Born with love of beauty in their blood, women have a great capacity to endure pain for the sake of being beautiful. In the name of beauty they can take pain as pleasure, treat suffering as a blessing and regard bitterness as a great enjoyment.

Women have a long history of willingly sacrificing their bodies to make themselves look more beautiful and attractive. More than 2,000 years ago the King of Chu State had a preference for women with slim waists. As a result, many of the beautiful women in his palace starved themselves to death in an effort to become slim. In ancient times technology was in a backward state, and women had to rely on such primitive methods as tightening their belts and enduring the pangs of hunger.

Women would endure even the most insufferable torture for the sake of beauty. There are many such examples, among the most famous is footbinding, the no longer practiced Chinese custom, formerly considered aesthetic, of reducing the size of women's feet by use of tight bandage wrappings to three-inch-long "golden lotuses".

The practice of footbinding began about 1,500 years ago, originally as a fashion trend among upper-class women in the developed regions. It persisted and spread throughout the country in later dynasties, and reached its highpoint in the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911).

To resist a custom widely held to be a social norm and moral virtue is not an easy thing, even if it's a bad custom. Even executive action would come to no avail in this regard. Soon after they took over China, the Qing rulers, who strongly opposed the binding of Han Chinese women's feet, ordered all men to wear plaits and banned women from binding their feet. The result was that men all wore plaited queues, but the women refused to obey the order, and continued to have their feet bound. At last the emperor realized that there was nothing he could do, and he had to lift the ban in 1668.

The world has turned over many times and the custom of footbinding has long vanished, but women never stop their pursuit of beauty. Now there has arisen an advanced technology capable of drastically improving one's physical appearance. This advanced technology, known as cosmetic surgery, includes everything from a tummy tuck to an eyelid lift, from breast implants to Botox, from chemical peels to collagen, from dental implants to porcelain tooth veneers.

Cosmetic surgery can easily transform an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan, so it is being put to a new use - that is, to create "man-made beauty".

Hao Lulu, China's first so-called "man-made beauty", has become famous in mainland China for having undergone extensive cosmetic surgery in 2003 to alter her appearance, which cost as much as 300,000 yuan (US$36,300) and took 200 days to complete.

Since then, man-made beauty has become a much-talked-about issue in the media and online. A non-negligible number of people endorse the idea of man-made beauty, and some women have rushed in to become the first man-made beauty of some place or other in the fear that otherwise they'll be lagging behind the times.

Even the banking sector has duly offered to provide loans to those who want to improve their image and need money to cover the cost of cosmetic surgery.

The love of beauty is an essential part of human nature. The question is, what is the true meaning of beauty? Are there other good qualities than a flawless physical beauty, such as temperament, gracious manner, skill and educational qualifications? This is an issue that deserves much reflection.

starcomment@yahoo.com