What is beauty? Have you ever asked yourself that question? “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” many would say. This is a correct statement, but it still doesn’t explain what beauty is. Likewise, what we find “ugly” follows the same logic. Ugliness too is in the eye of the beholder. For example, one day, back in university, I went to class wearing black lipstick, and while my fellow classmates were indifferent to it, my English teacher decided to ask me: “Why do you make yourself so ugly?” in front of the entire class. Needless to say that 18-year-old me was ‘too stunned to speak’. Thinking about it now, I see this incident as an illustration of how beauty and ugliness aren’t things we can all agree on. Beauty is influenced by more factors than we think. Similarly, I wouldn’t have enough fingers on my hands to count the amount of times I was criticized for having several piercings and tattoos. “You’d be prettier without them” someone told me just a few weeks ago. “You must make the metal detectors beep at the airport”. Good one! But no, I don’t make the metal detectors beep at the airport. “Moo-moo, you look like a cow”. That one was from high-school. I think you get the point here. Being heavily pierced and/or tattooed in Western societies is not welcomed with open arms, whether by young or older generations. Despite the public opinion on that matter seeming to be slowly evolving with the arrival of millennials in more and more positions of power at work and in our society, it still remains that these practices don’t ‘sit right’ with European traditions. I was curious to know why, so I decided to explore this issue in order to understand what it is that Westerners see in this type of body-modification to be so repelled about it.
The Meriam-Webster dictionary defines beauty as “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit”. In that sense, beauty is what makes us feel good to look at. The same way we’d stop by to stare at a nice painting in the museum, we often stop what we’re doing to admire the beauty of an individual, whether online or in real life. While, from a scientific point of view, there are commonalities across cultures when it comes to what shapes and forms beauty takes (e.g. symmetry vs. asymmetry, order vs. chaos, commonness vs. rarity, etc.), culture and customs play an enormous role in further defining what beauty should look like. For example, the Bible forbids its believers (Christians and Jews) to get tattooed, as per Leviticus 19:28 (Old Testament), “You shall not make gashes in your flesh for the dead, or incise any marks on yourselves.” Likewise, although the Quran does not cite the act of tattooing as haram, they are considered a sin, based on the hadith (oral traditions) of the prophet Muhammad. People who are of Christian, Jewish, or Muslim faith are therefore more incline than their agnostic or atheist counterparts to perceive someone with tattoos as “ugly”, because of what they represent from a religious perspective. We can thus grasp to what extent beauty isn’t only about a face being harmonious, or symmetrical. It’s also about whether the subject’s appearance corresponds to what is expected by the beholder’s cultural dogmas. Likewise, personal experience can also influence this notion. A lot of us for instance are affected upon encountering in a stranger a physical element proper to a former amorous partner. Seeing a stranger wearing your ex’s shoes can provoke an array of different emotions: disgust, nostalgia, anger, attraction, etc. This also goes for elements we might not consciously remember, but which impacted us enough to be stored in the unconscious part of our mind. For example, a child whose mother died wearing a yellow shirt might unconsciously start developing a certain distaste for the color yellow, because of the traumatic memory attached to it. Although the child may not remember the physical details of the event, those remain stored in the mind, only in a way which isn’t accessible to us.
