Yang Yuan, a professional model, was prevented from entering the 2004 Miss Global Competition in Beijing recently because she had undergone an “overhauling?plastic surgery, or a series of surgeries, to turn herself into a man-made beauty.

Although the rules for the competition do not exclude man-made beauties from entering, the competition committee held the view that if an artificial beauty won, it would result in great unfairness to other competitors and would lead to a series of bad results including fueling the “plastic surgery?trend and beauty investment competition among young girls.

In our minds, appearance is something that is born with us, something that is innate and something that cannot be altered or produced by financial investment. Beauty is one of those natural contingencies. And we highly respect natural contingencies, no matter how much we may hate them and no matter how loudly we claim that this is a meritocratic society.

But natural jealousy is not the whole thing. Money is another aspect of the problem. Plastic surgery is “capital intensive? The logic becomes this: if I have money I can make myself beautiful, however ugly I am now, by undergoing surgery, and the more money I have, the more I can change myself. Then beauty becomes something that can be bought and everything that can be bought tends to become, at least in people’s minds, contaminated by money.

People can tolerate others buying clothes, houses, cars, jobs and even lovers. But people cannot tolerate others buying their looks. Appearance seems so innate, so intrinsic, that people feel uncomfortable when others try to improve it through external means, especially with money.

The third reason may be that it has not been very long since people first acquired the skill required to change people’s looks. People have not become as used to surgery as to changing one’s clothes, although both are intended to make one looks better.

So plastic surgery, from the first day it was born, carried with it the fate of being morally fragile.

But the lady in the beauty contest herself does not feel fragile at all, she felt wronged and filed a complaint against the competition committee and threatened to sue.

Finally the international committee restored her eligibility for the competition because rules are rules.

Entitlement is one thing, recognition, another. Since the rules of the competition do not exclude the participation of a man-made beauty, she is entitled to enter it. If people do not like such man-made beauty, just vote against her in the competition, or even if she wins, just write articles to express dissent. But never substitute personal judgment for the rules.

However, although I respect potential dissenters, I fail to see any impressive reasons for people to make a fuss about man-made beauty. In today’s world, it is not surprising that there remain very few things that cannot be commercialized ?bought with money. Changing one’s appearance is just one more personal choice, a personal consumer choice, just like other personal choices such as buying gym card to gain a better shape. Maybe only rich people can buy a beautiful face, but isn’t it true that only rich people can buy gym cards?

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