Cosmetic gatekeepers: Negotiations of beauty and (re)shaping bodies by medical aesthetic practitioners

Abstract

Aesthetic practitioners who administer (non-)surgical medical cosmetic procedures play a central, and growing, role in the (re)shaping of predominantly women's bodies. This article focuses on how these practitioners negotiate their role as cosmetic gatekeepers – those with the medical and sociocultural skills, knowledge and tools - in (re)shaping the bodies of their client-patients. Adopting a reflexive thematic analysis of interviews conducted with aesthetic practitioners in the UK and the Netherlands, we identify three main themes. The first theme, conceptualizing beauty, describes the different ways in which aesthetic practitioners describe and negotiate the concept of ‘beauty’, including discussions of beauty as both subjective and objective. The second theme, shaping bodies, explores how practitioners consider why and how they (do not) suggest aesthetic procedures and how they (do not) see themselves as significant shapers of bodies and beauty. Finally, the theme of cosmetic gatekeepers examines the ways in which aesthetic practitioners provide boundaries in terms of how, when, why and on whom they (do not) perform procedures. Inherent to these discussions are constructions of the (non-)surgical ‘other’ and tensions between commercialism and ‘medico-cosmetic’ considerations that must be navigated by aesthetic practitioners. This article furthers explorations of how certain aesthetic appearances are (re)produced as desirable in increasingly expansive, diversified and normalized (non-)surgical cosmetic servicescapes.