Technically Beautiful
Even though there were posters on the walls and magazines on the comfy chairs and music on the intercom, the waiting room seemed overwhelmingly sterile to Naomi. She sat twiddling a finger in her red hair and bouncing her knees, trying to alleviate the nervous sensation going through her. Her mother noticed, as mothers always do, and laid a gentle hand on her leg. "Don't worry, Naomi. It's not like he's going to hurt you."
Naomi didn't respond but stopped bouncing her legs. She looked around at the posters on the walls. They all seemed so familiar, so similar. From one, a blond-haired beauty looked down at her, one word above her head "Look" and two words below, "like me."
She readjusted in her chair, sliding into that comfortable teenage slouch her mother was always on her case about. Across the room, she caught a glimpse of a man, presumably waiting for his daughter. He was looking at his mobile and his mouth was turned in a slight smirk. An upsetting thought jumped through Naomi's head, "Did he just take a picture of me?"
This worry subsided as her mind drifted into boredom and she instead passively listened to the music emitting from the speaker. She was concentrating on the singer's voice. A friend of hers from school had she didn't believe people were on the radio anymore, that all the instruments and voices were artificially generated so that the pitch and harmony would be totally and unequivocally perfect.
"Naomi?" A nurse waiting in the doorway read aloud from her clipboard and surveyed the room. Naomi gave a brief goodbye to her mother.
"Dr. Alvis will be with you in a moment. Meanwhile, change into this." The nurse was brief, but pleasant as she tossed a garment on the table and left. Naomi picked up the dress to examine it. It was the most fashionable gown she had ever seen, with lacy ribbons and sweeping cleavage and slits in the most elegant of places. She removed her clothes, feeling more ordinary than ever, and took stock of her surroundings while putting on her new apparel.
Technology was littered about the room, blinking and calculating in various levels of urgency. The ceiling was cluttered with expensive lights, though only a few were shining. Every square inch of the wallspace was covered with mirrors or pictures. As she finished adjusting some of the more difficult straps, she noticed one set of photographs in particular. One the left side were rather plain looking young women like herself, on the right, gorgeous beauties like the one in the poster.
"My proudest works." Naomi almost jumped out of her skin at the voice. An older, remarkably handsome man smiled kindly underneath his silver glasses. He wore a white lab coat, with five bold letters embossed on its breast pocket, "ALVIS."
"They remind me of why I got involved in this work. It's about more than just helping people, Miss-" he glanced at his chart, "-Naomi, it's art. And what nobler canvas, what greater height, can an artist aspire to than the human form?"
Naomi wasn't sure if he actually wanted her to answer. Thankfully, he broke the silence first, "Hi, I'm Dr. Alvis, and I'm going to be your beautician today." he extended his hand to shake. Naomi took it after a hesitance. Why was she so nervous?
"Now, Naomi, according to our paperwork, this is your first visit to a Salon. Sixteen's a bit older than most first-timers, you know. Why've you waited so long?"
Her heart quickened. She looked up at the bright light above her and tried to remind herself she was not being interrogated. Dr. Alvis seemed every bit the kind man. She was clearly overreacting. "I suppose I've just never felt the need. My family isn't exactly wealthy, I've always thought of this kind of thing as a sort of... I dunno, a privilege more than-" A bright flash interrupted her.
Dr. Alvis lowered an intricate camera from his eyes. "You mustn't feel that way, my dear. You should know that your parents want your happiness most of all." Naomi wondered if he sensed she was bending the truth, that her mother had been pushing her to visit the beautician for years. Dr. Alvis was looking into a computer monitor, beckoning Naomi to do the same.
On the screen, Naomi's reflection gazed out at her. It was painted with lines and scribbled upon with figures, tracing her cheekbones, outlining her eyes. In the margins, there were boxes representing her skin and lip and eye colors, schematics and pie graphs whose meanings were beyond her. On the top of the screen was a number, 5.63.
"For someone with no professional work, it's actually a pretty high score, Naomi. Now with very little work, I think we can easily boost you a whole, maybe even two whole, digits. And depending on the financial commitment your parents are willing to make, young lady, I think your surgical potential is huge."
