Nip/Tuck
How Americans are slashing away at age, one body part at a time.
BEAUTY JUNKIES
Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery
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By Alex Kuczynski
Doubleday. 290 pp. $24.95
Sometimes, out and about, I catch a stranger fixing me with a gimlet eye. Does she recognize me? Perhaps. I wrote a first-person story for Washingtonian magazine back in 1989 about getting a facelift -- with before-and-after mug shots on the cover. Maybe that stranger stashed it in a bedside drawer. I imagine her fishing it out after one of those blood-freezing flashes when she spots her own reflection in a shop window and thinks her mother's come to town.
Over the intervening 17 years, my own visage has slid back into its pre-lift contours. But millions more have surrendered to the knife, and a charming new vocabulary has been born: Carb Face, for example (puffy-cheeked); Bowling Ball Breasts; the Trout Pout; the Wind Tunnel (severely backswept facial skin); the Kabuki Mask (all-Botox, all the time). Mind-boggling new technologies have blossomed: lasers, microsurgeries, wrinkle fillers, wrinkle paralytics, power-assistant liposuction, endoscopic tricks and "thread lifts," in which barbed threads are stretched beneath the cheeks and anchored to the skull. Cheekbones are glorified with Gore-Tex, just like your L.L. Bean jacket. Gallons of collagen, cultivated in a vast petri dish from the stem cells of a single infant's foreskin, have been pumped into lips or nasolabial folds, an alternative to the locally fashionable "cadaver tissue," i.e., corpse flesh. (How do you know where it's been? Maybe you're sporting a snippet of dear old Alistair Cooke, whose own dead tissue went missing, in your kissable new Trout Pout.)
In New York, women have their toes trimmed to squeeze into pointy Jimmy Choo shoes. In Los Angeles, gals who've had everything else done now get genital beautification. Says one, "I've spent so much money for the rest of me to look like Dolly Parton. So why should that look like Willie Nelson?" Many under-40 men today think it perfectly normal for the breasts on a reclining woman to stand up like rockets at take-off.
The New York Times's racy feature writer Alex Kuczynski has written Beauty Junkies , an exposé of the cosmetic surgery industry. And she really knows her stuff. The 30-something beauty confesses that she hopped aboard the fix-me train at age 28. At first, it was just a couple of Botox shots to the brow. (Scowling over a computer all day, every writer knows, encourages piles, dowager's hump and eye trouble -- but exacts its most visible toll between the eyebrows.) Later, she was persuaded by her doctor to have her almond-shaped, slightly slanted blue eyes "fixed" to reduce the volume above the upper lid -- excising that enchanting, extended epicanthic fold that gives Charlotte Rampling, Kathleen Turner and, in an earlier generation, Simone Signoret their bedroom eyes. She's had lard lipo'd from her thighs. She's spent many thousands on "maintenance."
And finally, in 2004, in quest of that Angelina Jolie suck-the-chrome-off-a-trailer-hitch moue, she had her upper lip stuffed with Restylane, a mucus-like synthetic form of hyaluronic acid. It gave her a yam-sized Donald Duck disaster zone below her nose that kept her housebound for several days. That -- and the recognition that a friend had, in the course of various improvements, become a frightening "meat puppet" -- cured her of her addiction. Or so she says.
A few choice statistics, now, from her sumptuously fact-packed Beauty Junkies : In 2004, nearly 12 million surgical and nonsurgical beauty procedures were performed in the United States -- including 290,343 eyelid jobs, 166,187 nose jobs, 478,251 liposuctions and 334,052 breast augmentations. Despite the fact that those dense, high-cohesive silicone-gel European breast implants known as "gummi bears" are generally illegal here, it's estimated that a third of all artificial breasts in this country are "in trouble." Still, since 1997, breast implants are up 147 percent. Liposuction's up 111 percent; tummy tucks, 144 percent; and Botox use, 2,446 percent.
Kuczynski emphasizes the two harsh realities that steer these soaring numbers. First, boomers are graying more reluctantly than any previous generation. Second, with the current state of the health care game, many surgeons and dermatologists actually prefer big-bucks, high-satisfaction cosmetic work to, say, cancer surgery. Which would you rather do? Take 15 minutes to squirt a face full of Botox, and get $1,000 in cash and a stiffish smile in return? Or painstakingly remove a freckle, slice by panicky slice, over a full hour or more, and then, a couple of months later, get 12 bucks from a grudging insurance company?
At its core, of course, the rage for "age management" is a ghastly business. Beneath those glamorous Chiclet-tooth veneers may lurk stinking stubs that revolt even the dentists who created them from perfectly healthy teeth. Very fat people who have gastric bypasses (140,600 Americans in 2004) find their new slender bodies swimming in gigantic sacks of skin -- dangling aprons, flaps, curtains, folds and hammocks that actually shock the plastic surgeons who must tailor them to fit the new frame.
To avoid even approaching that fate, Hollywood gals turn to Clen -- clenbuterol, a steroid used to treat asthma in horses and to help the human body remain a size two. Clen also increases the risk of stroke and heart attack, destroys endurance and stiffens the heart muscles.
But as long ago as the 17th century, the wise François, duc de la Rochefoucauld, observed that, "One must suffer to be beautiful." Today, 73-year-old Joan Rivers wistfully adds, "I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I'd look like without plastic surgery." As for Kuczynski -- well, she's gone off the Botox. ·
Diana McLellan is the author of "The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood."
