It was my father who taught me to value myself. He told me that I was uncommonly beautiful and that I was the most precious thing in his life.
Dawn French
Love and the Plastic Surgeon (or, “It’s Not Me, It’s You”)
One of the best ways to annoy the wife of a cosmetic surgeon is to talk about how great he is. I’m not sure exactly what the mystique is, but I do know that people at parties say things to my wife like, “Oh, it must be great to be married to a cosmetic surgeon: you can get your whole body done for free!” My wife, being an intelligent person (and, by the way, a doctor in her own right) finds it repulsive to think of her husband as also being the one to modify her body with a scalpel. She also resents the implication that she needs to have work done, especially when it comes from a stranger holding a Martini glass. But some women apparently don’t feel that way: there are a number of cosmetic surgeons whose wives are shining examples of their handiwork. My wife and I just happen to want to keep our relationship personal.
But there’s a reverse of that idea going on, too. I find that sometimes my patients “love” me. They say nice things to me, laugh at my jokes (even when they aren’t that funny), and try to please me. Like anyone with an ego, I sometimes like to think it’s because of my innate specialness as a human being that makes my patients love me, but all I need to do to get a reality fix is consult with my realistic wife, my helpmeet. I’m not all that special; and if I were, my patients, who often see me when they’re slightly sedated, wouldn’t know it anyway. There’s something about what I do that makes me attractive to them.
When I decided to become a cosmetic surgeon, my wife was horrified. “What am I going to tell my friends?” she wailed. She was used to being married to a guy who fixed people’s eyes, who kept them from going blind, or removed skin cancer from them. A quiet hero, not a celebrity fixer. She didn’t want to be married to a guy who would pose on his latest book jacket holding a syringe (a favorite pose for guys in my profession; I don’t know why!) I thought and thought about ways to make my decision acceptable to my wife (and her friends). Finally, I hit on a solution. “Tell them I’m a hairdresser.”
She was okay with that. Basically, I am a highly trained hairdresser in that I take people’s wishes and try to make them real. People come to me with their most pressing personal problems and they trust me to help them. And in the way that they “love” the people who do their hair, they “love’ me. It’s not me, it’s them. When you’re doing cosmetic surgery, or hair, you’re a mirror and a tool for the customer or patient. You’re there, all right, but more as an instrument of their direction, or maybe even an extension of their ego. There’s nothing like having someone else focus all their attention and energy on meeting your most personal goals, which is why people are so loyal and affectionate when it comes to the people who work with their bodies—stylists, masseuses, Pilates instructors, diet chefs and cosmetic surgeons.
If all that sounds cynical, I don’t mean it to. My patients aren’t more self-absorbed than anyone else. One of the things I’ve noticed about my patients is their heroism. It takes a really strong man to have a facelift; aside from the pain and the cost, there’s the embarrassment of being seen to care about your skin. Caring about your looks is still something pretty new to men; a lot of the men who come to me now grew up with role models like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, baseball players and war heroes. The kind of characters whose idea of surgery was to have a bullet pried out of a shoulder while biting on a grubby rag. So the guy who decides to take a few years off the old chronometer by getting his eyes done or losing those jowls first has to fight his old ideas. Poker face or pantywaist? Rugged or handsome? Will women love him more for being good looking, or despise him for caring?
More and more, women are saying they like men who look good, who smell good. Being able to sit a horse and win a barroom fist fight are no longer the qualities most women are looking for in their mates, assuming they ever were.
Narcissus rejected Echo with contempt when she fell in love with him, and then he saw himself mirrored in a spring and fell in love with someone he could never have. It was payback for being mean to the nymph that he adored his own face, and no-one’s ever satisfactorily explained to me why he was so dumb he couldn’t figure out he was in love with his reflection. (And if Echo had known what a dummy he was, would she still have loved him for his face alone?) But if we take the story as a comment on human desire, it gets more interesting. Why do we have mirrors, unless it’s because we want to look into them and see—what? Beauty, of course. I think we all look in the mirror hoping to see ourselves as we want to be, young, beautiful, lively, attractive. Unflawed. Cosmetic surgery is an effective way to take a little of that narcissistic dream that lives in all of us, and make it real. So we “love” the surgeon, and the scalpel and the acids and lasers and even the waiting room smell. It’s all part of the package.
