These doctors certainly mean to try (https://fashionista.com/2019/06/psychodermatology-mental-health-skin-care).
The skin care business is a vast one in the West, and a vast, vast one in China, and other Asian countries. It has even attracted the attention of the CIA (https://www.lawliberty.org/2016/11/28/beauty-and-the-beast/).
Psychodermatology is an intensification of the blending already offered by the industries devoted to wellness and skin care. The intuition is clear enough: anxiety makes some break out in hives, so other psychological phenomena surely also affect the skin.
“Then there is the very modern, meta phenomenon of feeling you are inferior to your own filtered self” ( https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/article/3014543/how-snapchat-dysmorphia-drives-teens-plastic-surgery-copy).
The exaggerated “selves” generated by filters are actually driving plastic surgery in parts of Asia. “It also found that 22 million Chinese underwent cosmetic procedures in 2018, and that consumers under the age of 28 accounted for a whopping 54 per cent of the total client base.”
These astonishing numbers are driven by, in part, apps that bring together the young in communities of those wanting surgery. So-Young is a Chinese app that has a list of 10,000 doctors and made 80 million dollars in revenue last year.
Adam Smith thinks looking into a mirror — the spectator — crucial to good ethics. He also thinks you and I are under the spell of machines that generate fantasy versions of the self (V&R, Chapter 4). The religious tradition certainly sounds a warning: “God, least of all, contemplates Himself as in a mirror” (https://oratory-toronto.org/map-year/2019/06/18/reflections-on-false-prophets/). Smith also warns of contortions of the body at the behest of fashion (http://www.ethicsoffashion.com/adam-smith-on-corsets/).
Famously, Jacques Lacan invokes the mirror stage. I detail the basics (http://www.ethicsoffashion.com/lacan-on-fashions-dark-psychology/) and what I say there, applies here, too. The filtered self, and the damage we do it, is not uniquely modern or enabled by recent technology. However, it certainly gives ample scope for psychodermatology to ply its trade.