He typed into the keyboard and flipped switches on the monitors, traced her lips with the mouse pointer and Naomi's image on the screen began to distort. He narrated the transformation and while he spoke, the decimal number at the top of the screen rose in steady bursts. "If we raise your neckline just a little, emphasize your eyes a little more, reduce your nose, volumize the lips and the breasts here, sculpt the waist like so and," he reached his fingers for her red hair, "I think you're a brunette-"
Naomi drew back quickly. Dr. Alvis stopped. "What's wrong, Naomi?"
She didn't know how to say it. It was deeper than her normal insecurity, she felt more naked than she had ever felt before. She wanted to say something like she didn't feel very human, but she wasn't sure what that meant. Dr. Alvis nodded slowly.
"I know what you're feeling, my child. You're wondering, how do I know what's best? Why should I, a total stranger as of ten minutes ago, decide how you appear to the rest of the world?"
Naomi didn't respond. The beautician stood, looking again at the before and after photographs on the wall. "Naomi, you have to understand that this is not merely my personal whims at work here. My technique has been developed over years of training. Everything I am suggesting has been substantiated by tireless scientific enquiry. I want to help you Naomi. I want to make you beautiful. Why would you want to be anything else?"
The young girl wondered if Dr. Alvis knew that she had never been in love, that she had never even kissed a boy. Did he know how lonely she felt? Was he really able to cure that?
She suddenly found the courage to voice a fragment of the rebellion tossing within her. "What if everyone doesn't agree what beauty is? What if you're wrong?"
Dr. Alvis smiled kindly, like he was talking to a young child asking naive questions. "My dear, the science of beauty has been thoroughly researched. The graphical curvature of the chin, the symmetry of the nose and mouth, these are not conclusions reached by arbitrary mathematical formulas. They are the results of the polls of tens of thousands of men and women who were shown images and videos of people with or without these attributes. We balanced the factors carefully and monitored patient responses, both verbal and physiological, things like sweat, heart rate, salivation, the slightest changes most people would not even be aware of. The beauty I work toward is a democratic one, Naomi, ratified by the people."
She had spoken honestly once, no reason to stop now. "But it's just the average of all those perceptions. That's all you've got to work with. A perfect ten on the scale for one person might not be a ten in someone else's eyes."
"I never said it was, Naomi." He batted her questions like errant flies, a inconvenience he had encountered before and was no longer phased by. "The average is nothing to be ashamed of, what else should we work with? If there's someone specific you want to be customized for, we can do that too, but I don't think that's the case today, is it?" Naomi shook her head.
The bespectacled old man continued. "We can't abandon the goal of art because perfection is just an ideal. I have yet to sculpt a perfect ten, the possibility does not reside in every human, but I still dream of doing so. Maybe it's a matter of faulty genetics, I don't know, but I'm doing the best I can considering the resources at hand."
Naomi bit her lip, she wasn't convinced. "It's just that it doesn't feel somehow... honest." It wasn't quite the word she was looking for.
"Let me ask you this, Naomi. Is it fair that you are judged by the body and face you were assigned at birth without your choosing? Should two's and three's live with that burden for their entire lives when we have the technology to help those who are less fortunate? First impressions happen my dear, they are human nature, I just want the unpleasantness of that business to be as painless as possible. These days, people take a picture with their mobiles, and the beauty quotient can be calculated right there and then, what good would it do to have people think less of you?" He turned back to the computer and flipped a switch. The ceiling lights burst into full glory. "Especially when you have so much promise."
Naomi's spun as her reflection was suddenly plastered on the mirrors all around her, in various stages of undress with unfamiliar alterations. She looked at her unfamiliar form in all its angles and felt like she was in the trick mirror maze at the carnival. "Now, enough of this." Dr. Alvis said, opening a drawer to reveal its contents of gleaming metal. "Let's get started, see what we can be done with this." He placed a hand on her hip, looking through her to something that did not yet exist, and attached a steely clamp, presumably to examine or modify some feature of her waist.
