A beauty culture with rigid standards is a source of great pain and hopelessness for many women. In grasping for some sense of agency, an increasing number of young Iranian women resort to cosmetic surgery to modify their faces and their bodies.
In a society where wearing makeup is considered to be immoral, surgical face augmentation has become routine. The forced covering up of the body has intensified the desire to modify visible limbs.
Cosmetic surgery is paradoxical since it promotes control and enforces conformity at the same time. It reconciles the corporeal needs of feeling desirable with collective aspirations for an all-encompassing notion of beauty.
The first phase of the project started with investigative work where I impersonated a patient and made multiple visits to beauty clinics in Tehran. I made detailed reports of my observations as a patient. These conversations eventually led me to 16th-19th century medical drawings to understand the process of sculpting and altering facial features while imagining the role of the plastic surgeon as an artist.
Through role play and the use of cosmetics and silicone masks made from adjusted casts of my own face, I went through multiple transformations to give a first-person’s account of how it feels to change.