Living Lab: Expertise Group Cosmetic Procedures

In today’s society we are surrounded by appearance-focused imagery and, besides our offline existence, we live our lives in the online world of social media with technical affordances that can easily allow us to create our ideal-selves. The social context of our lives is an important factor in guiding appearance-standards. Especially young people seem to be affected by this cultivation of appearances and normalization of ideal-standards, which may lead to increased interests in becoming ‘your ideal self’. Our expertise group consists of experts from various disciplines who share a common denominator in the (growing) interest in cosmetic treatments and their impact on society.

In this expertise group we approach this topic of cosmetic procedures from different angles by combining our expertise and backgrounds, which creates an environment in which we can study the topic in the real-life settings of social media and cosmetic procedures. By combining quantitative and qualitative research, we will investigate the underlying motives and contributors to the increased interest in cosmetic procedures as well as the relations with self-image among youngsters. Moreover, the ‘complication consultation hour’ allows a real-life setting for in-depth research among people who actively engage in having cosmetic treatments.

Consortium:
Consortium website