Getting the Look

Recognition of the importance of physical attractiveness is nothing new. As Aristotle once wrote: “Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.” But in these visually dominated times, looking good is more important than ever. So can we still be happy if life has dealt us the plain card, or the inexorable signs of aging are creeping up on us? Bruce Emond reports.

Good looks have always made the world go around, with wars, fateful political alliances and the toppling of kingdoms all happening in the name of love and lust. Egyptian women were among the first to use cosmetics to enhance their appeal, while aristocratic women in China submitted to foot-binding for the erotic pleasure of their menfolk.

English monarch Henry VIII changed the course of history by divorcing his first wife Catherine of Aragon for the bewitching charms of Anne Boleyn, before tiring of her for a younger, more enticing lady.

In more recent times, Richard Burton left his wife and two daughters for the violet-eyed beauty of Elizabeth Taylor, and model Patti Boyd was serenaded by not one, but two of the greatest names in modern music, George Harrison and Eric Clapton.

But how we look affects much more than our choice of partners, writes Gordon L. Patzer in Looks: Why They Matter More Than You Ever Imagined. The good-looking are sitting pretty from before they can walk, with nurses lavishing more TLC on cute infants than on their plainer peers. That preferential treatment continues throughout life, with better jobs, salaries and opportunities coming their way.

Patzer, the founding director of the Appearance Institute, warns that our fixation with “lookism” — how people are treated according to perceptions of their Personal Attractiveness (PA) — is increasing and is becoming unhealthy. We have become a world where the quirky and unusual looking – those unlucky enough to be sloe-eyed, lantern-jawed, pug-nosed – are overlooked and ignored, except to be evaluated as candidates for radical makeovers.

British prime minister Winston Churchill (obese and bald), singer Edith Piaf (short) and the writer Carson McCullers (long-faced and homely), for example, were fortunate to live before these times.

Patzer traces the reasons for lookism to changes in the urban landscape and technology, beginning with the rise of populations in cities in the 1920s and 1930s.  

Before the rise of urban centers, most marriages within small, usually agricultural communities were based on shared lifestyles and values. Migrants to big cities were suddenly confronted by more available partners, and physical desirability gradually came to overshadow whether someone attended the same house of worship.

He cites a study of mate preferences conducted over intermittent years beginning in 1939 through 1996; the study found that the importance of PA for both men and women in choosing a partner increased, jumping from 14th to 8th among men, and from 17th to 13th in women. The researchers point to the probable cause of this shift in attention to a partner’s PA to “the surge in visual media — television, movies, Internet images and virtual reality”.

The American is writing about US society in discussing how the public is bombarded in media and advertising by images of idealized bodies and faces, often achieved through the luck of nature or through a graphic artist’s skillful polishing. Interestingly, in discussing how that PA obsession is spreading across the world, he chooses Jakarta to prove his point. He tells of Santi who, in her attempt to live up to the physical expectations of her family and friends, has developed an eating disorder, once a rarity in this developing country.

For anyone living in image-conscious Jakarta today, it does not come as a surprise. Those intent on perfecting what God gave them crowd fitness centers and plastic surgery clinics, or head to flourishing diet doctor practices for the latest “secret” formula to lose weight.

Singer Krisdayanti wrote in her recently published tell-all autobiography about undergoing Botox, a breast enlargement and a tummy tuck. She wants, she says, to be able to say enough is enough, even though she does not know if the urge to change herself once again will reemerge.

The feeling is that, even if one was not born with the look, there are ways and means to get it with a little extra cash.. For while Dorian Grey made a pact with dark forces to stave off the scourge of gravity and sun damage, modern men and women are putting their hopes in plastic surgery in their personal quest to remain forever young or correct the “defects” that nature gave them. Cue the radical makeover.

