当美的祭司，死于对美的追求：一支美容针背后的时代之问

Today, we'll talk about

a story about 'beauty'.

But its ending

is not beautiful.

The story's protagonist

was named Kendal Ascher.

He was,

fifty-six.

If you know anything

about the beauty industry,

you'll know

he was no ordinary figure.

He was, at the global beauty giant

the Estée Lauder Companies,

a senior executive,

in charge of

the group's most elite

luxury brands —

La Mer,

Tom Ford Beauty,

Jo Malone,

Frédéric Malle …

brands whose very names

make hearts flutter —

behind them all,

his hand was there.

From an ordinary

sales rep,

to a commanding

group executive,

at Estée Lauder he served

for

twenty-five whole years.

It's no exaggeration to say

his whole life

was devoted to

one word —

'beauty'.

More than almost

anyone else in the world,

he understood

how to become beautiful,

how

to hold on to youth.

And yet,

fate

played

an exceptionally cruel joke.

Such a man,

standing at the summit of beauty's pyramid,

in the end,

fell

in the pursuit

of 'beauty' itself.

Early this year,

with no warning,

he suddenly passed away.

At first,

the cause was a mystery.

Not until this week

did New York's chief medical examiner

officially announce

the conclusion

that shook

the entire industry.

His death

stemmed from

an utterly ordinary

cosmetic injection.

The clinical wording was:

'following a cosmetic injection,

a pulmonary embolism of foreign material,

leading to

acute respiratory failure.'

In plain words,

it means:

he received

what we commonly call a 'beauty injection',

that is,

the kind of filler

injected into the skin.

The filler, which should have rested

safely within the skin,

in a tiny-probability event,

strayed into

his blood vessels.

These minute 'foreign bodies'

thus set out on

a fatal journey.

Carried by the bloodstream,

they surged along,

and finally

lodged

in his lungs,

like so many plugs,

sealing off, dead,

the passages of life.

He first felt

a sudden wave of dizziness,

and then,

his breath

swiftly

left him.

According to reports,

his final moments

were spent in his husband's arms.

Spent there.

Officials

ruled this tragedy

to be

an accident.

At this point,

I must pause

and say,

in all seriousness, one thing.

I am not trying

to scare anyone off.

In fact,

this kind of cosmetic injection,

in the vast majority of cases,

is safe.

In the US alone,

the number of injections each year

exceeds

5.5 million.

Fatal accidents

like his

are the rarest

of the rare.

But 'extremely rare',

after all,

is not the same as 'zero'.

As one plastic surgeon

candidly admitted:

though the risk is rare,

it truly exists,

and at its worst

may even

cause blindness.

Any act

of sending foreign matter

into the body

carries no

one-hundred-percent safety.

Speaking of this,

I want, with you,

to talk about a deeper layer.

We are living

in an age

that exalts 'beauty'

as never before.

On social media,

it's face after

flawless, polished face.

Getting beautiful

seems

to have become

a new 'necessity'.

To pursue beauty,

in itself,

is not wrong at all.

It is humanity's

most instinctive longing

for what is lovely.

But Ascher's story

is like a mirror,

reflecting

the shadow behind

this grand

pursuit:

when we

ceaselessly,

outward,

onto our faces,

keep 'adding',

have we

ever seriously

done the

'subtraction'

of

risk?

Between 'more beautiful'

and 'unharmed',

that

invisible line —

where,

exactly,

should we draw it?

At the end of the show,

I want to leave you

with two questions.

First,

to become more beautiful,

the price

you're willing to pay —

what is its

ceiling?

Second,

if one day

'beauty'

required you

to trade your health,

even your safety,

for it,

would you

still

go without hesitation?

These two questions

have no standard answer.

But they

are worth your

thinking about slowly.