Averaging the Outliers

Advertisements for Latisse began to stream on primetime TV Summer 2009- Brooke Shields attends a stylish birthday party for her daughter, flirting and dancing with a young male guest. As the background voiceover describes the daily application process for thicker more beautiful eyelashes, we see Shields beam and bat her eyelashes as if the new serum made all the difference in her confidence and happiness. Computerized graphics show the progression of results from week 0 to week 16, the final shot depicting dark, full, and thick lashes, as if they were lathered with the heaviest yet silkiest mascara of them all. Wow. Poster advertisements for Latisse are scattered around malls and editorial commercials have two-page spreads, all with the same gorgeous Shields staring back at you…

While the New York Times editors are quick to dismiss this cosmetic trend as a foolish descent into superficiality and physical paranoia (“First it was frozen foreheads. Now it’s Betty Boop eyelashes”), one must critically evaluate Latisse in relation to its cosmetic equivalent found in the drugstore aisle: mascara, which, all brands combined, draws in nearly $500 billion of revenue per year. Latisse is a prescribed medication used to treat eyelash hypotrichosis, or inadequate eyelashes. That inadequate eyelashes are yet another target for female insufficiency and why Brooke Shields, one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, is advertising for this “symptom,” are arguments beyond the scope of this blog post, but the expansive market for mascara can help to explain how Latisse might become the next big cosmetic/pharmaceutical blockbuster drug, after Botox of course. As the bio-pharma industry begins to discover and exploit more and more of nature’s mechanisms of action (Bimatoprost, the active ingredient in Latisse is a lipid compound derived from fatty acids found to bind to prostaglandin receptors present in hair and thought to be involved in the development and regrowth of hair follicles), there is the potential that aesthetic enhancement can be achieved more effectively through biomedical intervention, essentially a more natural method than applying chemically derived topical treatments and synthetic serums. And if the drugs became sufficiently competitive in price, who wouldn’t switch to a longer lasting product that doesn’t smudge or have to be reapplied throughout the day (Latisse is a once-daily prescription treatment that has been clinically proven to make eyelashes grow 20% longer, 106% thicker and 18% darker). If other pharmaceutical makeup equivalents were developed, we may one day leave the doctor’s office with a prescription for an antibiotic and one for a radiating cheek colour or lip stain. May Latisse and other cosmetic drug hybrids one day erase the need for Maybeline and Lancome products, dissolving the endless makeup aisle in CVS, essentially medicalizing the makeup industry?

As the science advances, the results of cosmetic procedures last longer. Tissue fillers approved by the FDA, used to diminish the appearance of small lines and wrinkles around the mouth and eyes, claim to last over a year, 9 months longer than what was approved only 2 years ago. As permanence becomes a more defining feature and as the mechanisms of action begin to mimic and blend into our own body’s environment, responsive to individual contours, adapting seamlessly with changes in bone structure and growth, will facial aging become a thing of the past?

Medicalizing the discourse now mostly associated with fashion and fleeting trends, beauty treatments would attain a sort of omnipotent power over the ability to change oneself and enhance one’s image. As the New York Time article, Eyelash of the Beholder, argues, “Allergan isn’t making a disease-related claim about Latisse but rather positioning it, like Botox, as part of what the company calls a ‘science of rejuvenation.’” The FDA’s involvement in the beauty industry begs us to consider the direction cosmetics may begin to take in the future. Beauty becomes a technical science, measured by statistical analysis in clinical settings. But. It is also, in today’s media saturated world, defined by digital technologies. The beauty industry and omnipresent celebrity culture endorses and depends on a sort of premature transhumanist conception of beauty, constantly ushering forth new female ideals who transcend the average look. But blown up on giant billboards and fetishized on glossy magazine covers, digital technologies enhance these beauties even further, smoothing their skin to a plastic tautness, tinting their eyes in iridescent shades, erasing pores and unsymmetrical hairlines. Suddenly the female ideal is a digitally enhanced being, constructed and manipulated on the computer screen using mathematical algorithms and numeric code. Combine this with the capabilities of Biotechnology and one begins to envision people visiting the doctor’s office with a pixilated graphic in hand, their symbol of physical perfection...Scan that into the computer, decode it and translate it into a surgical map for the robotic doctor. Whoa. I know. But could plastic surgery play with the idea that the digitally created version of the human body could replace the inadequate, average man of everyday life? Sounds pretty posthumanly plausible to me.

With the democratization of these procedures, the average man may no longer be at the center, or mean, of the Gaussian Curve, but rather shift more towards what we now consider the outlier field, the extremes, the freaks (though hopefully the more beautiful side...). The consequences for the medical field as well as other areas of research (statistics, sociology, philosophy) are immense and perhaps disturbing for many. Further along the lines of a shifting Gaussian Curve, while insurance companies currently cover most procedures defined as reconstructive, those performed to correct abnormalities or deformities, cosmetic enhancement may become more of a significant factor in the health and progress of society- defining the community as fit, strong, and confident. If health insurance currently covers by-pass surgery…