“What I Did for Love”
Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.
William Shakespeare
It’s a basic fact of human life—maybe all sentient life—that we all want to be loved. Millions of people spent significant portions of their time searching for true love, and millions more would like to find Mr. Right, but might be willing to settle for Mr. Right-Now. But modern dating philosophies aside, most people want to feel that someone cares for them; they want someone to take care of them when they’re sick or hurting. We all want to feel accepted, and to have someone we love, love us in return. It’s the instinct behind most of what we do.
When we buy certain clothes, diet and exercise to create a particularly pleasing body form, choose perfumes and pick our hobbies, many of us are doing these things with an eye to our attractiveness to others. As much as we all want to be loved and accepted, most of us realize that the way to open the door for love is visual. And that’s natural too. I mean, evening blooming flowers carry nectar and pollen preferred by certain night-flying insects, but they don’t just put the pollen out there and hope for the best. Night blooming flowers use scent and color to draw night-flying insects. That’s why, when you look at moonflowers, night blooming jasmine and evening scented stock, you notice that they are all either white or very pale in color. The color helps the moths find them.
But the main attraction is scent: night blooming flowers keep pretty much to themselves in the daytime, but as evening descends, they begin to exude heavy perfumes, prized by human beings, but absolutely necessary to night-flying insects. The moths or other insects mistake the flower power for pheremones of their own; sometimes they mistake the shape of the flowers’ physical structures for those of their own species, and in “mating” with the flower also pollinate it with pollen from the flower next door.
People are like flowers (isn’t that a nice picture?) We try to draw others to us by any means possible. It might be a classy car, a fantastic wardrobe or a great smelling deodorant. It might be by our talents—great cooking, sailing or dancing. Our finances enter into the search for a mate: people often choose their professions based on the status, earning and sex-appeal of those careers.
Some people think it’s shallow to have cosmetic procedures in order to be more attractive to others, to find a lifestyle or a mate that you might not otherwise have encountered. Some people also think it’s wrong to wear lipstick. I remember running across a story online about a man who divorced his wife on the grounds that she had deceived him as to her true looks by the use of makeup. Apparently, once they were married, she “let herself go”, and he felt gypped. It seems that the entire basis of his marriage rested on his wife’s physical presentation—not the best basis for a marriage!
More recently, I saw a macabre story about a man in China whose first wife died. Remarrying after three years, he asked his second wife to have cosmetic surgery so she would more closely resemble his first wife. The man, who was forced by his parents to remarry, said he did so because this woman did bear a slight resemblance to his first wife, whom he lost in an automobile accident. About asking his new wife to undergo cosmetic surgery, he said, "Maybe it's more or less unfair to her, but she has agreed and I will embrace her with all my love.” His new wife agreed to the procedures in order to keep the family together.
Having cosmetic surgery to replace your husband’s wife is sad and weird and sick—in the U.S. and most of the world. The woman is clearly being victimized by her husband’s bereavement and their families’ insistence that they marry. In the system of old-fashioned Chinese family life, in a situation where divorce for a young woman may be unthinkable because of family pressures and lack of economic security, cosmetic surgery has arisen as a potential option to lifelong misery. Perhaps if the young woman does resemble her predecessor, her husband will be kinder to her. Maybe they will manage a sort of happiness.
