In French author Boris Vian’s novel Let's Kill All the Ugly Ones he describes an imaginary society where through genetic engineering and genocide, all the ugly are removed, leaving only the beautiful. The creator of this society keeps a carrier of ugliness genome in case beauty became boring. The science fiction future became real, up to a point, when modern medicine gives us a choice to create ourselves, to change, to work for distant result, perspective, or live here and now. Happiness is a process our new columnist, journalist, tv host and co-owner of clinic Vremya Krasoty, Yana Laputina considers. 

The question is not if we do have a choice or don’t. The question is that we got now a possibility to choose without any limit. The possibility edges are widened in another dimension. We used to have books and we realized that there was another reality, through cultural aspect. It was enough to read The Catcher in the Rye to understand how children lived in America, how they came home for vacations from private schools to New York, what their way of thinking was. Not better, neither worse, just different. We read Nabokov describing life in Europe different from ours. 
We lived in that cultural and historical paradigm and still up to some point we do. But another reality appears today, the one belonging to millen-nials — generation supposed to live in future. The huge media flow form-ing society is not atavistic TV anymore. Today anyone of us can open any newsfeed in internet and see, say, Jennifer Lopez and her choice of wearing something on the red carpet in Hollywood. Or a photo of one of Kardashians before and after — well, nor me neither, our clinic’s doctors couldn’t understand that it was the same person. It is all easy to reach and observe and if a person doesn’t have his own base, he starts to follow and do the same, trying same sympathetic models. He doesn’t understand that transformations are limitless but there’s no way back. It is not a choice of lipstick, nail colour or hair tone. A serious transformation is a point of no turning back. Aggressive way of changing oneself comes out of rushing about, not understanding oneself. Inner comfort and satisfaction are notions not correlating with appearance. To look good and look different is not the same. 
The state of comfort is an absence of will to compare oneself to others, delight of one’s appearance, skin, face, body. I strongly believe that losing a comfort like this is not a freedom, it is a loss of freedom. I think that the generation coming after us has multiple possibilities of choosing its style, its way of life, appearance but they lost their ability to be themselves. And this is the most fearsome the info flow we see in Facebook, Instagram and Magazines as well, gives us. I went to some event and saw people with boys dressed like girls among them, they wore dresses and had impossible hair. It was an absolute parody of people. Just a small part of those who attended the event had a human appearance and the media source that used to bring rational and healthy ideas before became an adept of androgyny, neuter gender, fashion follower. Walking along the street seeing people not in malefemale format is horrifying me as a mother too. I’m against this kind of freedom of choice. I’m voting for those who doesn’t do things based on trend or hype — I hate the term — but based on what is inside of them. It’s a pity that people started to refuse from their background — very important word — fundament, platform making us ourselves. 

Considering health, at some point it became socially acceptable to refuse absolutely from any hu-man weakness. We shouldn’t drink alcohol. At all. We should jog. We shouldn’t smoke. We should eat healthy. When you look at this list, all looks good. It is obvious that all listed is harmful. But when you try it and start to live this way integrating into the healthy lifestyle, you suddenly realize that you live an endlessly flavourless life reminding of the steamed fish cooked without salt. Refusing from pleasures means leading a boring life. A man should have some weaknesses. ‘Principles are created to break them sometimes’ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry once said. 

The situation with appearance is exactly the same. Ideal takes away the feeling of being alive. Happiness is not a goal, it is a process. It is very hard to understand this fact. It took me time to realize it. Marrying, giving birth to a child, making business income enough to stop working are the goals you wait to achieve to become happy. But this is totally wrong. When everything fulfills I won’t be there or I’ll have less time. That means all is done to see the end of, say, French movie, with the word Fin on the screen. Why can’t we enjoy life now? Those peo-ple who endlessly modify their appearance ought to may be stop and think for a while, why and where they move to. What is their destination. A good styled hair, for example, makes you happy for half an hour before you come to a meeting. But you forget about it talking to an interesting vis-à-vis. Same with fitness: you make a perfect body but it doesn’t matter if you sit in your kitchen alone with no one to talk to. 
My dad attended a conference in Monaco in the beginning of millennium. It was said there that aging is considered now to be a sickness that has to be cured. I suppose it was based on the fact that marketing previewed the epoch of revolutionary changes in the beauty industry, many hardware beauty techniques helping to save young appearance, injection protocols of an absolutely different level giving the effect you never can gain by massage. A vast choice of procedures that don’t stop time but help to look good in the moment of time. The term appeared, “good forties”. We look better in this age than our grandmothers did. No, we don’t look younger because of the hard disk built inside, our eyes, they give us away immediately. We are younger on ten years old photos because of the sight, it’s different, you can’t change it and actually don’t have to. A person who aims to look thirty at his fifties will look like a caricature of himself. But if you come and say that you want to look good at your thirty-five or forty, it’s an absolutely different goal. You don’t have to be ashamed of the life part you lived, of your ups and downs, of aging. This is a freedom of being yourself.