Cosmetic surgeries and injections “have been getting cheaper, less invasive and vastly more common in recent years, in middle income countries as well as rich ones,” a Jan. 4 article in the Economist boasts. “Falling costs and technology have democratized” and “globalized” the cosmetics industry, it says.
In the U.S. and Canada alone, total cosmetic procedures rose from 12 million in 2019, to an estimated 21 million last year, while in China the market is exploding, doubling in size since 2021, reflecting the profit lust that drives the cosmetics industry.
The Economist — which is interested in all things profitable — says that social media is “spurring a convergence in ideals of beauty around the world.” This means getting a surgeon to “improve” your body like asking for the “fuller eyebrows of South Asia,” the “fuller lips of sub-Saharan Africa” and the “upward arching eyes typical of East Asians.”
This so-called democratization of the industry also entails trapping working people seeking “beauty” into ever-greater debt. In Brazil, bosses at the enticingly named Plastics for All let patients who can’t afford their procedures go ahead anyway and pay their debts off in up to 100 installments (with a little extra interest). In Argentina, one of the largest health insurance companies now offers a plan that covers one plastic surgery a year.
South Korean plastic surgeons say their busiest time of the year is after university entrance exams, when many parents “reward” successful children with a gift of plastic surgery.
Absent from the article is any explanation of how the cosmetic industry reaps its vast profits by playing on the insecurities of women and adolescents to do what it takes to get ahead and to find a mate.
To understand this, you need to read the recently published new Pathfinder edition of Cosmetics, Fashion, and the Exploitation of Women by Mary-Alice Waters, Joseph Hansen and Evelyn Reed.