When you’re writing a book about cosmetic surgery, you walk a fine line between being medical, and thus insanely boring, and writing a piece of drivel fit only for the free beauty websites. When I started, I was determined to avoid all mention of celebrity surgeries, particularly the freaky ones. But when we’re discussing love and its permutations, I can’t ignore the story of Jocelyn Wildenstein, otherwise known as the “cat-woman”. It’s just too odd.
The lady in question was married to a wealthy art dealer, and as marriages do, theirs began to break down. When her husband was seeing other women, Ms. Wildenstein was about 50 years old, and she began having cosmetic surgery to try to win back his affections. It didn’t work—at least not right away, and the couple divorced in a battle that included both refusing to vacate their New York city townhouse, gunplay and millions of dollars. I can’t believe no one has made a movie about it.
Now, here’s where it gets weird. When her husband didn’t return to her, Ms. Wildenstein decided to refashion her face to resemble that of a lion. She and her husband had met at a hunting weekend in Kenya, and she knew he loved the big cats that lived on his Kenyan estate. She found a plastic surgeon who was willing to make the alterations, and transformed her face into a semi-catlike one, complete with narrow, tilted eyes, a pushed out chin, high, high cheeks and huge lips. (I’m not sure where the gigantic lips came in: most cats have skinny little lips). She certainly does look different: if you gave that face to someone who didn’t demand it, it would certainly be considered the most awful malpractice. And I’m not just being ‘catty’—the lady’s husband screamed when he first saw her new face.
And even weirder. After some time apart, (including a fantastically expensive divorce), the couple reunited. And have been together again since 2000.
Most of the patients I see are having cosmetic procedures for themselves—to build their self-confidence, self-esteem. But whenever we modify something in our own presentation, people notice. Sometimes they comment, hopefully favorably. If someone said to me, “I want to have this procedure so my husband (or wife, or neighbor) will love me,” I would discourage that person from having the procedure. Unrequited love does not usually become requited by physical alterations. But I see people whose reasons are a bit more complex: the aging husband who wants to look younger to match the youthfulness of his wife; the woman who wants to wear a bikini on her honeymoon without worrying about her tummy. Young people who want to be cuter but find themselves becoming shy and withdrawn over an outsized nose or undersized chin. We all want to be loved, and like the night blooming flower that draws the moth by any means at its disposal, we do what we can to look our best.
Afterword
I felt it shelter to speak to you.
Emily Dickinson
I’ve read some of the recent books on cosmetic surgery, and I found many of them to be thin. They either assume the reader will get the details elsewhere, or that readers don’t really want to know the nuts and bolts of cosmetic surgery. I’ve been surprised and sometimes dismayed by the paucity of real information in books written by surgeons for people interested in cosmetic surgery. I didn’t want to write a rah-rah book about how great life is when you have the perfect face—I wanted to create something real and useful; something that would actually be read, that would increase understanding and tell people something they didn’t already know.
When I decided to write a book about cosmetic surgery, I knew I wanted to accomplish a couple of things: I wanted to inform and educate patients, and I wanted to help them become their own advocates. I also hoped this book would be somewhat entertaining, so that people would want to buy it and would mention it to their friends along with such comments as, “the best cosmetic surgery book I’ve read all year!” (We all have our fantasies, and I’m privileged to share mine with you.) I had ambitions to explain the workings of the body and the ideas behind what we call “beauty”.
But as I worked, I realized that I also wanted to share some of my personal ideas—ethical concerns, psychological theories—and my experiences, not only as a surgeon but as a human being. I stopped being just a doctor—or maybe I became something more. I found myself imagining you, reading my book in the Borders’ bookstore, your library or on a comfortable couch. It became a sort of letter to you.
If you don’t take anything else away from reading this book, I hope it’s the sense that you can make decisions regarding your looks without having to feel guilty or afraid; that you have the necessary tools to make good decisions when you’re considering a procedure or choosing a surgeon. You will still need to communicate your desires and listen to the surgeon’s opinion as to whether they can be realistically accomplished, but once you find someone you trust, reaching your goal becomes a simple act of following through.
