The Idea of Beauty and Its Biases: Critical Notes on the Aesthetics of Plastic Surgery

Summary: Two biases affect the idea of beauty often embodied in aesthetic surgery. The first one is that the living body is the sum of different parts; the second one claims that beauty results from the sum of beautiful elements. Taken together, these 2 biases explain most of the aesthetic surgery procedures, in which a localized improvement is supposed to impact on the whole body image. In this article, I put into question these 2 problematic assumptions, showing that Western and Eastern aesthetics, on one side, and philosophical reflections, on the other side, support a different conception of beauty. In particular, an alternative idea that opens to authenticity and imperfection and focuses on the living body rather than on the mere anatomical surface is proposed here as a more adequate concept of beauty for aesthetic surgery. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives License 4.0 (CCBY-NC-ND), where it is permissible to download and share the work provided it is properly cited. The work cannot be changed in any way or used commercially without permission from the journal. Published online 25 October 2017. Received for publication April 3, 2017; accepted August 18,2017. Disclosure: This work is funded by the Institute of Philosophy of Scientific and Technological Practice, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, under 2015 Grant on "Embodiment". The Article Processing Charge was paid for by the author. Nicola Di Stefano, PhD, FAST – Institute of Philosophy of Scientific and Technological Practice, Università Campus Bio-Medico di Roma, Via Alvaro del Portillo, 21, 00128, Rome, Italy, E-mail: n.distefano@unicampus.it Copyright © 2017 The Authors. Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc. on behalf of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. All rights reserved.

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