Celebrity Plastic Surgery And The Collective Obsession With Youthful Perfection

The force behind this Hollywood celebrity trend to use plastic surgery beyond what is rational is a collective obsession with youthful perfection. That is, in American culture, youth is romanticized and physical perfection is idealized. The problem is that we are only young for a brief time in reality. Indeed, this evanescent quality is probably an ingredient of the fuel feeding this obsession. Combine this with the fact that very few, if any of us, are genetically perfect and you end up with a majority of the country somewhat unsatisfied with their appearance. Add to the fire, the pressure celebrities are under to be examples of perfection to those who consume their movies, TV shows, and music videos and you can imagine the desperate feelings these people have to hold on to this image of perfection or lose their celebrity status.
Further complicating the mix is that the personalities who go into that line of work tend to already enjoy some degree of narcissism with their coffee and you have a perfect storm. Nowhere do we see example after example of drastic measures taken by desperate souls to enhance or hold onto any shred of perfect youth that medical science might be able to offer. Likewise, nowhere else do we see so many sad cases of the fuel of this collective obsession with youthful perfection igniting the fire that ends in plastic surgery disasters, the likes of which we are all too familiar from watching late night TV.
As a plastic surgeon who believes very much that plastic surgery, and other cosmetic procedures such as Botox and facial fillers, can improve a person's appearance and make them feel more confident, I cringe when I see the next star to step onto the red carpet with lips the size of sausages and faces pulled so tight they look like, as a friend of mine recently described, "a screaming skull." Likewise, it sickens me to see a breast augmentation disaster such as putting 700cc breast implants in a petite woman of 5 foot 2 inches as was recently done to one well known reality star, so she ends up making Barbie look comparatively proportional! These cases are not medical science being used to improve lives, they are a shameful mockery of the fine art of plastic surgery.
The most difficult thing for me to get my head around is the process by which a trained doctor goes through with these surgeries. If he or she is even remotely educated in plastic surgery, or even the pretend plastic surgeons who call themselves, "cosmetic surgeons," these doctors have to know how awful these results are going to be before they even put the patient to sleep. As a plastic surgeon, my job is to improve on nature while balancing these improvements with aesthetic principles of balance, physical limits, and genetic realities. And a reality of being a plastic surgeon is knowing that some patients will come in with unrealistic expectations. I regularly have to sit down and explain in no uncertain terms, that there is such a thing as "too big" when it comes to breast implants.