I guess Henry never heard the saying, "Beauty is only skin deep."

The hands move, the lips move...Ideas gush from his words,
And his eyes devour!
He is an island of Selfdom.
-- a description from "A Manual of Muad'Dib" by the Princess Irulan

Bully_rus wrote: (...) plastic surgery ...

Have you ever thought someone was very attractive until he or she spoke? Getting to know someone can greatly endear them to us, or degrade our perception of them, even where physical characteristics are concerned.

Very deep . . . in a shallow sort of way.

Context from : Henry David Thoreau: Walden

11. Higher Laws

All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one. It is the same whether a man eat, or drink, or cohabit, or sleep sensually. They are but one appetite, and we only need to see a person do any one of these things to know how great a sensualist he is. The impure can neither stand nor sit with purity. When the reptile is attacked at one mouth of his burrow, he shows himself at another. If you would be chaste, you must be temperate. What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is. We speak conformably to the rumor which we have heard. From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality. In the student sensuality is a sluggish habit of mind. An unclean person is universally a slothful one, one who sits by a stove, whom the sun shines on prostrate, who reposes without being fatigued. If you would avoid uncleanness, and all the sins, work earnestly, though it be at cleaning a stable. Nature is hard to be overcome, but she must be overcome. What avails it that you are Christian, if you are not purer than the heathen, if you deny yourself no more, if you are not more religious? I know of many systems of religion esteemed heathenish whose precepts fill the reader with shame, and provoke him to new endeavors, though it be to the performance of rites merely.

I hesitate to say these things, but it is not because of the subject -- I care not how obscene my words are -- but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my impurity. We discourse freely without shame of one form of sensuality, and are silent about another. We are so degraded that we cannot speak simply of the necessary functions of human nature. In earlier ages, in some countries, every function was reverently spoken of and regulated by law. Nothing was too trivial for the Hindoo lawgiver, however offensive it may be to modern taste. He teaches how to eat, drink, cohabit, void excrement and urine, and the like, elevating what is mean, and does not falsely excuse himself by calling these things trifles.

Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones. Any nobleness begins at once to refine a man's features, any meanness or sensuality to imbrute them.

http://www.literaturepage.com/read/walden-166.html

Pretty or ugly, one has to ask "are you into men/women? Really?" these days to find a boy/girl friend. I am glad I do not have to ask that question.

How many of you asked yourself that question? Am I right to ask this question?

Eugenics were seen as a reliable science in his times: a social philosophy advocating the improvement of human genetic traits through the promotion of higher rates of sexual reproduction for people with desired traits (positive eugenics), or reduced rates of sexual reproduction and sterilization of people with less-desired or undesired traits

To refine one's features, as opposed to make them coarse (imbrute) in Thoreau's quote, refers not just to facial attributes-- least of all carnal beauty in particular.
He speaks of a spirituality manifested in an appearance polished by what one has acquired through one's own efforts and virtue, rather than inborn characteristics
of physical beauty.

Thoreau had certainly heard of the saying mentioned by Wanderer, indeed he may tell us how to look beyond, or beneath, beauty in a person, much like Sir Thomas Overbury had said :
"All the carnal beauty of my wife is but skin-deep."