Drawing the (surgical) line
It’s the year 2025 and almost everyone is beautiful, at least in the mainstream sense of the word. Symmetrical face, full lips and breasts, youthful skin: for a woman of the future, these features can be easily attained by a visit to the plastic surgeon. In fact, women with slightly larger noses or less-than-perky breasts are the minority. Their friends ask, “Why haven’t you had cosmetic surgery yet?”
It sounds like an episode of “The Twilight Zone,” but this scenario may not be far from reality. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans had 12.1 million cosmetic procedures in 2008, up 3 percent since 2007. Of all cosmetic surgeries, 91 percent are women. Men are catching up: pectoral implants have increased 203 percent since 2007.
In popular culture, plastic surgery is a sexy villain or a miracle worker. In the FX television show “Nip/Tuck,” plastic surgeons are immoral seducers, and their patients are vain, corrupt or mentally unstable. On the other hand, plastic surgery saves lives on “Extreme Makeover.” Plastic surgery can be celebrated as a human achievement in the ability to reconstruct our bodies, or a vain activity of the bored and rich. Which attitude will follow us into the future?
Attitudes toward plastic surgery depend largely on the circumstance. Plastic surgery is broken down into two types: cosmetic surgery and reconstructive surgery. Cosmetic surgery is elective, motivated by appearance and self-esteem and is usually not covered by health insurance. Reconstructive surgery is usually non-elective and is performed in cases of birth defects, developmental abnormalities, trauma, infection, tumors or disease. According to the ASPS, 4.9 million reconstructive procedures were performed in 2008.
Reconstructive surgery: “If you don’t take care of it, your daughter could go blind”
Lydia Schatzel, an ’09 graduate of the College of Arts & Sciences, has had more than 10 reconstructive surgeries. Two weeks after her premature birth, Schatzel began to develop a strawberry hemangioma — a giant blood birthmark on the outside of the skin. Strawberry hemangiomas are fairly common and usually go away in adolescence, but Schatzel’s was in a vital area: her face. More specifically, her right eye and earlobe.
“It was the size of a baseball over my eye and a golf ball over my ear,” Schatzel said. It was dangerous because if the hemangioma grew over her eye, it could be forced shut which would prevent synapses from forming. At 4 weeks old, Schatzel’s eye was shut.
“My parents rushed me to the ER for emergency surgery to open the eye,” she said. “The doctor basically told them, ‘If you don’t take care of it, your daughter could go blind.’ ”
Schatzel had more than 10 surgeries spread out every one and a half to two years, the most recent during her freshman year of college over Easter break. In the beginning, the surgeries removed tissue but allowed growth and attempted to keep her face as symmetrical as possible. Early surgeries were necessary because of health risks but later became more cosmetic.
“One procedure, they put a balloon in my forehead and would inflate the balloon every so often to form more skin,” Schatzel said. She experienced other progressive surgeries. After the strawberry hemangioma was removed, she didn’t have an earlobe. Surgeons made skin graphs from her eyelid.
“It was subtle things that made huge differences,” she said. Surgeries opened up her eyes and gave mini-facelifts, evened out her facial features, thinned scars and made them more skin toned. Skin therapy helped make the scar softer.
Most of Schatzel’s surgeries were covered by health insurance. In the future, she will have more local surgeries to fix smaller details.
Schatzel said that while most people are accepting of reconstructive surgery, some could learn to be more polite.
“When I was a kid, it was harder,” she said. “I’ve had people say, ‘What’s wrong with your face?’ Well, that doesn’t exactly make me want to tell you.”
“(Reconstructive surgery) saved my sight in my right eye, so I’m thankful for it,” Schatzel said.
Cosmetic surgery: “My family members don’t call me ‘Rudolph.’ ”
When Mary Roberts*, a Marquette senior, broke her nose in a soccer game in 2008, she had to make a decision. She needed surgery in order to breathe, and for five months, she could only use one nostril. She could have reconstructive surgery, called rhinoplasty, which would functionally fix her nose, although it would look somewhat abnormal. Or, she could have cosmetic surgery as well.
