This story is so nuts, it has the air of a hoax about it, but with so many agencies reporting on it, I couldn’t resist.

If you haven’t heard about this yet, prepare yourself.

When Jian Feng married the beautiful women of his dreams, little did he know the she was the result of $100,000 dollars worth of cosmetic surgery.

Upon giving birth to an “ugly” baby girl that clearly did not resemble either of the parents (Jian found the child to be horrifying), Jian sued his wife. He originally sued for infidelity, as he himself could never have created an ugly child. After DNA testing proved the child was in fact his own, the truth came out that his wife was born…ugly.

Unbeknownst to him she had transformed herself, under the knife, into the strikingly beautiful women he fell in love with.

The husband proceeded to sue for $120,000 and won on the basis of deception that lead to ugly children. If he wouldn’t have had ugly children, he wouldn’t have sued her for deceiving him.

If anything, this story raises some incredibly interesting topic points. As beauty becomes an increasing obsession all over the world, the negative consequences associated with it are escalating.

A potential reason for this obsession? Greater online interaction and social media.

Facebook (and media in general) is rendering the face as more important. Statistics from the U.S states that “The omnipresence of social media in our personal and professional lives has put “the face” on full display… In 2012, over 10 million cosmetic surgical and nonsurgical procedures were performed… this number of cosmetic procedures for women increased over 252% from 1997…” (www.Surgery.org).

The American Academy of Facial and Plastic Surgery and Reconstructive Surgery reported in March of this year that “Social media is leading consumers to have a more self-critical eye. The annual poll of 752 of the organization’s board-certified facial plastic surgeons found that there was a 31% increase in requests for surgery as a result of social media photo sharing”.

Facebook really says it all, doesn’t it?

There has yet to be created a “Soulbook” where the intricacies of ones soul could be illuminated for the world to see. If this were to happen, perhaps people would start recycling more, mediating, and being overall better people.

For now though, it’s not the soul that’s on full display, it’s the “face”, and this is having some serious consequences the world over.

While teaching in Beijing, China, I worked at an international high school that was 70% South Korean. Many of my young students would leave for holiday and get “basic” plastic surgery done on their face. Either a nose job, the double eyelid, or both. At 15, 16, 17 years old!

In many cases their parents were even encouraging their kids to get procedures done. See: South Korean parents are Making Their Kids Get Plastic Surgery.

I realize that it’s not fair to generalize, however, the statistics are alarming enough to take a close look at what is happening. The New York Times stated that  “…one of every five women in Seoul between the ages of 19 and 49 said they had undergone plastic surgery.”

What is more alarming still is the dramatic nature of the procedures. As society has become more open about the practice, surgeries have become increasingly extreme.

Double-jaw surgery, which was originally developed to repair facial deformities and involves cutting and rearranging the upper and lower jaws, has become a favorite procedure for South Korean women who are no longer satisfied with mere nose jobs or with paring down cheekbones to achieve a smoother facial line.

From the U.S to South Korea and China, it is evident that we may be at a “Tipping Point”, Malcolm Gladwell’s term explaining how human behavior spreads and exponentially escalates like infectious diseases.

Face it—the babies that are born to the millions of people who have undergone plastic surgery the world over will never match up to the parents who have them (as was the case with Jian Feng) because, as they are babies, they haven’t been under the knife…yet.

Where is this all going to end? Parents giving their babies plastic surgery?

With a precedent set (real or imagined) that a man can sue his wife for having ugly children, who’s to say there won’t be operations happening behind closed curtains, such as genetic engineering—creating what would be called “designer babies”?

Manipulating genes is a possibility that has already been widely discussed. What horrors does the future hold when it becomes common practice to design babies to look a certain way (beautiful) before even being born?

As the prominence of beauty escalates along with the technology to create it, what does this mean for us as a race?

In the Natural History Museum in central London there is currently a small exhibit asking children to examine this issue for themselves. It all sounds incredibly far off into the future, however, chillingly, we may be headed in this direction faster than we think.

Something needs to change.

I propose “Soulbook”, a social media site that forces us to stop focusing on and emphasizing our external features. We would be forced to clean up what’s happening on the inside of our souls, because our obsession with beauty is clearly taking us to some…ugly places.

We can’t be far off from linking our thoughts and our hearts directly onto the internet, thus projecting the real core of who we are to the world, instead of the face.*

I can’t imagine, had “Soulbook” existed, that Jian Feng, real or imagined, would have wanted the world to see the inter-workings of his mind as he sued his wife for ugly children.

* On a recent episode of the show South Park, Eric Cartman and Alec Baldwin are on the right track with “Shitter”—a social media outlet that broadcasts thoughts directly to other “Shitter” followers.

Sources:

ABC News, Babble, The Frisky, Huffington Post, Irish Examiner, Planet Ivy, The New York Times, American Academy of Facial Plastic Surgery and Reconstructive Surgery

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Assistant Editor: Karissa Kneeland/Editor: Bryonie Wise

Photo via flickr