Sarah Ledden | Senior Staff Writer
According to Genesis, we were once creatures of ignorance, blindly living sin-free, until a coaxed Eve sunk her teeth into the forbidden fruit and mankind’s eyes were opened to the bareness of the human body. Adam and Eve cared about how they looked and took time to cover themselves up and look presentable. The need to care for ourselves and our appearance is not something that has evolved and grown in the modern world, but a part of societal norms for millennia. With increased technologies and media outlets, it’s unsurprising that people feel under more pressure than ever to care for their appearance. Although we hate to admit that this is something we engage in, we are all guilty of caring about how we look and spending time each morning refining our appearance before we face the world. I have never seen anyone stroll through the Arts block with their hair unbrushed in their pyjamas, and even tracksuit bottoms are a rarity. The fact that we all have a certain amount of concern for our appearance does not mean that we are all vain individuals, but why is appearance so important?
First impressions have an overwhelming influence on our overall estimation of a person and are said to be made within seconds, with most recent reports suggesting as little as 100 milliseconds is needed for impressions to be formed. 93% of first impression judgements are based on non-verbal cues, primarily appearance. People draw all sorts of conclusions about our character and personality based on our faces alone. Although we are warned not to judge a book by its cover, research shows that personality judgements based on appearance-only information are quite accurate, including cases where people judge personalities based on photographs alone, with no other non-verbal cues or interaction with the person. Although JRR Tolkein tries to warn us that “all that is gold does not glitter”, research shows that attractive people are more likely to be hired, receive higher salaries, be ruled not-guilty and, even as young children, liked more by their classmates and teachers. In the immortal words of Taylor Swift “everybody loves pretty, everybody loves cool”, so it’s not surprising that with all the odds weighing in attractive people’s favour we would make a little effort to look nice before we leave the house, and consider our appearance almost as much as our material when preparing for an interview.
From about two years of age, infants show the first signs of self-recognition, as they begin to acknowledge their own reflection. The recognition of ones own reflection is an attribute held exclusively by humans and higher functioning apes, such as orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees. Only a few years later do children begin to express dislike about how they look. From a perceptual perspective, faces are special. They are processed differently in our visual system than objects and attract visual attention. Newborn infants even show a tendency to prefer looking at faces than objects. When we meet people for the first time, we instinctively take in all the visual stimuli presented, and without our knowledge our eyes automatically outline details of a person’s face and hair. At the most basic cognitive level, the appearance of someone is the first, and most important, piece of information we store about them.
A Canadian survey showed that 90% of women are dissatisfied with their appearance. Rather than accepting our appearance as a biological inheritance composed of cells and structures constructed from genes, we seek to control as much as we can about the way we look. The cosmetic industry made approximately $54.89 billion dollars in the US in 2012. Companies like Luxurgery are providing services to those who feel like they want to alter their appearance for a myriad of reasons, it is not always to do with vanity. I did once heard someone say “losing your make-up bag is like losing your purse”. Make-up has almost become a necessity for women, and some men, to hide blemishes and accentuate their more desirable features. Tutorials online can even guide people on ‘extreme contouring’, in which you change the apparent shape of your face using make-up. Wearing make-up can boost self-confidence as people feel more comfortable when they can disguise and hide spots and scars, but the psychological boost that is accompanied by make-up, and the anxiety in it’s absence (let’s not forget about the ‘no make-up selfie’ phenomenon), demonstrates the importance appearance plays in our self-evaluations. Cosmetic surgery is a more extreme way to change appearance, and although it is more prominent in celebrity culture, the general public are not excluded in using cosmetic surgery to change the way they look. As years go on, cosmetic surgery just increases in demand, leaving the plastic surgery industry even busier. The communication with a CRO (contract research organization) is also essential for these plastic surgery companies for an FDA approval for aesthetics procedures, leaving CRO’s in high demand also.
We make decisions about our appearance and the way we want to present ourselves. Our appearance plays an important role in our self-concept: if we class ourselves as likeable, attractive, confident, introverted, this will be reflected in the way we walk or stand, the clothes we wear and our non-verbal behaviour. Our hair colour and apparel may be seen as extensions of ourselves and a reflection of our self-expression. Social psychologists argue that these ‘free-will’ decisions are guided by implicit and explicit cues from the people and media surrounding us. Leon Festinger outlined how individuals have a desire to receive accurate self-evaluations, and base these evaluations through comparisons with others. We are constantly evaluating ourselves and aiming for self-improvement and enhancement in all aspects of our life. Repeated exposure to the idealistic men and women over-represented in the media creates an environment in which we are always making upward comparisons. An important observation is the little, and near non-existent, representation of disfigurement is in the media. People with visible disabilities or disfigurements often have low levels of self-esteem and have negative self-evaluations on their appearance. The few representation of physical disability in the media appear in shows such as the Undateables, which only highlights the disfigurement of a person and how their appearance hinders them in other aspects of their life. Dissatisfaction with appearance and the accompanying anxiety can lead to psychological distress that may develop in to mood, anxiety or eating disorders.
In a modern world, the concept of our appearance is being extended into our online lives. How we present ourselves online, the pictures we allow on our profiles and the information we provide on our newsfeed are all modern ways of presenting ourselves in an admirable, or distinctive, light both for those we know to maintain a good impression of us, and strangers to form one. How many times have you spent minutes or hours agonizing over your profile picture choices? Or taken more than one selfie on Snapchat before getting the perfect one to send? Even the ‘unattractive’ selfies we send to our best friends are restrictive and rarely executed on the first attempt. Our online lives’ offer a new way for us to control the way we present ourselves to the world and the assumptions others make about us. Although explicitly referred to as social media, the majority of users are conscious of the potential professional consequences of our online behaviour. Facebook allows the option to approve taggings before publicising your photographs, which offers another way for us to control what people do and don’t see about us. We choose cover photos that make us look social or thoughtful or educated and profile pictures that make us look fun-loving or attractive or, even just, happy. We design our profiles knowing that strangers will be lurking, in preparation for when that guy you met in Coppers or potential employers stumble upon your page.
Why do we care so much about appearance? The answer appears to be quite simply, because we want to be liked. Humans are social creatures, and no matter how much we preach about individuality and the desire to be independent and unique, we all derive from the same social brain. Appearance is important in other people’s evaluations of us and our success, so our concern with appearance could derive from a need to control these evaluations. We do not all want to be attractive, and the majority of people are very comfortable in their own skin, regardless of the size and colour of that skin, but we are comfortable because it is our skin. It is the part of ourselves that we choose to show the world, the piece of ourselves that we put on display to welcome or warn people. It is the impression we want to make.
