Beauty Demands

Call for Abstracts Beauty Demands Workshop 4 Routine maintenance and exceptional procedures: 23-24 March 2016 Hosted by Manchester Law School, Manchester Metropolitan University www.birmingham.ac.uk/beautydemands This workshop explores the popular rhetoric that ‘routine’ beauty procedures are similar to standard beauty practices (such as make-up application and hair dye) and therefore non- problematic. Many ‘routine practices’ have expanded and now include removal of body hair, salon manicures and ‘non-invasive procedures’ (such as fillers and Botox), procedures which require ‘beauty technicians’. Surgical procedures are not yet ‘routine’, but the resort to surgery is increasingly becoming ‘routine’. The workshop will explore the extent to which the boundaries between what is ‘routine’ and ‘exceptional’ are changing, and what this means in terms of what is demanded for ‘acceptability’, as well as regulating risky, but supposedly ‘routine’ procedures. Abstracts are sou

In this post, Katharine Wright from the Nuffield Council on Bioethics reflects on the recent Beauty Demands workshop on the globalisation and homogenisation of beauty held at the University of Birmingham. Back in June, I wrote about the  Beauty Demands  seminar we hosted here at the Nuffield Council that looked at the  role played by health professionals  in both creating and meeting the increasing demand for invasive cosmetic procedures. In the next seminar of the series, held in Birmingham (also see  Kate Harvey’s previous blog ), we turned our attention to the  globalisation of beauty , debunking the myth that the rising interest in surgical ‘fixes’ is a trend emerging only in the wealthy western world. In exploring the very different ways in which the demands of beauty play out in diverse societies around the world, some common and thought-provoking themes emerged. Almost all speakers strongly challenged the idea that the growing use of surgery (and/or invasive non-surgical