Opinion | In Brazil, Beauty Is a Right. Are They On To Something?

This philosophy has significant drawbacks. In a public health system that’s strapped for resources, it’s certainly arguable that this is the wrong kind of spending. Everyday differences in bodies end up being pathologized by the medical establishment, defining attractiveness in a limiting way. Small breasts, for instance, might be diagnosed as “hypotrophy of the mammary glands.” Finally, because plastic surgeons gain practice at government hospitals, poor patients are basically guinea pigs, Jarrín says.

For all its failings, however, what Brazil’s policy does create is an acceptance that beauty is a form of self-care and that there’s nothing embarrassing about wanting to meet society’s standard for how we should look, no matter our social class. There’s no denial that small changes we can make to our surfaces have profound influence on our quality of life and that beauty is often a means of gaining power.

When I got back to Virginia after my daughter’s accident, I kept wondering what her treatment would have been had it happened here. Most countries’ health coverage applies just to reconstructive care, not aesthetic. Brazil, an outlier, sees more continuity between the two, “likely a means to push their own agenda, but that they also have a point,” says Alexander Edmonds, the author of “Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil.”

Our system in the United States makes the kind of hospital treatment my daughter received a matter of privilege. While her procedure might be considered reconstructive rather than cosmetic, whether she got a chance to see a plastic surgeon would depend on where she was getting treated. For example, hospitals visited by patients on Medicaid are less likely to provide the option of a plastic surgeon, and Medicaid does not cover cosmetic surgery unless the procedure is medically necessary — which, in my daughter’s case, it was not.

Beauty standards continue to rise, yet access to cosmetic care is rarefied.

When I went to my daughter’s pediatrician’s office to get the stitches out, the nurse hesitated at first. She’d never seen stitches like hers, with the thread visible only at its entry and exit points. She brought in two doctors just to check she was doing it right. None of them knew for sure, but when pulled from one end, the thread came out easily. I asked about what the care would need to be like going forward to minimize scarring. Sunscreen, they all said.