A friend of mine recently posted a link on Facebook to a series of photos titled A New Kind of Beauty by photographer Mr. Toledano. When I hit on link I was immediately taken aback by the power of his imagery.

Are these people the shock troops of the future of the human body? I don’t know. But what I do know is that I’m starting to see a lot of similar faces on news anchors, TV and movie stars and magazine models. Is some sort of new consensus on what constitutes “beauty” in our era being drawn?

Mr. Toledano writes:

Is beauty informed by contemporary culture? By history? Or is it defined by the surgeon’s hand? Can we identify physical trends that vary from decade to decade, or is beauty timeless?

When we re-make ourselves, are we revealing our true character, or are we stripping away our very identity?

Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?

 

 
More of A New Kind of Beauty after the jump…

 
I want to shake Jesse Rosten‘s hand, the writer and director of this awesome fake commercial titled “Fotoshop by Adobé.”

Jesse says, “This commercial isn’t real, neither are society’s standards of beauty.”
 

 
(via Nerdcore)

 
Hypnotic animation—this is an ad, really, but it’s a soft sell—to get people interested to read the Newseek special report on The Beauty Advantage (which is quite interesting). There’s a fairly amusing punchline, but I won’t spoil it for you.