The "Beautiful" pain: cosmetic surgery and the embodiment of pain

This article focuses on women undergoing plastic surgery operations, highlighting their particular attitude toward pain, which is caused by the desperate pursuit of beauty. Extracting data from semi-structured interviews, it is shown how pain is defied, eliminated or even denied by individuals undergoing cosmetic surgery. Since cosmetic procedures are carried out for aesthetic reasons, people disconnect this process from any negative emotion and ignore pain and trauma yielded from surgical operation. Hence, a special kind of pain embodiment is reflexively emerged. Pain is not a one-dimensional biological stimulus; it is rather associated with how each social group perceives, interprets and reacts to the biological stimulus, producing a particular mode of embodiment.