"Iran has arrested an Instagram celebrity famous for drastically altering her appearance through cosmetic surgery..."

"The social media star known as Sahar Tabar was detained on the orders of Tehran’s guidance court, which deals with 'cultural crimes and social and moral corruption'... She faces charges including blasphemy, inciting violence, gaining income through inappropriate means and encouraging youths to corruption," The Guardian reports, based on a report from the "semi-official" Tasnim news agency.

Here's the crazy-looking picture of her, which is said to resemble Angelina Jolie (in some zombie sort of incarnation).



Tabar does plastic surgery, and we're told "Cosmetic surgery is hugely popular in the Islamic republic," but there's also photoshopping involved. I'm not sure what part of all this is regarded as "blasphemy" by the Iranian authorities.

Tabar used Instagram, the only "major social media" available in Iran. It's accurate, I think, to say that this sort of thing entails "social and moral corruption." The problem is using criminal law to deal with it. The government's solution is worse than the problem. But it's amazing that a person was able to go this far in Iran without encountering a reaction from the government, and it's hard to understand, without living there, how much social media expression like this is a legitimate and admirable rebellion against repression. Without government repression, onlookers are free to simple express disgust at this sort of attack on one's own face.

ADDED: On the subject of plastic surgery in Iran, consider "Why Iran is a hub for sex-reassignment surgery/It is not because the regime is liberal" (The Economist):

Attitudes towards sexuality can be rigid in Iran. A conservative former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, once declared that the country didn’t have any gay people. So it seems an unlikely hub for sex-reassignment surgery. But the procedure has been permitted since the mid-1980s, when Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini met a trans woman called Maryam Khatoon Molkara, who had been thrown into a psychiatric institution and forcibly injected with male hormones. Moved by her story, he issued a fatwa allowing the procedure, which a cleric later compared to changing wheat into bread. Today the government even helps with the cost.

But the regime’s encouragement of sex-change surgery is related to its intolerance of homosexuality, which is a capital offence. Gay Iranians face pressure to change their sex regardless of whether they want to, say activists and psychologists in Iran. Therapists tell patients with same-sex desires that they may be transgender, not gay....