'Snapchat Dysmorphia' Syndrome: How we're getting sucked into an ugly beauty trap
Perfection and acceptance are distant synonyms for sure.
Perfection is a virtue in itself as long as it leads you to betterment. Sadly, nowadays, perfection is defined not in terms of making amendments and developing ourselves into better and happier people. The meaning of 'being accepted by others’ has completely changed.
Do we want to be perfect, or we — humans, the most advanced form of creatures — just crave for acceptance?
We desire the ideal beauty and booty to fit into standards of perfection. Just so others approve of us.
Wasn’t that a barrier we were taught to cross in school?
“Love yourself”, “Do what makes you happy”, “Don’t judge anyone”, and ironically, as adults we judge ourselves cent percent and try to change every bit of us to be accepted by society.
Sadly, society reacts to beauty - outer beauty. The person inside doesn’t have to speak much, if the outside attire is shiny and attractive. In order to look perfectly happy on the internet and in social circles, people are forgetting to be happy in real lives.
While we judge others for being cruel to animals and blame older times for harassing women, modern times carry a host of these practices.
Cutting open our bodies for surgeries, breaking our nose to sharpen it, starving ourselves to be smaller, whitening our skin, killing our feet in high heels, living with plastics in our chest to become ‘desirable'.
Does it not sound barbaric?
Going by definition, the feminine beauty ideal is the socially constructed notion that physical attractiveness is one of women’s most important assets and something all women should strive to achieve and maintain.
However, pressure to conform to a particular standard of ‘beauty’ can have drastic psychological effects on a person. These ideals have long been correlated with depression, eating disorders and low self-esteem, starting from an adolescent age and continuing into adulthood.
As the trend of getting ‘the perfect selfie face’ is increasing, and make-up and beauty filters on various social media apps are certainly not enough, people are making their way to the plastic surgeon’s clinic. Liposuction, nose reshaping, eyelid surgery and breast augmentation are the most common cosmetic surgical procedures in demand. Surprisingly, it's just not women, but also men and teenagers seeking these cosmetic surgeries for what they call ‘a better me’.
Peeping into history, we know this practice of having unrealistic expectations from women is rather ancient. A Chinese beauty trend involved ‘breaking girls’ feet’. Like we go to the surgeon now to break our nose or cheek bones to get them 'resculpted'. This particular practice known as ‘foot binding’ was the custom of applying tight binding to the feet of young girls to modify the shape and size of the feet. It was practiced in China from the Song Dynasty until the early 20th century, and bound feet were considered a status symbol as well as a mark of beauty.
A small foot in China, no different from a tiny waist in Victorian England, represented the height of female refinement.
“The smaller the foot, the better the husband."
Of course, it sounds extreme.
But is it so different from us?
Studies suggest that in Vietnam, some mothers call their daughters ugly and buy them plastic surgeries for their birthdays. In America, over one million women cut open their faces, chests, stomachs and butts, just to look more beautiful.
Surprisingly, Western culture is taking over India when it comes to creating fake realties as well. India (with a total number of 8,78,180 procedures) is included in the list of countries with the highest number of cosmetic procedures in 2016 along with the US, Brazil, Japan, Germany, etc.
People are excessively obsessed about their facial features and want a perfect selfie face. Doctors have come up with a name for this obsession - while many social media apps offer perfecting filters that smoothen skin tones, thin the face and change the colour of eyes, this photo editing technology has resulted in a new mental illness that scientists call ‘Snapchat dysmorphia.’
It's a disorder which makes people want to look like an edited version of themselves.
People are visiting plastic surgeons these days, not with their favourite celebrity's picture, but a morphed version of their own pictures so that #nofilters can be used to caption those pictures while all the necessary filters are applied to the face already.
This phenomenon, 'Snapchat dysmorphia', is being described by doctors and researchers as a form of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD).
During my research, I visited a well-known plastic surgeon and psychiatrist from BLK Hospital, New Delhi. Explaining whether this new filtered face obsession is more common in men or women, Dr Lokesh explained, "The ratio of female to male patients is 7:3. But out of the 70 per cent female patients, there are a lot of genuine cases, unlike the male patients who are obsessed to higher levels to gain those perfect features."
Telling us about the age group which is more into these facial transformations, he explained, "Patients mostly between 20 and 35 years come for counselling. Housewives above 30 are into these surgeries and in 10 per cent of the cases, these could also be obsessed teenagers."
While everyone around loves saying "I like being natural" without fail, doctors tell us fuller lips, high cheek bones, high eyebrows, sharper nose tips and conical-shaped faces are what patients come desperately looking for.
Dr Manish Jain, a well-known psychiatrist, suggested, "Psychiatric reference is done in cases for such patients. Generally, such patients are advised to go for mental treatments rather than going for surgery. Low self-esteem, problems in relationships and lack of self-confidence are major reasons for this disorder."
The solution to get out of this tricky trap lies within. We should start accepting ourselves as we are and seek perfection from within. Society these days is conditioned to react to the camouflage people wear. But, as individuals, we can initiate a change.
Admire the souls that people carry, not their outward baggage.
We should work on being better people and making this world a better place for everyone.