Cosmetic Surgery Blog

What is Beauty? What is a perfect female body? Those questions have been asked since before the invention of the question mark and everyone has their own answers. Even society as a whole has had different answers to those questions in different eras. Take a serious look at the figure of the Venus de Milo: Thick waist, small breasts, and no arms and still one of the great beauties of all time.

But a better question might be “Why are we so hard on each other?” Case in point: Jennifer Lover Hewitt. Hewitt is a fine actress and is quite lovely. Recently, she was spending time with friends having fun playing in the ocean in Hawaii. Someone took photos.

Others spread the photos around the Internet. Within what seemed liked hours, Hewitt was being ripped up one side and down the other for being fat, being out-of-shape, and having (Oh! The horror!) cellulite. No one commented on the look of honest happiness on her face. (She was in Hawaii celebrating her engagement.) No one said, hey, isn’t’ the pretty lady having fun in the surf? Nope. The only comments were about the size of her posterior and whether or not she looked awful in that swimsuit.

Hewitt—sensible woman—fired back. She stated, “”I’ve sat by in silence for a long time now about the way women’s bodies are constantly scrutinized. To set the record straight, I’m not upset for me, but for all of the girls out there that are struggling with their body image”

And Hewitt is a woman who has ranked highly on a couple dozen “sexiest woman” or “most beautiful” polls, not to mention a few “best-dressed” lists. So what chance would the rest of us stand if we got hit with that sort of criticism?

It is one thing to have standards of beauty, but are we getting hypercritical? Are we losing sight of what is a normal woman’s body? The average dress size in the United States is between a 12 and a 14, yet women act as if being over a size 6 is a crime against nature. And no one likes cellulite, but the vast majority of us have some of it.

But instead, now everyone stands around sniping at a petite woman (Hewitt is only 5 foot 2 or 5 foot 3) who, if she is not a size 2 as she claims, is certainly not hearing a lecture on weight from her doctor. In a designer dress at some awards show or other, Hewitt looks phenomenal.

Maybe this is something our paparazzi culture has left us with. We no longer have an idea of what is normal beauty and assume that we all should be extraordinarily beautiful. Once, we only saw pictures of screen idols when they were made up to the nines and dripping in Dior. Now we see paparazzi photos of celebrities with cellulite and no makeup pushing their toddlers while doing the grocery shopping. And then a week later, we see a shot of the same famous-for-being-famous celebrity dressed to kill and made up within an inch of her life on a red carpet.

Which photo is the right one? The truth is that they both are. Take a photo of me when I am leaning over the produce at Shop-Rite and I probably look like hell on wheels. I do not wear makeup to go and buy broccoli. Put me in a free, custom-made gown, a few borrowed diamonds, and give me the services of a makeup artist and I could look like heaven. And I still wouldn’t be in Hewitt’s class. (And if you take a photo of me on the beach that shows anything below my shoulders, I will hunt you down.)

Maybe we need to rethink what a beautiful body is so that fewer of us fall outside of that definition. It isn’t like the definitions haven’t changed over the years. Check out some paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, a man who seemed to love cellulite. Here is his great painting, “Venus at the Mirror.” Somehow, I doubt that his fashion in women’s figures is going to happen again any time soon, but let’s try reviving the word “rubenesque” for healthy women who have dress sizes in double digits.   

The good news is that the poll done here at MyCosmeticSurgeryBlog.com says that the majority of you think the same way Hewitt does. Fifty-five percent said that she looked just fine. Only a small 10% said she should lose weight, although 23% said she needed to work out a bit.

Then again, 7% of you asked, “Who is Jennifer Love Hewitt?”