Plastic Chaos

There is an even more extreme insecurity-preying industry that we’ve come to accept as a society. Cosmetic surgery. People will spend obscene amounts of money to have doctors cut into their skin, so they can be “prettier”. The most popular procedures are relatively well known: liposuction, breast augmentation, BOTOX, facelift, tummy tuck, and rhinoplasty.
There are also some rather lesser known and just as ridiculous surgeries such as: necklift, chemical peel, cheek implants, fat injections, lip augmentation, dermabrasion, body contouring, gastric bypass, buttock implants, calf augmentation, and hand rejuvenation.

Here are some descriptions from cosmeticsurgery.com (a site promoting the surgeries):

Facelift: $5,000-$10,000: During the facelift procedure, excess fat is removed and underlying muscles are tightened and the remaining facial skin is redraped.

Dermabrasion: $400: Dermabrasion is a procedure where the surgeon scrapes away the top layers of skin using an electrically operated instrument with a rough wire brush or diamond-impregnated burr.

Body contouring: $20,000-$55,000: This is a very extensive procedure, where excess skin is removed and the remaining skin is pulled, tightening it up.

Chemical Peel: $600-$4,000: A chemical peel is a procedure that uses chemical solutions to improve upon these skin conditions, leaving it looking smoother and younger.

Fat injections: $1,100: This procedure involves removing fat cells from areas of one’s body, including the abdomen, thighs, and others, then injecting this fat into the person’s facial area.
Necklift: $3,000-$5,000: During the neck lift procedure, excess fat and skin are removed from the neck and the neck muscles are either removed or altered.

Tummy tuck: $4,000-$8,000: This is achieved by removing excess skin and fat from the abdominal area, and having the muscles tightened.

Buttock implants: This involves the surgical insertion of artificial implants into the buttocks in order to enhance its size and shape.

Gastric bypass: $20,000-$55,000: the stomach is made smaller by creating a small pouch at the top of the stomach using surgical staples or a plastic band. The smaller stomach is connected directly to the middle portion of the small intestine, bypassing the rest of the stomach and the upper portion of the small intestine.

All sounds really pleasant right? People are so desperate to be skinny and “perfect” that they will risk their lives under a knife, spend thousands of dollars, go through weeks of painful recovery, have fat injected into their faces, plastic bands put around their waist, and even have their muscles or pieces of their stomach removed.

Instead of dealing with our self-image issues in a healthy, constructive way, we are encouraging women to pay thousands of dollars so doctors can slice them up, inject chemicals and animal fat into their skin. We’re masking the real issue with a risky, costly, debilitating “solution”.

11,701,031 of these procedures were documented in 2007.

Even more disturbing – over 333,000 of these procedures were on people 18 and under. Meaning parents or guardians granted permission for 4,108 girls to get breast augmentation, 8,194 to get Botox (what wrinkles do you have to get rid of when you’re a teenager?!), 2,735 agreed their children should get liposuctions, 26,709 let them get a chemical peel, and 373 got a tummy tuck. When you’re under 18 you should be worrying about find thing the perfect dress for prom, your recent crush, and graduating high school, not having bigger breasts, less wrinkles, and smaller tummies. Yes, some of these cases were fixing anatomical problems like Poland’s syndrome, but over half of the breast augmentations in girls under 18 were purely cosmetic.

Breast implants are becoming an increasingly popular high school graduation gift. I think that occurrence speaks for itself.How can parents be approving of letting their daughters surgically alter their appearance? Shouldn’t they be reinforcing to them that they are beautiful just how they are? Where would I be today if my father had not consistently and persistently told me when I was younger that I was “the most beautiful girl in the world”? What if instead I had been like my close high school friend whose mother convinced her she NEEDED a nose job? Is that healthy? Is this what society is crumbling into? Can we please all reach over knock some sense into the person next to you? We’ve all gone mad.