Instinct kicked in, and shattered rational processing. There was no reason to feel so attached to her arbitrary form. There was no reason to distrust the good doctor. There was no reason for her to fear beauty. But her and her thousand fragmented reflections suddenly burst from the room, the metallic instrument tearing at her dress.
She sprinted down the hall and crashed through the door into the waiting room. People gasped, the clipboard of the bewildered admitting nurse clattered on the linoleum. Naomi's mother dropped her magazine and clutched her bosom, both concerned and frightened. The beautiful woman in the poster still stared at her seductively. "Look like me." Was it an offer or a command?
The music from the waiting room speaker droned on, unaware of the scene, and Naomi heard the hurried footsteps of Dr. Alvis behind her. A realization rose in her chest that she was making a fool out of herself, but all she could do now was keep running. She scurried out the front door before anyone could fully react.
The autumn air blew coldly on the flesh left uncovered by her strange costume. Leaves were kicked up in the air and tears streaked down her face, smearing her make-up, as she ran. She ran until she was out of breath, even after she was sure nobody was following her, even though she didn't know where to go.
She came to a stop in front of a store. In every window, the same beautiful face looked out. It was like gazing into Big Brother's Sister, soft and feminine, meaning no harm. She wondered if the image was of a real woman who lived and breathed and spoke, or if it had been generated by data and technology. There was a flash from across the street.
A group of children had stopped playing, half-stunned by the streaks on her face and the tears in her dress, the uproar of her red hair. The girl with mobile passed it around to her friends and they began to laugh.
"Hahaha, she's a two!"
"What a loser!"
"Get out of here, no uggo's here!"
"Ewww, she's disgusting!"
"My big sister's a nine!"
"Nuh uh!"
"Yuh huh!"
"Nuh uh!"
The squabble ensued loudly, and mothers emerged in their doorways to take their children inside, for the sun was beginning to set, after all.
Naomi stood on the forlorn street in her ragged garb, looking into the store's glass. It was a matter of loneliness more than right and wrong. What was the point of this sudden martyrdom? What difference would the unacknowledged tears of her rebellion make? What shame was there in this surrender? What good was it to be unbeautiful?
She gazed into the store's glass, into her reflection cast there atop the beauties beckoning from within, her fingers reached out to trace the familiar lines of her untouched face one last time, then she turned to walk back to the Salon.
Naomi didn't respond but stopped bouncing her legs. She looked around at the posters on the walls. They all seemed so familiar, so similar. From one, a blond-haired beauty looked down at her, one word above her head "Look" and two words below, "like me."
She readjusted in her chair, sliding into that comfortable teenage slouch her mother was always on her case about. Across the room, she caught a glimpse of a man, presumably waiting for his daughter. He was looking at his mobile and his mouth was turned in a slight smirk. An upsetting thought jumped through Naomi's head, "Did he just take a picture of me?"
This worry subsided as her mind drifted into boredom and she instead passively listened to the music emitting from the speaker. She was concentrating on the singer's voice. A friend of hers from school had she didn't believe people were on the radio anymore, that all the instruments and voices were artificially generated so that the pitch and harmony would be totally and unequivocally perfect.
"Naomi?" A nurse waiting in the doorway read aloud from her clipboard and surveyed the room. Naomi gave a brief goodbye to her mother.
"Dr. Alvis will be with you in a moment. Meanwhile, change into this." The nurse was brief, but pleasant as she tossed a garment on the table and left. Naomi picked up the dress to examine it. It was the most fashionable gown she had ever seen, with lacy ribbons and sweeping cleavage and slits in the most elegant of places. She removed her clothes, feeling more ordinary than ever, and took stock of her surroundings while putting on her new apparel.
Technology was littered about the room, blinking and calculating in various levels of urgency. The ceiling was cluttered with expensive lights, though only a few were shining. Every square inch of the wallspace was covered with mirrors or pictures. As she finished adjusting some of the more difficult straps, she noticed one set of photographs in particular. One the left side were rather plain looking young women like herself, on the right, gorgeous beauties like the one in the poster.
"My proudest works." Naomi almost jumped out of her skin at the voice. An older, remarkably handsome man smiled kindly underneath his silver glasses. He wore a white lab coat, with five bold letters embossed on its breast pocket, "ALVIS."
