Twenty years ago, we all knew what it meant to be a beautiful woman, in so much as it was a rarified experience. Beautiful women were a select group of Amazonian models with Darwinian proportions, largely interchangeable give or take a mole. There was us over here. And there were the beautiful people (we could, quite literally, name them all on two hands - Cindy, Elle, Claudia, Helena, et al) over there, selling us Tab and night cream and taking turns on magazine covers.

The closest we could get to being one of them was to get a Linda Evangelista feathered crop or to wear whatever lipstick Cindy Crawford was flogging at the time. That's the way things were. And it was a relatively amicable arrangement.

But today, this relationship is messily ambivalent and confused. Being beautiful in 2009 is neither rare nor removed. It's purchasable with cosmetic surgery, spray tans, eyebrow-shaping and bum-lifting. For the first time in history, we can cheat nature and emulate the beautiful people. Who is authentically beautiful? Who can tell? And perfect beauty is a little dull, don't you think, when so many can attain it?


Resource:http://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/beauty/the-beautiful-truth-20090901-f63t.html