The Beautiful People

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator
Shakespeare – The Rape of Lucrece

The beautiful people,
The beautiful people,
It’s all anatomic as the size of your steeple.
Marilyn Manson – The Beautiful People

Oh my beauty past compare,
These jewels bright I wear.
Bianca Castiafore – The Tintin Series by Hergé

Very few things today can survive commercialisation and once commercialised, they lose most of their intrinsic value. Diwali and Dusshera for instance are India’s answer to Christmas in the west. The October to November period has been transformed into one big shopping fest. Everyone puts off buying their consumer-durables, clothes and whole host of other shit till the Diwali discounts are announced. Even the monsoons are now an excuse to discount-shop. Beauty and sex though have suffered the most from our consumerist mindsets. I find it really hard to think of beauty without imagining waif-like, pouty-lipped French models selling anything from lipstick to washing machines.
It’s true; people respond favourably to beautiful faces, we will buy anything as a gorgeous face is peddling it. So the less-than-scrupulous advertising fraternity exploits our instincts to make us do what we do best; buy, buy and buy some more. What we are shown is beautiful men and stunning women selling us products, what we see is a chance at being that perfect ourselves; if you just buy that cell-phone, you’ll look like the model and you will get the chick who’s on his arm.

All those magazines that talk about weight loss,
If I buy those jeans I can look like Kate Moss.
Lily Allen – Everything’s Just Wonderful

Who are we kidding, no jeans can ever transform that beer gut into a six-pack and no washing machine is ever going to make your family picture perfect like in the ads. We are subconsciously aware of this, yet when we watch our telly, we can’t but help reaching for our credit card the moment the beautiful people begin to preach.
In India we have our own take on beauty, here, fair does not mean just or impartial, it is used to comment on the lack of pigmentation of an individuals skin. Through the ages, our movie industry had fed our fairness fetish, as a result we have had generations of fair heroes and heroines while the comic relief and villainy is left to the ‘darkies’. Our concept of female beauty has changed a little though, for while the actresses of old were buxom, today’s generation of stars follow in the hallowed footsteps of Twiggy. What’s worrying about all this is that the general populace is convinced of their shortcomings. So while women starve themselves into nothingness, men bloat themselves on diet supplements of dubious composition and everyone smothers themselves with bleach to weed out that evil melanin in their skin. Being proud of what you look like naturally is an utterly foreign concept, the current view is that we are all born imperfect and must spend our lives in the vain pursuit of physical perfection. Of course cosmetic manufacturers and weight-loss centres are happy to reinforce this view and are glad to flood the media with their ideas on physical perfection. Watch the Discovery Travel and Living channel; a large portion of their programming is devoted to weight-loss, image makeovers and grooming tips. Who advertises the most on these channels? Companies like Garnier and L’Oreal, feeding our collective inferiority complex.
Fair and Lovely (a fairness product) has done the most disservice to this country, continually subjecting us to a barrage of their racist crap, their success has spawned a whole industry, dedicated to keeping us fair. They teach us about dark women who after using the product for 4-8 weeks are suddenly noticed by movie producers and cast into new movies. About how only fair women can achieve their dreams. About how a man can only get so far on his hard work and only a fairness cream (specially formulated for thick male skin, of course) can get him to the top.
Ironically though, the companies and guys doing the advertising didn’t create the problem, they just used it to sell products and as a consequence reinforced it. Our insecurities are a result of our own sense of inadequacy, but now we have been drawn so deep into this web of self –improvement that extricating ourselves seems an impossible task.