Real-life Barbie & Ken: plastic surgery and the attempt to redefine beauty
Modern-day philosophers say our idea of "beauty is becoming increasingly visual," with many trying to achieve this with technological and surgical interventions.
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| Real-life Barbie & Ken |
Justin Jedlica, a 41-year-old Slovak-American, prides himself on being a real-life doll and having no facial hair. Born in Poughkeepsie, New York, he underwent his first corrective procedure at the age of 18. Since then, he has had at least another 999 procedures done and spent at least $1 million on modifications. It is safe to say that not all of these interventions have gone to plan.
When asked how he would define the word “beauty,” Jedlica told TRT World that “beauty standards are something that he has desperately “tried to redefine” for himself.
“The Western ideal of beauty,” he said, is not something that he has ever been comfortable with. He is the recipient of numerous pec implants, at least 32 bicep implants, half a dozen tricep implants and deltoid implants, as well as numerous buttock injections.
We’re told, “beauty in the eye of the beholder.” It’s wholly subjective, and it can’t be measured.
However, Aristotle, one of the greatest thinkers of all time, begged to differ. According to the polymath, beauty could be measured. The founder of the Lyceum meant this quite literally.
In “Metaphysics”, he wrote: “The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate to a special degree.” As beauty writer Skye Sherwin has noted, Aristotelian values “are written into the way the Greeks built the world: from the mathematical proportion of their architecture to the way they composed the twisting bodies of discus throwers in sculpture.”