Dawn French
Love and the Plastic Surgeon (or, “It’s Not Me, It’s You”)
One of the best ways to annoy the wife of a cosmetic surgeon is to talk about how great he is. I’m not sure exactly what the mystique is, but I do know that people at parties say things to my wife like, “Oh, it must be great to be married to a cosmetic surgeon: you can get your whole body done for free!” My wife, being an intelligent person (and, by the way, a doctor in her own right) finds it repulsive to think of her husband as also being the one to modify her body with a scalpel. She also resents the implication that she needs to have work done, especially when it comes from a stranger holding a Martini glass. But some women apparently don’t feel that way: there are a number of cosmetic surgeons whose wives are shining examples of their handiwork. My wife and I just happen to want to keep our relationship personal.
But there’s a reverse of that idea going on, too. I find that sometimes my patients “love” me. They say nice things to me, laugh at my jokes (even when they aren’t that funny), and try to please me. Like anyone with an ego, I sometimes like to think it’s because of my innate specialness as a human being that makes my patients love me, but all I need to do to get a reality fix is consult with my realistic wife, my helpmeet. I’m not all that special; and if I were, my patients, who often see me when they’re slightly sedated, wouldn’t know it anyway. There’s something about what I do that makes me attractive to them.
When I decided to become a cosmetic surgeon, my wife was horrified. “What am I going to tell my friends?” she wailed. She was used to being married to a guy who fixed people’s eyes, who kept them from going blind, or removed skin cancer from them. A quiet hero, not a celebrity fixer. She didn’t want to be married to a guy who would pose on his latest book jacket holding a syringe (a favorite pose for guys in my profession; I don’t know why!) I thought and thought about ways to make my decision acceptable to my wife (and her friends). Finally, I hit on a solution. “Tell them I’m a hairdresser.”
She was okay with that. Basically, I am a highly trained hairdresser in that I take people’s wishes and try to make them real. People come to me with their most pressing personal problems and they trust me to help them. And in the way that they “love” the people who do their hair, they “love’ me. It’s not me, it’s them. When you’re doing cosmetic surgery, or hair, you’re a mirror and a tool for the customer or patient. You’re there, all right, but more as an instrument of their direction, or maybe even an extension of their ego. There’s nothing like having someone else focus all their attention and energy on meeting your most personal goals, which is why people are so loyal and affectionate when it comes to the people who work with their bodies—stylists, masseuses, Pilates instructors, diet chefs and cosmetic surgeons.
If all that sounds cynical, I don’t mean it to. My patients aren’t more self-absorbed than anyone else. One of the things I’ve noticed about my patients is their heroism. It takes a really strong man to have a facelift; aside from the pain and the cost, there’s the embarrassment of being seen to care about your skin. Caring about your looks is still something pretty new to men; a lot of the men who come to me now grew up with role models like Clint Eastwood and John Wayne, baseball players and war heroes. The kind of characters whose idea of surgery was to have a bullet pried out of a shoulder while biting on a grubby rag. So the guy who decides to take a few years off the old chronometer by getting his eyes done or losing those jowls first has to fight his old ideas. Poker face or pantywaist? Rugged or handsome? Will women love him more for being good looking, or despise him for caring?
More and more, women are saying they like men who look good, who smell good. Being able to sit a horse and win a barroom fist fight are no longer the qualities most women are looking for in their mates, assuming they ever were.
Narcissus rejected Echo with contempt when she fell in love with him, and then he saw himself mirrored in a spring and fell in love with someone he could never have. It was payback for being mean to the nymph that he adored his own face, and no-one’s ever satisfactorily explained to me why he was so dumb he couldn’t figure out he was in love with his reflection. (And if Echo had known what a dummy he was, would she still have loved him for his face alone?) But if we take the story as a comment on human desire, it gets more interesting. Why do we have mirrors, unless it’s because we want to look into them and see—what? Beauty, of course. I think we all look in the mirror hoping to see ourselves as we want to be, young, beautiful, lively, attractive. Unflawed. Cosmetic surgery is an effective way to take a little of that narcissistic dream that lives in all of us, and make it real. So we “love” the surgeon, and the scalpel and the acids and lasers and even the waiting room smell. It’s all part of the package.
