muck to suck. It's
Speaker 1: like sugar in the natural world. We never get this much,
Speaker 1: and so the appetite is bottom. Let's call Mabeline anonymous
Speaker 1: by narcissists. Of all of us, we never get enow,
Speaker 1: but still we get into the car because we've got
Speaker 1: someplace to be. So check your lashes in the mirror
Speaker 1: and you turn the engine over. Deeply Human is a
Speaker 1: BBC World service in American public media co production with
Speaker 1: I Heart Media, and it's hosted by Medessa. Find me
Speaker 1: online at Dessa on Instagram and Dussa Darling on Twitter.
Speaker 1: Next time on Deeply Human. If sleep is so important
Speaker 1: to our health and well being, then why does so
Speaker 1: many of us struggle to go down and stay down
Speaker 1: for a full night of rest. Join Medessa and asking
Speaker 1: why do we suck? It's sleeping