Painting your life with Poison

At a tube station recently I was noticing how many ads there were for female cosmetic surgery. Then one advert leapt out at me. It was of a twenty-something chap and the promotion was about 'improving your pecs'. There was something about a young, healthy male advertising cosmetic surgery that highlighted both how sad it was and how female surgery has become so commonplace it doesn't really register as shocking any more.

In most other areas, society is making progress against prejudice, but there seems to be a growing trend to be hyper-judgemental about physical appearance. This is so extreme we think nothing of our healthy, young people succumbing to the scalpel and people queueing up to have neurotoxin injected into their faces to remove wrinkles. There was even one tragic story of the death of a young woman having industrial silicon (the stuff you seal your bath with) injected into her buttocks rather than the medical quality product.

In times gone by it was considered attractive to use white lead paint on faces - which eventually proved disastrous, and yet we let non-medically trained people introduce poison into our bodies - in the hope of what exactly?

Attracting a better class of mate?

Improving our inner happiness - with poison or surgery?

Really?

Why are we so conditioned to feel guilty about having grey hair, lines on our faces, bags under our eyes? Why do we all pour money into the products that convince us we too can look like Hollywood stars, particularly the ones that tell us without irony, 'because you're worth it'? Why can't we just say 'grey is good' and value the physical signs that show we have probably gathered great wisdom and learned a lot about life?

It is what's inside that counts - and most people recognise that at some level. Maybe it's time to start an anti-advertising revolution, and deliberately not ever buy anything we see advertised. It might make us all happier.