“I was okay with my nose. It was my family nose — it was always crooked. My mom pushed me to have cosmetic. She said, since you’re going under the knife anyway, this is a great opportunity to fix your nose. It made me kind of insecure,” she said.
Roberts decided to have the cosmetic surgery as well as reconstructive. “It wouldn’t have looked the way it looked before,” she said. The surgery consisted of two hours of reconstructive surgery and three hours of cosmetic surgery. Of the $15,000 price tag, insurance covered about $8,000.
Roberts’ surgery was performed in December 2008 by Dr. Dean Toriumi, a Chicago facial specialist who was named one of the five best rhinoplasty surgeons in the world by “W Magazine.”
“He requires psychological backgrounds,” Roberts said. “He’s very selective of his patients. He wants people to get surgery for the right reasons.”
During recovery, Roberts wore a cast on her nose for a week. Her physical activity was limited for two months, and she had to stay out of the cold.
“It wasn’t that painful,” she said. “The worst part was getting the stitches out.”
During rhinoplasty, it is common for surgeons to attach extra cartilage to the neck behind the ear to be used in case of future surgeries, she said. Her neck was another source of pain because of the added cartilage.
Roberts still deals with some complications from her surgery. She does compressions on her nose 10 times a day and wears a mask when she plays soccer. “It’s still sensitive. It’s mostly numb,” she said, flicking her nose to show that it has no feeling.
Although her surgery involved more cosmetic than reconstructive work, she said, “Everyone tends to view it as reconstructive. I’ve never had a negative reaction.”
Roberts said she thinks people would have more of a negative reaction if the surgery had been purely cosmetic.
But she is satisfied with the results of her surgery. “I would never consider getting anything else done,” she said. “The most important part is that I can breathe now, and my family members don’t call me Rudolph.”
How much is too much: “We can’t all look like robots.”
As with most activities, plastic surgery is unhealthy in excess. The extremes pique interest, and as a result, most media coverage of plastic surgery is sensational — especially when celebrities have a little nip or tuck.
Web sites such as CelebrityPlasticPics.com or AwfulPlasticSurgery.com are obsessed with knowing every detail of star surgery. Gossip mags such as Star Magazine or OK! Magazine discuss celebrity surgeries as controversial, usually citing a surgeon who speculates on the type and cost of the alleged surgeries.
“With cosmetic surgery, people wonder, why do you need it? And reconstructive is seen as a kind of blessing,” Schatzel said. “Even the way the media portrays it: a woman attacked by dogs, the doctor who worked on her is a hero. But people in the limelight who take it to an extreme, like Michael Jackson — magazines say, ‘Oh, so-and-so got their nose done.’ It’s seen as gossip.”
Sitting in Dr. Toriano’s waiting room, Mary said she saw women “with money to spend” who obviously had lip injections, face lifts or cheek implants.
“It was a little weird,” she said. “I don’t judge them for having it. But if you’re having excessive surgery, something else could be wrong — like a self-confidence problem. I think some people have issues they should deal with instead of seeing plastic surgery as a hobby.
“You’re given one body, one life. We can’t all look like robots.”
American women have been taught that they must be beautiful. But beauty is defined narrowly by images in the media and by strict cultural standards of youth, health, symmetry, weight and body shape. Plastic surgery can be seen as an effect of growing up in a beauty-obsessed culture.
How can we cause women to feel imperfect and then judge them for taking action? Where should we draw the line between an acceptable use and amount of plastic surgery and unhealthy, excessive surgery? Why do we celebrate the technology and achievements of reconstructive surgery while judging cosmetic surgery? Just as we consider a repaired body to be a miracle, perhaps we should feel the same way about repaired self-image
*Name changed for privacy.
Tags: beauty, cosmetic surgery, extreme makeover, nip/tuck, plastic surgeons, plastic surgery, reconstructive surgery, self image
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