Back in the 1970s, children – and secretly lots of grown-ups – were transported by the future portrayed in television’s The Six Million Dollar Man adventure series.
Catastrophically wounded in a Nasa test-flight accident, astronaut Steve Austin had his injuries magicked away and his ridiculous knitting-pattern good looks restored by “bionics”. “We have the technology. We can rebuild him,” said Nasa. This fictional retrofit was somewhat over-specified, resulting in a bionic Steve who could see further than a telescope, run faster than a cheetah and lift trucks as if they were made of paper.
Half a century on, we still don’t “have the technology”, life-enhancing as our spare parts and replacement medicine have become. Humans are not routinely upgraded with super powers – for all that they would surely and solemnly use them only in the service of law and order and the good of humankind as Steve did. We gratefully accept interventions to restore mobility, hearing and sight, and although these are constantly improving, they’re not honing us into elite CIA recruitment material.
What we do have, however, are near-bionic levels of cosmetic reconstruction. Once only the very rich, obsessive or objectively disfigured had their bodies artificially altered for an aesthetic idyll. Now, average-income folk get “work done” for buttons in package trips to Thailand and Turkey, among other economical jurisdictions.
More than that, it’s an everyday, all-genders thing. It’s becoming unusual, to the point of being jarring, to come across anyone under about 35 who has merely their own eyelashes. Today’s lash extensions are more Bambi-core than Barbie-core. Those who dare leave their eyebrows as nature intended are in danger of being thought odd.
Wear one’s fingernails unenhanced and there’d better be a good reason. Allergies will do, but an excuse of manual work or sport is apt to signal a lack of commitment.
The days when any extreme-seeming fashion statement triggered a moral panic are thankfully decades behind us. Revolving cycles of fashion extremes are the norm as of centuries ago. Aspects of today’s doll-eyed look hark back to the 50s and 60s.
But although we may verge on being cosmetically bionic, this may yet be a one-way street. Technology that makes adhesion to a particular look semi-permanent or permanent cannot also make fashion permanent. Fashion’s dial customarily revolves in convulsive lurches.
Today’s mirror looks and reach-for-the-sky cheekbones have been around since the 1990s. This can’t stay chic indefinitely.
History suggests our next stop will be a version of Steve Austin’s 70s, when hippy and feminist rejection of highly groomed, restrictive fashions went mainstream and the overwhelming ethos was, look natural. (Even if it half-killed you to hide the effort involved.)
In concert with using fewer of the planet’s resources, fashion leaders may next demand we glory in what nature gave us. Still-younger generations will surely reassess today’s effortful beauty diktats and find them naffly try-hard.
Ninety minutes surfing or 90 minutes of having bits glued to one’s eyelids? A day exploring a new city or a day having hair extensions bonded? The French used to say one must suffer to be beautiful, but must one also be bored witless?
Objectively, today’s predominant look can be drop-dead gorgeous and must feel wonderfully empowering. Its affordable enhancements have democratised beauty. No one but a dutiful medical professional wants to be the killjoy who dwells on risk: surgical complications, fungal infections, follicle damage causing baldness, months of pain and unsightly ooze from costly tattoo lasering that won’t necessarily banish the brow ink.
But when even Irish farmers – no more sartorially fashion-forward than New Zealand’s – are giving cows in the summer agricultural shows elaborate tail extensions and sheep spray tans to make their fleece glow, it’s probably time to shelve the high-tech bionic idyll for something more earthily Byronic.
