American Beauty

One of the advantages of being a Visiting Scholar at Stanford University is the opportunity to get closer to another culture. Myriad of minor and major differences are emerging to the surface, in everyday rhetoric and actions. One interesting difference between American and Danish culture is, for example, the relationship to cosmetic surgery. The industry is growing rapidly worldwide, but where in Denmark it is still look upon with ambivalent feelings (it is something you prefer not to talk about), it has gained more favorably on the other side of the Atlantic. In the new American edition of Elle, you can read an Upper East Side New Yorker’s photo diary. We follow her every day, dressed in new incredible expensive clothes, on her cafe visits, in the Hamptons and on the Botox Clinic (!). That would not has happend in a Danish magazine. Beauty comes from within, not by a knife (and if it does we keep it for ourselves). On another page in the Elle magazine can be seen an advertisement for yet another rejuvenation miracle cream. A new wrinkle treatment promises fewer wrinkles.’It is not surgical results of course’ as it states – ‘hopefully not’ Danish women will think, but here it is obviously meant as a reservation à la ‘do not expect that kind of magic’. The question is whether this difference in the relationsship to cosmetic surgery will be maintained, or whether this is merely a matter of time before we come to love the needle as much as the Americans.