David Hume’s famous proposition that beauty lies in the eye of the beholder was not an invitation to open another beauty clinic. He was making a simple point: beauty is not a physical substance hidden inside a face, waiting for an expert to certify it. Beauty involves perception and the mind of the person who looks. Centuries later, we seem to have made the proposition considerably more profitable.
Beauty is increasingly presented as a problem to be diagnosed, corrected and purchased.
Television is particularly good at making this transaction look harmless.
A confident female host sits across from an aesthetic practitioner. The conversation is warm, reassuring, almost sisterly. They discuss looking fresh, younger, more confident, perhaps even procedures before marriage. There is no hard sell. Yet marketing does not become less commercial merely because it arrives disguised as conversation.
None of this means that every woman who chooses cosmetic treatment is oppressed. That would be patronising women.
Women have agency.
The more interesting feminist question is: what happens to choice when the market first teaches us what we should dislike and then sells us the freedom to correct it?
First comes the beauty ideal. Then insecurity: perhaps my face is not young enough, smooth enough, fresh enough. Then comes the commercial solution. Once enough people begin buying that solution, the optional starts looking normal. And once it looks normal, refusing it can begin to look like neglect.
For an affluent woman, an aesthetic procedure may be discretionary spending.
For a middle or lower income household, the expectation can become another pressure.
When a woman prepares for marriage, the beauty market can meet the marriage market.
I know something about that market.
My research and advocacy on dowry violence goes back decades.
A bride must bring enough, look good enough and perform femininity well enough. Now perhaps she must also be maintained enough.
Marriage already has an astonishing shopping list: clothes, jewellery, furniture, appliances, ceremonies, gifts and, increasingly, the endless maintenance of an acceptable appearance.
I am not suggesting every bride undergoes cosmetic procedures. I am asking what happens when the idea becomes normalised.
Because once an "optional" beauty expense becomes an expectation, somebody eventually gets the bill. And the bill does not end at the clinic.
Money spent on socially manufactured appearance cannot be spent twice.
In a pressured household, another beauty expense can mean less room for savings, education, health or other needs.
Multiply that pressure across households and we move from an individual beauty choice to an economic question: what happens to purchasing power when insecurity itself becomes a consumption category?
This is not medical depression. It is the depressing effect of another normalised consumption burden on household purchasing power and inequality.
The market is clever. Sell the insecurity. Sell the solution. Then sell the maintenance.
Capitalism has always known how to monetise desire. The more unsettling achievement is monetising dissatisfaction with the self.
The pendulum swings again.
I have been called a pendulum, from one idea to another, one discipline to another. Perhaps life itself swings between freedom and expectation, individuality and conformity, nature and the market.
We tell women they are liberated because they can choose what to do with their faces, while commercial culture keeps teaching them what they ought to dislike about those faces.
We also tell them they will be loved for their souls. But the labour market has not always been so philosophical.
Research on physical attractiveness has found measurable effects in job related outcomes, although such effects vary by context and are not confined to women.
Appearance can matter for professional opportunity.
The issue is not Botox versus nature. It is choice versus manufactured compulsion.
Nor am I arguing that ageing should simply be surrendered to. Looking attractive is not a crime, and caring about appearance is not a moral failure.
Aesthetic medicine can have legitimate purposes.
But there is something peculiar about creating a society in which a woman is no longer simply ageing.
She is ageing and expected to manage the evidence. We may be inventing a third category: young, ageing, and cosmetically or surgically maintained.
We are, in effect, arguing with nature and charging women for the privilege.
That world has changed, and it would be unfair to pretend otherwise.
Younger women have different relationships with appearance, femininity, fashion and bodily choice.
Choice deserves respect. But choice should not become an alibi for cruelty.
Pakistan does have broadcast advertising rules.
PEMRA’s Code of Conduct contains provisions concerning health related advertising, misleading content, harmful advertising and the separation of advertisements from programmes.
The harder question is whether such rules address the softer ecosystem: the friendly interview, influencer conversation, celebrity endorsement and apparently innocent discussion that can blur information and promotion.
Perhaps we have become very alert to what women wear on television. We should be equally alert to what television teaches women to feel about themselves.
The problem begins when social norms, patriarchy and commercial culture make a natural face appear like an unfinished project.
If beauty lies partly in the eye of the beholder, perhaps the beholder should be allowed to develop an eye of her own.
Perhaps she should grow older without being treated as a failed younger woman.
A prospective bride’s family should not quietly acquire another expense because television has persuaded them that a human face is an unfinished renovation project.
Choice is not the enemy.
An economy that manufactures insecurity and then sells relief from that insecurity is the problem worth putting under the microscope.
I hope the pendulum beneath this argument is neither flabbergasting nor baffling.
The obvious part is simple: beauty is being sold.
The less obvious question is what happens when the sale becomes an expectation.
Beauty may indeed lie in the eye of the beholder.
But increasingly, someone else is trying to sell us the eyes.
