Styles of beauty are always changing, but one thing that does not change is the willingness of a beautiful person to suffer to achieve a desired appearance.
Today it may be fashionable to starve to stick-insect proportions or to burn off the fat to reveal hard, cut and toned muscle structure, but it was not always so. Harem favourites were force-fed on Turkish delight to preserve their opulent curves and waxy skin while boyish waifs were not always the male ideal of female beauty. In Samoa it was said that the loins of a virile male rarely stirred for anything under thirteen stone, and in America there is still a sub-culture of gainers and feeders, partners who get erotic pleasure from fattening their mates, or being fattened by them to be more desireable.
In the pursuit of beauty there is pain. The Chinese cut, bound and crippled their baby girls to achieve a lumpy, painful, smelly hoof they prized as a “lotus” foot. Maori beauty required scarring and tattooing faces whilst Pacific Islanders stretched holes in their ears down to their shoulders, Amazon men and women stretched their bottom lips with wooden discs and African women dislocated their cervical vertebrae by stretching them with columns of iron rings to achieve the prized “giraffe” neck. This seems to equate to the current western penchant for rings, piercings and tattoos and for plastic surgery to mould faces and bodies to required shapes, rebuilding noses and jaw lines, peellng skin, sucking out fat and augmenting breasts with silicone implants. This is not a practice restricted to women who want to please men. In the pursuit of male fantasies, males also frequently convert themselves surgically to comic-book parodies of the female form.
There is nothing new in any of this. Victorian women had their lower ribs removed to produce hand-span waists and before the second World War film stars sacrificed their wisdom teeth to achieve hollow cheeks.
In Tudor times men and women alike risked death to paint and powder themselves with lead-based cosmetics, whilst Edwardian beauties used poisonous arsenic to give their skin a luminous transparency and deadly nightshade to enlarge their pupils and brighten their eyes. Hence its popular name of belladonna, “the beautiful woman”. All to often these beautiful women died young.
The Queens of ancient Egypt did not only bathe in asses milk, but outlined their eyes with soot and cleaned their teeth with baby urine to keep them bleached white. They may seem unappetising or unsafe practices, but compared to what we do to ourselves today, can be argued to be less hazardous than the chemical cocktails we currently use to cleanse, moisturise, deodourise, paint and perfume ourselves.
Primitive men and women beautified themselves with cicatrices and tattoos and wore bones through their noses and hollow reeds through their cheeks. They painted themselves with plant and animal extracts and plastered themselves with coloured mud. What have we learned in the last four thousand years?
Sylvia Farley - From researching light in the Arctic to building palaces on the equator; from night-club singer to landlady providing bed, breakfast and ...
