Cancelled: Beauty For All!

Beautiful people have a good life. They are more likely to get invited to job interviews, are seen as kinder, and they have a more successful love life. Your genetic makeup plays a big part in this, but there are plenty of ways to tweak your appearance. Cosmetics or the right clothes can help, but you can also go a step further and use plastic surgery or edit your appearance online. Beauty ideals might not always be realistic or affordable, however. Does this lead to certain inequalities? And who even gets to decide what beauty is? Join us during Beauty for All! to find out.

During the evening we will dive into these questions with:

• Dr. Heather Widdows, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick in the UK. She will talk about beauty and ‘lookism’, as beauty is something which seems to be one of the highest ideals to strive for in society nowadays. In 2018 she published the book Perfect Me: Beauty as an Ethical Ideal which focused on this subject. Has beauty truly become something which we are all expected to strive for? Is it even possible for everybody to be beautiful?
• Dr. Anne-Mette Hermans, Assistant Professor at the University of Tilburg. Currently, Anne-Mette Hermans researches attitudes towards cosmetic procedures, the relation between social media and procedures, and the experiences of people whose procedures go wrong. She published the book Discourses of Perfection about the marketing of such operations in the UK in 2021. Do young people really go from filter to filler? And do people with “botched” fillers go back for more procedures?
• Ma’MaQueen, the Drag Queen of Rotterdam. During the evening she will entertain us with a mesmerizing performance, but also take part in the discussion on beauty. As drag is something which is both about emulation and transformation, what does she think of the current focus on beauty and society? Can beauty become suffocating?