“What I Did for Love”
Love is not love that alters when it alteration finds.
William Shakespeare
It’s a basic fact of human life—maybe all sentient life—that we all want to be loved. Millions of people spent significant portions of their time searching for true love, and millions more would like to find Mr. Right, but might be willing to settle for Mr. Right-Now. But modern dating philosophies aside, most people want to feel that someone cares for them; they want someone to take care of them when they’re sick or hurting. We all want to feel accepted, and to have someone we love, love us in return. It’s the instinct behind most of what we do.
When we buy certain clothes, diet and exercise to create a particularly pleasing body form, choose perfumes and pick our hobbies, many of us are doing these things with an eye to our attractiveness to others. As much as we all want to be loved and accepted, most of us realize that the way to open the door for love is visual. And that’s natural too. I mean, evening blooming flowers carry nectar and pollen preferred by certain night-flying insects, but they don’t just put the pollen out there and hope for the best. Night blooming flowers use scent and color to draw night-flying insects. That’s why, when you look at moonflowers, night blooming jasmine and evening scented stock, you notice that they are all either white or very pale in color. The color helps the moths find them.
But the main attraction is scent: night blooming flowers keep pretty much to themselves in the daytime, but as evening descends, they begin to exude heavy perfumes, prized by human beings, but absolutely necessary to night-flying insects. The moths or other insects mistake the flower power for pheremones of their own; sometimes they mistake the shape of the flowers’ physical structures for those of their own species, and in “mating” with the flower also pollinate it with pollen from the flower next door.
People are like flowers (isn’t that a nice picture?) We try to draw others to us by any means possible. It might be a classy car, a fantastic wardrobe or a great smelling deodorant. It might be by our talents—great cooking, sailing or dancing. Our finances enter into the search for a mate: people often choose their professions based on the status, earning and sex-appeal of those careers.
Some people think it’s shallow to have cosmetic procedures in order to be more attractive to others, to find a lifestyle or a mate that you might not otherwise have encountered. Some people also think it’s wrong to wear lipstick. I remember running across a story online about a man who divorced his wife on the grounds that she had deceived him as to her true looks by the use of makeup. Apparently, once they were married, she “let herself go”, and he felt gypped. It seems that the entire basis of his marriage rested on his wife’s physical presentation—not the best basis for a marriage!
More recently, I saw a macabre story about a man in China whose first wife died. Remarrying after three years, he asked his second wife to have cosmetic surgery so she would more closely resemble his first wife. The man, who was forced by his parents to remarry, said he did so because this woman did bear a slight resemblance to his first wife, whom he lost in an automobile accident. About asking his new wife to undergo cosmetic surgery, he said, "Maybe it's more or less unfair to her, but she has agreed and I will embrace her with all my love.” His new wife agreed to the procedures in order to keep the family together.
Having cosmetic surgery to replace your husband’s wife is sad and weird and sick—in the U.S. and most of the world. The woman is clearly being victimized by her husband’s bereavement and their families’ insistence that they marry. In the system of old-fashioned Chinese family life, in a situation where divorce for a young woman may be unthinkable because of family pressures and lack of economic security, cosmetic surgery has arisen as a potential option to lifelong misery. Perhaps if the young woman does resemble her predecessor, her husband will be kinder to her. Maybe they will manage a sort of happiness.
When you’re writing a book about cosmetic surgery, you walk a fine line between being medical, and thus insanely boring, and writing a piece of drivel fit only for the free beauty websites. When I started, I was determined to avoid all mention of celebrity surgeries, particularly the freaky ones. But when we’re discussing love and its permutations, I can’t ignore the story of Jocelyn Wildenstein, otherwise known as the “cat-woman”. It’s just too odd.
