"The Butchering of Beauty"

I attended a meeting in Washington DC this past week and prior to going, I exchanged a number of emails with the assistant of the person I was to meet with. Knowing the business environment, I quickly developed a metal image of this assistant, Amber; a sixty’ish woman, blue-haired with a pleasant smile, reading glasses hanging down around her neck from a beaded chain and wearing very sensible shoes. In short, a librarian.


So, imagine my great surprise when I walked into the office and was greeted by the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. Before me stood my Amber; tall, African-American, with deep brown smiling eyes; a vision to behold. And as I swept the shattered glass of my previous mental image from the dusty floor of my brain, calculating the potential of her becoming my future ex wife, I began to notice some details. She had a few blemishes on her face. Her teeth were not movie-star perfect and her breasts didn’t extend into the next time zone. But the combination of her other physical traits with these incredibly minor imperfections created a stunningly beautiful woman. Ah, my Amber. If only…

Anyway, later that evening I was watching an old episode of “Bones” on Hulu.com. This particular episode was about a crooked plastic surgeon and took place in Los Angles, home of the face-lift, breast implants and collagen lip injections. You know, the place where all the artificially “beautiful” people seek their fifteen minutes of fame before the unsympathetic opaque eye of a camera; Herds of thousands of Barbie and Ken dolls seemingly everywhere.

Well, during this episode there was a scene at a sky bar, beautiful blond, skimpily-clad, plastic-breasted women and squared-jawed, human growth hormone-injected, ripped men. And as I watched, something struck me, something crystalline.

When I was living in San Diego I occasionally would go to a sky bar, a top one of the many high-rise hotels, over looking the bay. So I could relate to this scene. And as I continued to watch, I remembered that I had the same feelings then as I did now, but could never codify my feelings into some sort of concrete thoughts. Then it came to me.

Looking at so many beautiful people, all outwardly and artificially perfect in every way, I lost interest. They struck me as, well unappealing. The very same people who all of us ordinary-looking people want to look like suddenly seemed to be merely average, and in becoming average now seemed mundane, everyday, ordinary; just another car commercial. There simply was no exception, no person who stood out, no one that my male eyes would subconsciously scan the room for and then lock on to like a laser. The exceptional had become the ordinary and the ordinary had become the exceptional. My world was rocked.

Then there was my Amber; not at all fitting into my new artificially average measure, not at all appearing plastic perfect, as if stamped and dumped from an endless automated assembly line producing the exact same copy as the one before, like so many Chinese-made happy meal toys. She stood out. She was an outlier on the far end of my newly inverted bell-shaped curve of beauty. She and the rest of us, in my eyes, are now the exceptional, no longer average. My beauty scale has been turned upside down.

And as I came to this revelation, I dug a bit deeper, trying to determine the root cause. Why in the world would someone subject themselves to the brutality of plastic surgery in the first place? Of course there are very justifiable reasons; birth defects and physically abusing accidents come to mind. But, besides all the intense pain, there’s no guarantee of success. Just look at Meg Ryan. She was beautiful before she chose to be butchered and ended up with a gash of a mouth, looking like a carp, instead of the naturally pouty and full mouth she had before. Axle Rose, Joan Rivers, and so many others suffering the same grotesque fate. It must be that these and others really don’t like what they look like. Why? And this realization made me come to the conclusion that the new average plastic-perfect person is flawed on the inside as well. And maybe that’s the real shame.

But not my Amber, a vision of true artistic beauty made from uniquely-imperfect parts; a person who is happy with who she is. Now that’s beautiful! Even if I did later discover that she’s already happily married. Lucky guy!!!