Likewise, although beauty ideals change from one era to the other, there remain a few common elements which determines our beauty. When comparing Renaissance paintings, photographs of the 1960s, and selfies from the late 2010s, it is obvious that a lot has changed in terms of beauty and body goals. However, tattoos and piercing still remain out of the picture when it comes to mainstream beauty standards. Having your ears pierced is fairly common, but facial piercings seem to remain a big deal for many. I remember having to rehearse asking my parents for my first nose piercing when I was 17. Luckily for me, they said yes – but little did they know they had just opened a Pandora’s Box! Facial piercings somehow remain this “edgy” thing that few people go for. Indeed, there is something about European beauty standards that requires one to have a bare face, without any marking or jewelry. Despite body-ideals having changed tremendously throughout the centuries, facial beauty has remained fairly identical for European societies. We still see blond or fair-colored hair as the pinnacle of beauty, blue eyes still remain a desired eye color, and fair skin still remains a general preference (although the practice of fake-tanning being on the rise, darker complexions are still not welcomed as actual beauty goals). Take for example the modeling industry. Only a fragment of popular models are heavily tattooed, and even less heavily pierced. Rick Genest, also known as Zombie Boy, was one of a kind within the industry. Moreover, while tattoos tend to be more tolerated, and for some perceived as “attractive”, on men, they remain for many a turn-off when worn by women. We observe this a lot in the media, with very few heavily tattooed actresses in the forefront of popular cinema, while on the opposite having a few males with ink under their skin – Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Jason Momoa, or even Pete Davidson.
This keenness for one type of beauty standard not only has for consequence to ostracize those not matching its requirements, but also to rebuke beauty standards proper to other cultures. Because piercing and tattoos are, in our Western societies, not practices which are encouraged and celebrated as part of ways through which we people can express ourselves, individuals who do have them are deemed as rebels and non-conformists. This non-conformism is then often interpreted as being a sign of someone not being friendly or trustable, because they refuse to follow society’s dogmas. In certain cases, non-conformism also acts like a mirror for the beholder, in the sense that it can trigger the latter to realize how they too could break free from societal norms, but do not, by fear of external judgements, by cowardice, or by mere fear of being ostracized the same way they too ostracize others.
Another reason behind the repulsion for piercing and tattoos also comes from the fear of the unknown. Because this type of physical adornment pertains to the foreign, it causes individuals who aren’t not familiar with them to shy away from them and assume the worse of the people who wear them. This fear of the foreign can in fact be summed up in one word: xenophobia. While most of us tend to think of xenophobia as purely overt racism and evidently prejudiced attitudes towards foreigners, xenophobia takes (unfortunately) more shapes and forms than we can think. Because of its pervasive nature and its ties to in-group bias, fearing what isn’t orthodox is not only difficult to realize but also to admit. We all know judging on the basis of appearance is a slippery slope towards bigotry and preconceived perception. Yet, we all do it, because it’s in our nature to emit judgments. But therein isn’t the issue. As Arthur Schopenhauer wrote “Der Mensch kann tun was er will; er kann aber nicht wollen was er will.” In English: “Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.” In this context, it is to be understood as the fact that we do not have power over our thoughts or desires, but that we do over our actions. We can therefore emit judgements, but we can choose to not act upon them. For instance, I was born in a small, bourgeois French town, where I received a Eurocentric academic education, often tainted with disdain towards what the West likes referring to as the ‘Third World’, and even more so towards Africa. This has impacted the way I think, the way I emit judgements, and I believe it is the case for anyone who, like me, was born and raised in the West. Nonetheless, we remain in capability to alter the trajectory of certain thought-patterns. Author Nathan Rutstein in fact wrote that “Prejudice is an emotional commitment to ignorance”. Although sometimes rather unconsciously than consciously, we choose to remain ignorant. Deep down, we know we’re doing the wrong thing but we choose to repress that knowledge by fear of facing the truth as much as ourselves. Jane Elliott, retired Iowa teacher, has been running experiments to tackle racial biases since the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in the late 1960s. She too stated that whoever happens to have received their academic education in the West is likely (if not definitely) racist, because we as children were taught to think a certain way and held onto that way of thinking up into adulthood. This fear of the foreign, although understandable from a basis of human nature, does not profit us as social creatures at all – quite the opposite in fact, as it generates biases and creates unfounded animosities between individuals who normally could get along.