The lady in question was married to a wealthy art dealer, and as marriages do, theirs began to break down. When her husband was seeing other women, Ms. Wildenstein was about 50 years old, and she began having cosmetic surgery to try to win back his affections. It didn’t work—at least not right away, and the couple divorced in a battle that included both refusing to vacate their New York city townhouse, gunplay and millions of dollars. I can’t believe no one has made a movie about it.
Now, here’s where it gets weird. When her husband didn’t return to her, Ms. Wildenstein decided to refashion her face to resemble that of a lion. She and her husband had met at a hunting weekend in Kenya, and she knew he loved the big cats that lived on his Kenyan estate. She found a plastic surgeon who was willing to make the alterations, and transformed her face into a semi-catlike one, complete with narrow, tilted eyes, a pushed out chin, high, high cheeks and huge lips. (I’m not sure where the gigantic lips came in: most cats have skinny little lips). She certainly does look different: if you gave that face to someone who didn’t demand it, it would certainly be considered the most awful malpractice. And I’m not just being ‘catty’—the lady’s husband screamed when he first saw her new face.
And even weirder. After some time apart, (including a fantastically expensive divorce), the couple reunited. And have been together again since 2000.
Most of the patients I see are having cosmetic procedures for themselves—to build their self-confidence, self-esteem. But whenever we modify something in our own presentation, people notice. Sometimes they comment, hopefully favorably. If someone said to me, “I want to have this procedure so my husband (or wife, or neighbor) will love me,” I would discourage that person from having the procedure. Unrequited love does not usually become requited by physical alterations. But I see people whose reasons are a bit more complex: the aging husband who wants to look younger to match the youthfulness of his wife; the woman who wants to wear a bikini on her honeymoon without worrying about her tummy. Young people who want to be cuter but find themselves becoming shy and withdrawn over an outsized nose or undersized chin. We all want to be loved, and like the night blooming flower that draws the moth by any means at its disposal, we do what we can to look our best.
Afterword
I felt it shelter to speak to you.
Emily Dickinson
I’ve read some of the recent books on cosmetic surgery, and I found many of them to be thin. They either assume the reader will get the details elsewhere, or that readers don’t really want to know the nuts and bolts of cosmetic surgery. I’ve been surprised and sometimes dismayed by the paucity of real information in books written by surgeons for people interested in cosmetic surgery. I didn’t want to write a rah-rah book about how great life is when you have the perfect face—I wanted to create something real and useful; something that would actually be read, that would increase understanding and tell people something they didn’t already know.
When I decided to write a book about cosmetic surgery, I knew I wanted to accomplish a couple of things: I wanted to inform and educate patients, and I wanted to help them become their own advocates. I also hoped this book would be somewhat entertaining, so that people would want to buy it and would mention it to their friends along with such comments as, “the best cosmetic surgery book I’ve read all year!” (We all have our fantasies, and I’m privileged to share mine with you.) I had ambitions to explain the workings of the body and the ideas behind what we call “beauty”.
But as I worked, I realized that I also wanted to share some of my personal ideas—ethical concerns, psychological theories—and my experiences, not only as a surgeon but as a human being. I stopped being just a doctor—or maybe I became something more. I found myself imagining you, reading my book in the Borders’ bookstore, your library or on a comfortable couch. It became a sort of letter to you.
If you don’t take anything else away from reading this book, I hope it’s the sense that you can make decisions regarding your looks without having to feel guilty or afraid; that you have the necessary tools to make good decisions when you’re considering a procedure or choosing a surgeon. You will still need to communicate your desires and listen to the surgeon’s opinion as to whether they can be realistically accomplished, but once you find someone you trust, reaching your goal becomes a simple act of following through.
