Valeria grows pensive, which in her case means rolling her eyes slightly upward without changing anything else about her face. "I wouldn't say so. Everyone wants a slim figure. Everyone gets breasts done. Everyone fixes up their face if it's not ideal, you know? Everyone strives for the golden mean. It's global now."

"But that's a relatively new thing," I reply. "The ideal of beauty used to be different."

"That's because of the race-mixing."

If I had a glass of multi-chutney carrot-juice mix before me, I'd do a bright orange spit take.

"For example, a Russian marries an Armenian," Valeria elaborates helpfully. "They have a kid, a cute girl, but she has her dad's nose. She goes and files it down a little, and it's all good. Ethnicities are mixing now, so there's degeneration, and it didn't used to be like that. Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this. I love the Nordic image myself. I have white skin; I am a Nordic type—perhaps a little Eastern Baltic, but closer to Nordic."