Rebecca Mead writes in The New Yorker of all places:
“On the Upper East Side of New York City, the body and the face are considered to be something like a garden. . . . They are to be tended and cleaned, cared for every day in the hope that the buds will remain dewy,” Kuczynski writes, employing the same metaphor used by St. Teresa of Ávila, the sixteenth-century mystic and monastic reformer, whose autobiography called upon the beginner in prayer to think of himself “as of one setting out to make a garden in which the Lord is to take His delight.” The women Kuczynski interviews for whom cosmetic surgery is both a passion and a pastime are beauty nuns, dedicated to the discipline of personal physical reformation.
Unlike St. Teresa, of course, Kuczynski’s beauty nuns are interested in the garden of themselves for its own glory, not for the glory of God.
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Like certain strains of Christian mysticism, cosmetic surgery is founded on a notion of human perfectibility, although the means of achieving perfection, and the rewards thereof, are the opposite of those in a Christian theology. If for St. Teresa perfection required transcending the allures of the material and the sensual, adherents of the cult of plastic surgery undergo surgical mortification of the flesh in order to embrace the sensual life more fully. Ultimately, Kuczynski argues, what the beauty junkie is pursuing, and what our culture values most, is not simply aesthetic improvement but the preservation of apparent youthfulness at any cost.
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