Mask of Perfection: photo series explores ugly impetus behind plastic surgery

Many people have noticed something that they’d secretly like to fix about their face or body. Some people not so secretly.

We know it’s not good to fixate on the physical, and whilr er know that flaws are what can elevate an attractive person into a unique beauty, but by the time we reach adulthood, we’ve been so socially conditioned to process airbrushed and scalpel-assisted images of perfection that it’s hard not to lose perspective.

Especially when studies about the way conventionally attractive people get treated compared to their less conventionally attractive peers keep confirming our worst fears about it.

That’s when a bit of extra skin around the waist or a not-exactly-straight nose become parts of ourselves we try to minimize.

New York-based photographer Marc Erwin Babej is interested in exploring “uneasy coexistences” in his work, and his latest series, Mask of Perfection, takes an uncomfortable look at the way we’ve not only internalized beauty ideals in the 21st century, but how quick we are to go out and purchase them as if they were available on a retail shelf.

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“The currently emerging ideal of beauty is unprecedented in that it is actionable, and that conformity to it has become widely available. Lips like Angelina Jolie; breasts like Scarlett Johansson; a butt like Kim Kardashian; less slanted eyes like a white woman; a wrinkle-free complexion like a cosmetics model? Available at a plastic surgeon near you,” he writes in Camera Obscura magazine.

“In other words, the emerging beauty ideal not only reflects changing taste, but also represents a radical shift in the understanding of beauty itself. Conformity to an ideal of beauty used to be a daydream; now, it has become a line item on a shopping list. Whether this development is liberating or cheapens the concept of human beauty (or both at the same time) is a matter of individual judgment.”

To explore these ideals, he selected a series of beautiful young models – all of whom would fit our narrow standard of physical attractiveness – and had a plastic surgeon mark their faces where she would “fix” or “improve” them.

Though the average person would look at them and see features to admire, not alter, Babej’s project exposes how today’s chisel-wielders have been trained to look at faces based on the beauty standards of the minute.

On the face of a gorgeous “patient” identified as D.I., the surgeon marked the spots where she would inject filler into the 25-year-old’s non-existent marionette lines and perform rhinoplasty to fix the non-existent asymmetry in her perfectly lovely nose.

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This does not feel like a condemnation of plastic surgeons. They’re simply doing a service demanded of them by their patients and informed by public tastes. Not to mention that some people genuinely feel better after they’ve gotten a little nip and tuck and this has improved their lives.

But plastic surgery used to be the concern of the on-camera class, the actors and models and performers whose faces were just as scrutinized as their talent. Now it’s the balm of the masses, many of whom spend money that could be put toward vacations or school in order to purchase what they think is a more attractive physical appearance.

Even though we’ve seen the potential hazards of fiddling with one’s face, plastic surgery numbers continue to rise. Sometimes too high. Like tattoos, people can get addicted and keep wanting more.

What Babej’s series does is show us the depth to which our obsession with perfection can take a naturally beautiful person and turn her into an unnatural representation of someone else’s very temporal, very subjective idea of beauty.

And that’s a rather ugly concept to behold.