Vanity Calamity - Your Guide to Cosmetic Acupuncture For Anti-Aging
Vanity Calamity - Your Guide to Cosmetic Acupuncture For Anti-Aging
The Vanity Calamity is a two fold phenomenon. First, it is our obsession about how we look as we age. Second, it is our willingness to do almost anything - have surgery, be suctioned, injected, peeled, implanted, and more to fulfill our need to look younger.
Let's look at the obsession part first. Don't get me wrong; I want to look as young and vibrant as I can as I age. There is no doubt that maintaining a healthy, young look takes action while just allowing the clock to keep ticking may result in looking older. But I am blessed to know, use, and teach a very healthy way to stave off the effects of aging: Mei Zen Cosmetic Acupuncture.
Knowing that we can use Chinese Medicine to maintain our youthful appearance and actually improve our health while we see cosmetic improvements helps me be optimistic about the potential end of the Vanity Calamity.
The continuous and endless obsession with looking younger or more beautiful and the extent to which many people are willing to go to achieve that look are my concerns. In the year 2006, the obsession with looking younger and less wrinkled cost people billions of dollars in Botox injections. Billions! Beautifying treatments are a huge business. There is no end to the procedures that you can have to remove wrinkles, achieve skin that sags less, plump up your lips, your cheeks, your chin. I review many of those procedures in the chapter "How far should we go in our quest to look younger?".
Before I became a Practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine I was a Research Psychologist. Part of my studies centered around Social Psychology. I had an interest in the field of attractiveness and know that attractiveness leads to positive outcomes (at least according to the research). The more attractive you are the more likely you are to get the job, find a mate, and be perceived as more intelligent. These are called "attractiveness halo" effects because, for example, you are thought of as more intelligent because you are beautiful. It's a plain and simple fact that our society has emphasized beauty for a long time. And, unlike many other cultures, it has almost despised aging and the effects of aging. Basically everything associated with getting "old" is perceived as unwanted. Therefore most beauty procedures concentrate on erasing the effects of aging.
Think about it. How many people, especially women, do you know who love the way they look? How many do you know who don't see something on their faces that they can criticize? How many don't have "a few pounds to lose"? You don't generally hear people talking about how great they feel about their face. They're usually complaining about a wrinkle here, a wrinkle there, more than one chin, swelling under their eyes, age spots, and a slew of other "problems".
Who are we comparing ourselves to? Women on the covers of fashion magazines? Well, we will never measure up to those images. I take that back. I suppose with enough surgery, plumping injections, implants, liposuction, and permanent make-up maybe - just maybe - we could look something like those women on the magazine covers. But, more likely, we will never look like those women. We will never measure up to our current society's definition of beauty. Beauty = youth; beauty = perfection ... even if you have to undergo surgery to get the look.
Another very serious issue is that it's not even "older" women who are searching out some of these procedures. It's young women, women in their twenties who are already dissatisfied with how they look. Even some teenagers want procedures like breast augmentation so that they can like their bodies. If we don't start sharing a more healthy view of our bodies and faces with our young women, they won't need plastic surgery when they're forty, they'll need psychotherapy.
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