"They remind me of why I got involved in this work. It's about more than just helping people, Miss-" he glanced at his chart, "-Naomi, it's art. And what nobler canvas, what greater height, can an artist aspire to than the human form?"
Naomi wasn't sure if he actually wanted her to answer. Thankfully, he broke the silence first, "Hi, I'm Dr. Alvis, and I'm going to be your beautician today." he extended his hand to shake. Naomi took it after a hesitance. Why was she so nervous?
"Now, Naomi, according to our paperwork, this is your first visit to a Salon. Sixteen's a bit older than most first-timers, you know. Why've you waited so long?"
Her heart quickened. She looked up at the bright light above her and tried to remind herself she was not being interrogated. Dr. Alvis seemed every bit the kind man. She was clearly overreacting. "I suppose I've just never felt the need. My family isn't exactly wealthy, I've always thought of this kind of thing as a sort of... I dunno, a privilege more than-" A bright flash interrupted her.
Dr. Alvis lowered an intricate camera from his eyes. "You mustn't feel that way, my dear. You should know that your parents want your happiness most of all." Naomi wondered if he sensed she was bending the truth, that her mother had been pushing her to visit the beautician for years. Dr. Alvis was looking into a computer monitor, beckoning Naomi to do the same.
On the screen, Naomi's reflection gazed out at her. It was painted with lines and scribbled upon with figures, tracing her cheekbones, outlining her eyes. In the margins, there were boxes representing her skin and lip and eye colors, schematics and pie graphs whose meanings were beyond her. On the top of the screen was a number, 5.63.
"For someone with no professional work, it's actually a pretty high score, Naomi. Now with very little work, I think we can easily boost you a whole, maybe even two whole, digits. And depending on the financial commitment your parents are willing to make, young lady, I think your surgical potential is huge."
He typed into the keyboard and flipped switches on the monitors, traced her lips with the mouse pointer and Naomi's image on the screen began to distort. He narrated the transformation and while he spoke, the decimal number at the top of the screen rose in steady bursts. "If we raise your neckline just a little, emphasize your eyes a little more, reduce your nose, volumize the lips and the breasts here, sculpt the waist like so and," he reached his fingers for her red hair, "I think you're a brunette-"
Naomi drew back quickly. Dr. Alvis stopped. "What's wrong, Naomi?"
She didn't know how to say it. It was deeper than her normal insecurity, she felt more naked than she had ever felt before. She wanted to say something like she didn't feel very human, but she wasn't sure what that meant. Dr. Alvis nodded slowly.
"I know what you're feeling, my child. You're wondering, how do I know what's best? Why should I, a total stranger as of ten minutes ago, decide how you appear to the rest of the world?"
Naomi didn't respond. The beautician stood, looking again at the before and after photographs on the wall. "Naomi, you have to understand that this is not merely my personal whims at work here. My technique has been developed over years of training. Everything I am suggesting has been substantiated by tireless scientific enquiry. I want to help you Naomi. I want to make you beautiful. Why would you want to be anything else?"
The young girl wondered if Dr. Alvis knew that she had never been in love, that she had never even kissed a boy. Did he know how lonely she felt? Was he really able to cure that?
She suddenly found the courage to voice a fragment of the rebellion tossing within her. "What if everyone doesn't agree what beauty is? What if you're wrong?"
Dr. Alvis smiled kindly, like he was talking to a young child asking naive questions. "My dear, the science of beauty has been thoroughly researched. The graphical curvature of the chin, the symmetry of the nose and mouth, these are not conclusions reached by arbitrary mathematical formulas. They are the results of the polls of tens of thousands of men and women who were shown images and videos of people with or without these attributes. We balanced the factors carefully and monitored patient responses, both verbal and physiological, things like sweat, heart rate, salivation, the slightest changes most people would not even be aware of. The beauty I work toward is a democratic one, Naomi, ratified by the people."
She had spoken honestly once, no reason to stop now. "But it's just the average of all those perceptions. That's all you've got to work with. A perfect ten on the scale for one person might not be a ten in someone else's eyes."
