---
title: "A Crisis in Aesthesis"
description: "For millennia, the great Greek statues—Venus de Milo, Wing Victory of Samothrace, Laocoön and His Sons—have defined the pinnacle of classical beauty. They bear…"
url: https://www.independentpress.com/article/a-crisis-in-aesthesis
date: 2026-07-19
categories: ["Philosophy","Beauty"]
author: "Advik Lahiri"
---

# A Crisis in Aesthesis

![Laocoön and His Sons, Sistine Chapel](https://images.ctfassets.net/ewtdlsoyixc1/4orMHxKZojKDE67tn0x71k/6eee7d5bed672ffe37fb3bbc8807eb73/Untitled.jpg)

For millennia, the great Greek statues—[_Venus de Milo_](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Venus-de-Milo), [_Wing Victory of Samothrace_](https://www.louvre.fr/en/explore/the-palace/a-stairway-to-victory), [_Laocoön and His Sons_](https://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/museo-pio-clementino/Cortile-Ottagono/laocoonte.html)—have defined the pinnacle of classical beauty. They bear no tattoos, no cosmetic enhancements. They are monoliths of admiration; marble paragons that uphold societal values and somatic desire. At the time of their creation, tattoos were stigmatized, used to brandish criminals. Tattoos were a sign of punishment that betrayed anonymity and coloured you as a criminal. 

No ink winds up the forearm of the [_Doryphoros_](https://museum.classics.cam.ac.uk/collections/casts/doryphoros-0), the way tattoos symbolise pride and victory on so many soldiers today, telling a story of how many tours they experienced, how much trauma endured. No filler swells the lips of the [_Aphrodite of Knidos_](https://museum.classics.cam.ac.uk/collections/casts/aphrodite-knidos) the way it does in today’s age of celebrity and fame, abandoning the features that limn a beautiful heritage for a cuter pout on a TV screen. You do not owe anything to the facts of your life, to your ancestry, but disregarding it means losing yourself in the process. 

For more than two thousand years we have called these unmarked statutes the height of beauty. And yet today the body is endlessly altered—pierced, injected, sculpted, resurfaced—and we call that beautiful too. Both are valid, worth appreciating, and signal human development. The statue reaches toward an ideal: a body perfected by proportion, untouched precisely because it needs no touching. Modification, historically, reached toward expression: a body made meaningful by what was done to it. These are different conceptions, rival theologies of the flesh.

Capitalism has collapsed them into a third thing, _sameness_.

This is not an argument against cosmetic procedures, and it passes no judgment on anyone who has chosen one. That a person feels at home in their own body matters more than any theory about how they got there, and the choice to change one's appearance can be an act of genuine self-possession. The argument is about the impersonal forces that have quietly converted body modification from an instrument of distinction into an instrument of convergence, so that the act of becoming _more yourself_ increasingly produces a face that looks like everyone else's.

For most of human history, to modify the body was to say something that could not be unsaid. To the [Māori](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Maori), the indigenous peoples of New Zealand, the sacred tattooing practice of [_tā moko_](https://www.newzealand.com/us/feature/ta-moko-maori-tattoo/) is a tradition that maps genealogy and rank onto the face; each spiral legible to anyone who knows how to read it, with no two faces reading the same. [Scarification rites across West Africa](https://www.africarebirth.com/exploring-the-ancient-art-of-scarification-tradition-beauty-and-identity-in-african-and-aboriginal-cultures/) mark the passage into adulthood, the survival of ordeal, membership in a lineage. Sailors' tattoos record crossings of the equator and Cape Horn: a résumé written on the skin. The pierced, stretched, inked, and scarred body can be seen as a _document_. It tells you where a person has been, to whom they belong, what they have endured, and what they have earned.

First and foremost, the marks were particular: yours, or your people's. Their entire function was differentiation from other tribes, other ranks, other lives. Second, they were costly in a way that made them meaningful. They took time, pain, ceremony, and standing. You can not simply purchase a _moko_; you have to be entitled to one. Modification was the opposite of a commodity. It was the one thing that could not be bought, only lived.

…

The modern beauty catalogue is a menu of commodification: lip filler, jaw filler, Botox, buccal fat removal, rhinoplasty, the Brazilian butt lift, the [upper bleph](https://www.mayoclinic.org/tests-procedures/blepharoplasty/about/pac-20385174). Each procedure, taken alone, is a private choice. Taken together, they trace something stranger—a mass migration toward a single face. Plastic surgeons themselves have a name for it. Patients arrive not with photographs of themselves at twenty but with the same composite reference, the high cheekbone, the plump midface, the feline eye, the small, upturned nose. The look has been called _Instagram Face_ or _iPhone Face,_ and its defining quality is that it belongs to no one. It is racially ambiguous, geographically placeless, and reproduced with such fidelity from Los Angeles to Seoul to Dubai that influencers on different continents are routinely mistaken for one another. 

Tattoos once purported to say _I am this, and not that_. The filler syringe increasingly says _I am that _which is in spirit _the same as everyone else_. Modification no longer distinguishes; it homogenizes. In [_The Burnout Society_](https://robinmarkphillips.com/byung-chul-han/), philosopher Byung Chul-Han writes of the “violence of positivity”_ _in today’s society that encourages everybody to the same ideal. This institutionalized positivity is inwardly pernicious and ends up saturating the world. The same objects are ingrained into the same soma, purchased from the same menu, aspiring to the same template. And the cruelest part of the mechanism is its vocabulary: every procedure is marketed in the language of individuality. _Become the best version of yourself._ But the ‘best version’ turns out to have been designed elsewhere, in aggregate, and the pursuit of it lands millions of separate selves on the same coordinates. Such is a quandary of the self. Are attempts at self-discovery through our physical bodies ultimately banal? Perhaps the fact that the best version of yourself can only be realised through your eyes and will never be perceived by another the way it is perceived by you redeems the _sameness_. However, the consumer act of self-expression resolves, at scale, into an act of self-erasure.

