Ageless
by Elizabeth Averay
Humans are a strange race of beings. Always in search of beauty and everlasting youth. The things they have come up with and do to themselves can be horrific. A number of these beauty practises go back thousands of years, some are more modern, and some are completely new.
Some older ones consist of foot-binding to ensure small feet. The binding process is to repeatedly break a woman’s feet while they grow to stunt the growth of said feet. All because small feet were considered a mark of beauty.
Neck-stretching is another. Adding solid metal bands around the neck until they reach its natural limit, then adding another ring to continue the stretching process. Some people’s necks are stretched up to a metre in length!
While this gives the advantage of seeing over crowds it is impossible for the rings to be removed, as there are no extra vertebrae in the neck to accommodate the enforced length.
Lip stretching is yet another. A plate is implanted in the bottom lip, expanding the skin and tissue to make the lip jut out from the rest of the face.
The simplest beauty treatment is the application of makeup, and has been around since Ancient Egyptian time. They would use crushed beetle husk to wear as glitter eye shadow. And of course piercings and tattooing, though the latter wasn’t originally used to beautify the wearer but to show that you’d passed certain milestones amongst your people.
The slightly more modern beauty search moved to corsets that would give an hourglass figure, generally squeezing the waist in so tight that many women would suffocate for lack of air.
The final stage is a mix of youth and beauty. It is a strange procedure called plastic surgery, which many wealthy people have had done. Some have it because they were badly injured and wish to look like themselves again. Others seek it out because they believe the surgeon can coax and craft beauty with his scalpel – only to end up looking just like everybody else the surgeon has worked this miracle on.
The last group to have plastic surgery choose to do so because they fear growing older, and though the procedure can make them look younger on the outside it does nothing for the internal ageing – that is something nobody can reverse!
Why would anyone want to put themselves through the mental and physical pain of surgery, foot binding, neck-stretching, etc; because after all is said and done you can never escape who you really are.
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