The cult of beauty

“We humans have been adorning ourselves since the Palaeolithic; wearing bracelets, necklaces and earrings is almost an integral part of the human experience,” says Marga Sánchez Romero, archaeologist and author. If we look back, the body has historically undergone transformations and alterations: “Cranial modifications are also a very practical example of physical alterations that strove towards an ideal of what was considered beautiful or that reflected a degree of status."

This is also proven by the exhibition The Cult of Beauty, hosted by the Centre for Contemporary Culture in Barcelona, which offers a highly visual exploration of how the idea of beauty has imbued society throughout the ages. The exhibition also explores how health – in the form of cosmetic medicine or self-care routines – has become a means to pursue beauty. “In fact, what the exhibition suggests is that we are born naked, and the rest is a disguise.

The idea of beauty is hardly organic at all, and we tend to engage all the strategies at our disposal to approach this ideal—a destination we never actually reach. It’s like María Zambrano’s ‘clearing in the forest’: a path we’re constantly on, but one that has no endpoint,' says Blanca Arias, art historian and curator of the exhibition.

Is a beautiful body a healthy body?

“Health is a concept that cannot be separated from appearance, because, in fact, most diagnoses are made on the basis of appearance”, Blanca Arias points out, adding: "When someone walks down the street, we are able to tell if they are ill. Sometimes, we blithely claim that someone is obese without knowing anything about that person, based solely on our visual assessment. Medicine is therefore an extremely visual discipline that is shaped using as its reference an image of a healthy body—which is always one specific, single image—because medicine isn’t isolated from our shared archetypes; rather, it relies on an anatomical model. And beauty, too, has often drawn inspiration from that anatomical model.”

Ethics and beauty

The nature of this ideal of beauty, which we think of as linked to health, is more ethical than aesthetic. In line with the Aristotelian premise that there is a good whose attainment opens the door to all other desirable goods, meeting standards of beauty has carried, and continues to carry, the promise of attaining a degree of social status.

“We know that during the sixteenth, seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries, there were many men who wore heels as a status symbol. The first to start wearing them were men from the elite classes in the Persian region, who were horsemen and needed to hook their heels into the stirrups. In the 10th century AD, it began to be seen as a symbol of power and spread throughout Europe, reaching France and England,” explains Marga Sánchez. Subsequently, the heel has come to be a symbol representing femininity, but height remains the main aesthetic challenge for men, despite the fact that there is still no strictly standardised model of beauty for them.

For women, of course, that ideal is much more clearly defined, specifically in terms of the four pillars outlined by the philosopher Heather Widdows: youth, slimness, smoothness and firmness. However, even within those parameters, there are a growing number of models – as we saw in Greta Gerwig’s recent feature Barbie – that cater to the diverse body types seen in modern society. “If we think about what the industry considers beautiful, that is one understanding of beauty, and it is valid, but I believe we are also at a point where the term is being redefined. As with health, we need to start viewing beauty not as a privilege, but as a right – the right to make decisions about our own bodies.”