One does not have to go all the way to Hollywood and give Janice Dickinson a call to find people in Jakarta who look like they have taken their plastic surgery a little too far. Their faces — pinched, pulled and stretched to sometimes otherworldly proportions — are splashed across society pages. One public figure has become something of an urban legend for her startling surgically enhanced looks. “She’s a truly nice person when you get to know her, but a first glance almost takes your breath away because so much has been done,” an acquaintance says.

It’s not just women who have been sucked into the PA obsession. Men, freed from judgmental perceptions thanks to the advent of metrosexualism, are also becoming more conscious of their looks. A life-size poster for a milk-based supplement in Central Jakarta shows a model, his shirt open to reveal his rippling six-pack, with the tempting tagline “Trust me it’s true”.

“Johnny” is one man who is doing his best with what nature gave him. He has had braces, undergone a dermatologist-prescribed course of cosmetics and works out almost every day with a fitness instructor. The investment in his once-average looks has paid off in enhanced PA for the communications worker, in his mid-20s.

Ari Martono from Biotherm acknowledged that Indonesian men are increasingly concerned about their looks. The cosmetics company, part of L’Oreal, put on a special day of pampering for male customers in August that included manicure and pedicure sessions.

Nobody denies that looking good makes us feel better and gives us self-confidence. The problems arise when we define our self-worth based on how we look, or how we believe we look, says Patzer, with no chance of achieving satisfaction.

“You are as you believe you look,” he writes of the PA obsessed. “And if you are, for example, someone who strongly believes that thin is in, but fat is where you’re at, then merely being exposed to pictures of people of your own gender with an idealized physique can lead to feelings of anxiety and loss of self-esteem. It could even propel you into a depressed state.”

Patzer calls for the public to do their best to reject the Lookism trend. Yes, work out, but do it in the interest of health, not for the pursuit of a better PA. Don’t let concerns about looks stop you from going after a better job, or from attending social events simply because of a crooked smile or big thighs. For those who are shorter than average and crippled by feelings of inadequacy, he urges them to remember the many short people who have been successful.

And there are signs of a backlash brewing, or at least a slightly more accepting view of the physical deficiencies of most mere mortals.

The New York Times reported in August that hipsters in the US this summer were proudly embracing pot-bellies, a rejection of the “prissy” look of gym-toned bodies. It’s a reaction, the Times speculates, to having PA-blessed, physically fit Barack Obama leading the country.

“What once seemed young and hot, for gay and straight men alike, now seems passé,” it writes. “Like manscaping, spray-on tans and other metrosexual affectations, having a belly one can bounce quarters off suggests that you may have too much time on your hands.

If letting it all hang out is good enough for the average Joe (hipster), then it’s also good enough for Brad Pitt.

In the February 2009 issue of W magazine, the international heartthrob laid himself bare for the world to see. Of course, we have seen him before in the buff, and looking impossibly buff, in paparazzi photos of him vacationing with former love Gwyneth Paltrow years ago.

While Pitt was not in his birthday suit this time, he appeared almost naked in his vulnerability, stripped of all makeup and without the protection of photo-shopping, the modern technology that has removed the need for us to destroy those old photos we shove into a drawer away from judging eyes. In a stark black-and-white spread photographed by Chuck Close in conjunction with the release of his movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the close-up shots show furrowed lines on his forehead, large pores and a smattering of crow’s feet and sun spots.

While the actor and activist is still undoubtedly a handsome man at 45, he looked his age, a taboo in today’s ageist Hollywood.  

“You can’t be the fair-haired young boy forever,” Close, who is famous for his warts-and-all daguerreotype portraits, told the magazine. “Maybe a photograph of him with crow’s feet and furrowed brow is good for him. It humanizes him. It makes him less of a cinema god and more of a person.”

Pitt and partner Angelina Jolie have refused to marry in protest against the ban on gay marriage in many parts of the US, so his decision to let his lines and wrinkles show could also be seen as a bid to buck the youth obsession and ageism.

For if one of the world’s handsomest men can show his true face, then surely the rest of us could give it a try — and perhaps be happier for it.

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