It is only very recently that elective cosmetic surgery has entered the mainstream as a routine and socially acceptable way to alter appearance. In the 1950s, for example, aesthetic plastic surgery was a largely marginal and unknown medical practice. Just a few decades later, in the present day, it is a recognized medical speciality, not to mention a highly lucrative multi-billion dollar global industry. Although cosmetic surgery is regularly performed on men, it is by and large a female practice. In 2016, for instance, in the United States, ninety-two per cent of surgical and non-surgical cosmetic procedures were performed on women, and only eight per cent on men. (Interestingly, although women are by and large the primary recipients of cosmetic surgery, approximately eight out of every nine cosmetic surgeons are male.) These figures are mirrored precisely in the UK, where women, in 2015, made up about 91% of cosmetic surgery recipients.

It is commonly argued that women who undergo cosmetic surgery are ‘cultural dopes’, ‘misguided and deluded victims’ that have been misled by patriarchal norms that are contrary to their ‘authentic’ or ‘autonomous’ selves. The assumption of a pervasive false consciousness which leads women astray from a more authentic expression of identity and appearance is operational in much of the liberal feminist discourse on the matter. Women’s choices to engage in extreme grooming practices, like cosmetic surgery, are devalued as ‘inauthentic’, driven by hegemonic hetero-normative patriarchal societal pressures, rather than on so-called ‘authentic’ personal preferences. In the context of cosmetic surgery, questions about authenticity versus false consciousness are enormously ambivalent and the aim of this short article is to explore some of these ambivalences. In fact, cosmetic surgery is an arena where the question of whether we can meaningfully disentangle an authentic expression of self and identity, from an expression of self that is mediated and constructed by societal and institutional expectations, comes strikingly to the fore.