It is no surprise or lie that places like Africa and Asia have for a long time been perceived by the West (and more particularly by Europe) as primitive. Many texts from icons of European literature can attest of the disdain and hatred towards those nations that inhabited the European psyche. French Enlightenment writer Voltaire himself wrote that he believed Black people together with indigenous populations of Northern Siberia were “plunged into the same stupidity, and will languish in it for a long time”. German philosopher Friedrich Hegel thought there was “nothing human to be found” in Black populations. His contemporary Immanuel Kant believed what he referred to as the “yellow and Indians” to have lesser talents as the White race, and that Black people “stand far lower”. With this in mind, when Europe discovered traditional practices of body-modifications at the time of colonizing those populations, it goes without saying that these were instantly associated with what the people represented in the European psyche. Septum, lip and cheek piercings have been found to be practiced since the earliest forms of civilizations in Africa. Science editor Hannah Osborne in fact writes in a 2020 article for Newsweek that “the earliest evidence of facial piercing in Africa have been discovered in the skeletal remains of a young man who lived around 12,000 years ago”, who appeared to have pierced and stretched his cheeks and bottom lip, which is a practice still present to this day in many tribes of Africa – the Mursi and Surma people of the lower Omo River valley in Ethiopia being two examples, where wearing a lip plate is a common form of body adornment. The septum piercing is also very common and its meanings are various. The stretching of ear piercings is another practice present throughout different places of the world. One of the continents where it is most found is Africa, where the earliest evidence of it was found on Ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun. Nowadays, this practice is shared across different tribes – the Fulani people of Western Africa, Maasai people of Kenya, the Mursi tribe of Ethiopia, and more. Body-modification practices in Africa also extend to facial and bodily skin-marking in the form of scarification. The famous Benin bronze heads are proof of the ancientness of this tradition. In Asia, the practice of ear-stretching can be found among the Lahu tribe from Thailand and the Karen-Padaung from Myanmar. The most famous example of the continent is Gautama Buddha, who had long stretched ears. Ancient Mesoamerican populations like the Aztecs and the Mayans were also known for the practice of ear-stretching. As for tattooing, many places are known as cradles of skin-inking: the Pacific Islands of Tahiti, Samoa, or even New Zealand are great examples.
Through their discovery of the aforementioned cultures and populations, Europe associated certain types of body-modification with a form of primitiveness, moral abasement and unorthodoxy in comparison to European beauty and body standards. At crossroads between racial prejudice and religious fanaticism, the European psyche associated being tattooed or pierced with all they saw in the foreign, and since the foreign meant bad, so did piercings and tattoos. “But this was centuries ago” you might say. It was indeed, however, the same way the first law of thermodynamics is that energy can only be changed and not destroyed, so do ideas. Xenophobic ideologies did not vanish into thin air. They got transferred into new ones. Thus, although this fear and repulsion for the foreign and its traditions appeared a long time ago, they left an indelible impact at every single strata of Western societies. Although we can observe a growth in popularity of other forms of body modifications (as a UK-resident, I can attest of the booming success of lip fillers, BBLs, nose-jobs and plastic surgery as a whole), they remain more or less in alignment with European beauty standards, with its twenty-first-century tweaks. Piercings and tattoos “in excess” (defining excess sends us back to the notion of subjectivity of beauty) however still remain part of a niche, often labeled as outcasts. So all in all, we did make progress, but we cannot deny the West’s (un)conscious wish to preserve its own traditional European beauty standards, and to therefore maintain facial adornment and heavy inking out of the question.
Sources
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/beauty
https://daily.jstor.org/why-does-the-bible-forbid-tattoos/#:~:text=But%20in%20the%20ancient%20Middle,against%20pagan%20practices%20of%20mourning
https://www.learnreligions.com/tattoos-in-islam-2004393
https://www.newsweek.com/earliest-facial-piercing-africa-ancient-skeleton-1484600
https://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/biobk/biobookener1.html#:~:text=First%20Law%20of%20Thermodynamics%3A%20Energy,from%20one%20form%20to%20another
Aude Calloch 