If I Had Your Face: she’ll never be
This is a multi-POV novel about beauty standards, feminism, and the lives of a few women in Seoul, Korea. Some of these women have undergone dozens of cosmetic surgery procedures. Isn’t it anxiety-inducing to think about how many wrong things there can be with a little feature on a girl’s face? Just the nose, surgeries correct upturned ones, downturned ones, nose tips, nose bridges, nose symmetry and deviations, and rhinoplasty. These girls feel so compelled to change their faces to achieve a beautiful — yet natural — look, and the whole purpose of their lives seems to revolve around the illusory ideal of being beautiful, with no other objective but beauty. Isn’t it exhausting to live life thinking about every spoonful of food, calculating every face you greet (… is her jaw real?), and then sashaying, pretending that being beautiful is easy, effortless, to please men and themselves. It is not these girls’ fault that society values their worth this way — people like to drink with pretty girls at room salons. I found these girls so fixated on their own beauty that their characters become dry and sadly simple. Maybe that was an intended effect on Frances Cha’s part. Why do we despise plastic surgery? Perhaps because it reminds us of the unyielding beauty standards we hold in the back of our own minds.
Measuring women by attractiveness, illusively, is how our gears run in society, but it is just so absurd that we judge women based on their beauty. The gossip in the magazines, women in the same outfits, who wore it better? We pit women against women and set our eyes on the more attractive woman as defined by arbitrary standards. One day we like slender, the next day, curvy. At the same time, who doesn’t like being called pretty? I’d loathe living in Gilead, and simultaneously I’m not trying to be hypocritical about self-expression and embracing your own beauty. But the entire message of body positivity seems to be so fixated on framing that “you are beautiful”, no matter what your dress size is, or whatever hip dips or armpit fat or absence of thigh gaps you appear to notice. Yet at the same time, attractiveness psychologically exists, where we judge people based on their face symmetry and the averageness of their features, and pretty privilege is a background motor force more than we realize. It creates so much conflict in women when we stare into a mirror and tell ourselves we’re “beautiful”, but do not inherently see the similarities that we scroll through endlessly on our screens. I think, that at the end of the day, the message shouldn’t be ‘you are beautiful’, but that ‘beauty does not matter’. ‘Beauty’ is this slippery outward judgment that doesn’t define anyone whatsoever, complete genetics and randomness of the universe.
I don’t think other people can ever fully wrap their heads around how much pressure some women have to be beautiful. Beauty is a gift, but at times it also is a burden, and sometimes the highest moments in life when you are supposed to fully enjoy and be present, people instead worry about smudging mascara, if they’re smiling too wide, or if there is something else wrong with their face. So many young girls struggle with their body image in the dark. It breaks my heart how hurt we can be about something that amounts to nothing. If I Had Your Face is a book that made me feel lightheaded and just disappointed in the world because she’ll never be what she wanted to be.