Consider how quickly the standards move. The Victorian woman concealed her ankles; her great-granddaughter sunbathed in a bikini; a further generation contours a silhouette on camera for strangers. Within living memory, the ideal female body has swung from [Twiggy's](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Twiggy) beautiful androgyny to the athletic curve of the nineties to the surgical hourglass of the 2010s and back toward thinness in the age of [semaglutide](https://www.mayoclinic.org/drugs-supplements/semaglutide-subcutaneous-route/description/drg-20406730). Nothing about human biology changed in those decades. What changed was the surrounding apparatus of images and incentives. Beauty, in other words, is constructed—and whatever is constructed can be commissioned.

A market has a particular interest in what gets commissioned. A thousand competing ideals of beauty are commercially inconvenient: they fragment demand, complicate supply chains, resist economies of scale. One ideal, universally chased and perpetually just out of reach, is a machine for generating desire. The image regime we live inside—advertising, film, and above all the algorithmic feed, which learns what holds the eye and then shows it to a billion people at once—does not conspire to flatten beauty. It simply optimizes it. The face that performs best becomes the face that is shown most, which becomes the face that is wanted most, which becomes the face that is bought and commoditized.

If beauty were natural, none of this leverage would exist. So, it is worth asking: what happens to beauty when the surrounding system changes completely?

…

We have a controlled experiment on this subject, and it ran for decades.

Under [Mao Zedong](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mao-Zedong), leader of China’s communist revolution, the celebrated ideal of the body inverted nearly every term of Western glamour. The Chinese heroine of revolutionary posters was the ‘iron girl’—sturdy, sun-darkened, hair cropped or plaited for work, dressed in the same blue or green cotton as the men beside her. Beauty was read as a productive virtue: the strong back, the capable hands, the face turned toward the harvest or the furnace. Mao manifested the industrial demands of the [Great Leap Forward](https://www.britannica.com/event/Great-Leap-Forward) into the image culture of his regime. As people grew into that mode of life, they carried Mao’s campaign forward. Industrialization had taken over every aspect.

Ornament was not merely unfashionable; visible adornment like lipstick, a permanent wave, a fitted dress could be politically suspect, evidence of bourgeois individualism clinging to the skin. Within a generation, under Mao’s brutal [Cultural Revolution](https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/resources/the-cultural-revolution/), a civilization that had held a tapestry of elaborate cosmetic tradition dear to their hearts came to see plainness as the new aspiration. 

The point is not that one system was freer or truer. The point is that beauty followed the system _completely_. Maoist China bent the beautiful to serve the state; western market-based society bends it to serve consumption. In both cases the ideal presented itself as obvious, as simply what beauty _is_ and, in both cases, it was manufactured by the surrounding order, top to bottom.

We did not escape the propaganda poster. We privatized it, personalized it, and put it in our pockets.

…

Writer and feminist, [Simone de Beauvoir](https://www.britannica.com/biography/Simone-de-Beauvoir) gave us the deep grammar of this predicament. In Beauvoir’s seminal work, [_The Second Sex_](https://newuniversityinexileconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Simone-de-Beauvoir-The-Second-Sex-Jonathan-Cape-1956.pdf), Woman, she argued, is constructed as ‘the Other’. She is defined not from within but through the gaze of the one who looks. Beauty, under such an arrangement, is never merely an attribute. It is an asset one is expected to hold, maintain, and eventually spend: on marriage, on employment, on the basic social permission to be seen and heard.

The market did not invent this; it monetized it. Where beauty is treated as currency, the pressure to converge on the reigning standard falls hardest on those whose social value has been most tightly pegged to their appearance. Historically, women and men's cosmetic procedures climb year over year as the gaze finds new territory. This is why sympathy, not judgment, is the only honest posture toward the individual in the cosmetic surgery clinic waiting room. When the standard is currency, meeting it is not vanity. It is solvency. One does not fault a person for changing money into the denomination the economy accepts.

…

We conclude by standing again before the great Greek marble statue of antiquity. It is unmarked and did not need marking to mean something; its meaning was carried in [mathematical proportions](https://www.1st-art-gallery.com/article/divine-ancient-greek-sculpture/?srsltid=AfmBOoo0Et6-4Mfr53WXjNTkYN3mD47zQ41A_BTmBcJ6KfUygLU_Dl4W) and symmetry, in the ideal it gestured toward. The tattooed Māori chief, its perfect opposite, carried meaning in every line cut into his face. Both bodies _said _something. That is what they share, across the chasm between them—and that is precisely what the modern market-based society has drained away.

The real change is not modification itself. Humans have always altered their bodies and always will; the impulse is as old as [bistre](https://www.thecolourclub.co.uk/articles/d8xwvvmipgr1ry7m0c2rr9f3lywv8n) and [bone needles](https://www.penn.museum/sites/bulletin/2302/). The change is that an act which for most of history celebrated individuality now manufactures conformity—that the deepest available gesture of self-authorship has been converted into a form of subscription. The statue reached for an ideal. The moko declared a self. The syringe, too often, purchases a resemblance.

The result is quieter and more unsettling than the mere choice between naturalism or modification. When we set out to become the best version of ourselves, the version we were always meant to be—the phrase the market has taught us all to say—are we expressing something, or merely buying the same self as everyone else?