"I never said it was, Naomi." He batted her questions like errant flies, a inconvenience he had encountered before and was no longer phased by. "The average is nothing to be ashamed of, what else should we work with? If there's someone specific you want to be customized for, we can do that too, but I don't think that's the case today, is it?" Naomi shook her head.
The bespectacled old man continued. "We can't abandon the goal of art because perfection is just an ideal. I have yet to sculpt a perfect ten, the possibility does not reside in every human, but I still dream of doing so. Maybe it's a matter of faulty genetics, I don't know, but I'm doing the best I can considering the resources at hand."
Naomi bit her lip, she wasn't convinced. "It's just that it doesn't feel somehow... honest." It wasn't quite the word she was looking for.
"Let me ask you this, Naomi. Is it fair that you are judged by the body and face you were assigned at birth without your choosing? Should two's and three's live with that burden for their entire lives when we have the technology to help those who are less fortunate? First impressions happen my dear, they are human nature, I just want the unpleasantness of that business to be as painless as possible. These days, people take a picture with their mobiles, and the beauty quotient can be calculated right there and then, what good would it do to have people think less of you?" He turned back to the computer and flipped a switch. The ceiling lights burst into full glory. "Especially when you have so much promise."
Naomi's spun as her reflection was suddenly plastered on the mirrors all around her, in various stages of undress with unfamiliar alterations. She looked at her unfamiliar form in all its angles and felt like she was in the trick mirror maze at the carnival. "Now, enough of this." Dr. Alvis said, opening a drawer to reveal its contents of gleaming metal. "Let's get started, see what we can be done with this." He placed a hand on her hip, looking through her to something that did not yet exist, and attached a steely clamp, presumably to examine or modify some feature of her waist.
Instinct kicked in, and shattered rational processing. There was no reason to feel so attached to her arbitrary form. There was no reason to distrust the good doctor. There was no reason for her to fear beauty. But her and her thousand fragmented reflections suddenly burst from the room, the metallic instrument tearing at her dress.
She sprinted down the hall and crashed through the door into the waiting room. People gasped, the clipboard of the bewildered admitting nurse clattered on the linoleum. Naomi's mother dropped her magazine and clutched her bosom, both concerned and frightened. The beautiful woman in the poster still stared at her seductively. "Look like me." Was it an offer or a command?
The music from the waiting room speaker droned on, unaware of the scene, and Naomi heard the hurried footsteps of Dr. Alvis behind her. A realization rose in her chest that she was making a fool out of herself, but all she could do now was keep running. She scurried out the front door before anyone could fully react.
The autumn air blew coldly on the flesh left uncovered by her strange costume. Leaves were kicked up in the air and tears streaked down her face, smearing her make-up, as she ran. She ran until she was out of breath, even after she was sure nobody was following her, even though she didn't know where to go.
She came to a stop in front of a store. In every window, the same beautiful face looked out. It was like gazing into Big Brother's Sister, soft and feminine, meaning no harm. She wondered if the image was of a real woman who lived and breathed and spoke, or if it had been generated by data and technology. There was a flash from across the street.
A group of children had stopped playing, half-stunned by the streaks on her face and the tears in her dress, the uproar of her red hair. The girl with mobile passed it around to her friends and they began to laugh.
"Hahaha, she's a two!"
"What a loser!"
"Get out of here, no uggo's here!"
"Ewww, she's disgusting!"
"My big sister's a nine!"
"Nuh uh!"
"Yuh huh!"
"Nuh uh!"
The squabble ensued loudly, and mothers emerged in their doorways to take their children inside, for the sun was beginning to set, after all.
Naomi stood on the forlorn street in her ragged garb, looking into the store's glass. It was a matter of loneliness more than right and wrong. What was the point of this sudden martyrdom? What difference would the unacknowledged tears of her rebellion make? What shame was there in this surrender? What good was it to be unbeautiful?
She gazed into the store's glass, into her reflection cast there atop the beauties beckoning from within, her fingers reached out to trace the familiar lines of her untouched face one last time, then she turned to walk back to the Salon.
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