Opinion – Rosana Hermann: Famous and anonymous, we are all eager in search of perfection

People are obsessed with their own image. It’s no longer normal vanity, self-care. It turned into despair. Almost everyone wants to fit into the norm, they want to copy the appearance of models, celebrities, influencers considered beautiful.

And these celebrities, in turn, want to be perfect, even if they have to change their appearance to do so. Just look at the epidemic of facial harmonization that until the other day no one knew existed.

And, YES, I know, everyone knows (and agrees) that everyone is free to do what they want with their body, their face. But the issue here is not individual freedom but a possible collective illness of society, which without realizing it, thinks it is making a choice when it is being deceived and led by algorithms and pressure from the industry.

Recently, a young influencer confessed, crying, to having taken semaglutide “under pressure from her followers”. It’s no surprise that the word ‘anxiety’ was chosen as word of the year in Brazil.

Modern plastic surgeries in Brazil have existed since the 1920s and became popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Vanity is inherent to human beings, there is nothing new or abnormal. But it was a small portion of the population that gave importance to this. Not now. Now everyone wants to have the same mouth, the same cheek, the same hair, the same body.

It’s as if there was a desire to be industrialized, like a cookie in a package, like a doll in a window. Perhaps because entering the norm seems like a guarantee of being accepted, of never being humiliated by appearance again. Plastic surgery in search of perfection is like a safe passage to be accepted.

The statistical data is surprising. Here in Brazil, in the last ten years, there has been an increase of more than 140% in the number of plastic surgeries performed on young people aged 13 to 18. According to a survey by the Brazilian Society of Dermatology, the search for non-invasive aesthetic procedures in the country increased by 390%. In 2023, more than 3 million aesthetic procedures were performed in our country, of which 2 million were surgical.

And, as demand is very high, supply increases in a disorderly manner. In addition to authorized professionals, upstarts and opportunists appear offering aesthetic services without a diploma, without a course, without a license, without anything. There are cases of people with no experience in the health sector taking any online course and starting to sell health services online.

And the sad consequence is that many people die because of poorly performed procedures or are left with serious consequences. In the desperation of imagining that ‘after the plastic surgery everything will be fine’, people give their lives to strangers who they ‘found on Instagram’.

In our country, many people dream of ‘exposing their lives, going viral, gaining millions of followers and publishing’. Getting paid to show off your daily life has become the object of desire for millions, because it seems like an easy, quick and efficient solution to social mobility. Many believe that Jeniffer, the girl in the plane window, is lucky, because she gained two million followers, an asset that can bring in a lot of money.

However, the banker says she hasn’t eaten or slept in days. She’s shaken. Along with sudden fame came a lot of hate, a lot of attack. No one is prepared for this kind of tsunami of attention. Instant fame is not a solution to life.

And it’s not just here that people freak out about events. In the United States, whose people are more consumerist and less emotional than us, there was a very strange reaction to the murder of a health insurance CEO: they are glorifying the killer on social media.

Since they showed photos of the then suspect, sales of the jacket he was wearing have exploded. That’s right, people want to buy a coat like the killer’s. They want to be part of the news, they want a crumb of his ‘success’ of exposure in the media, even though he is a criminal.

Social networks and their algorithms took advantage of our vulnerabilities and weaknesses, such as vanity, the tendency to illusion, lack of criteria, ambition, magical thinking and addicted us, transforming us all into mental colonized. We were hacked. Now we are all sick, addicted to platforms that enslave us and rob us of the best we have: our humanity.

Given all this that has happened in 30 years of internet in Brazil, it is time to stop and, perhaps, return. Don’t ‘go back in time’, because technology is here to stay and is extremely beneficial. But go back to socializing, talking, looking each other in the eye, existing without a cell phone in your hand. Return to balance.

Return to understanding that beauty lies in the fact that each human being is unique. Return to believing that it is our personal characteristics that make us irreplaceable. Because if the idea is to become a plasticized doll, it’s better to put a robot in its place, which, in addition to being beautiful, also comes with artificial intelligence.

Who knows, maybe the word of the year 2025 might just be “human”.