The knife life
In "Beauty Junkies," Alex Kuczynski's memoir-cum-exposé, teens get Botox, Navy SEALs get fake bullet wounds and face-lifts are the new feminism.
By Marisa Meltzer
Read more: Books, Plastic Surgery, Books Features
Nov. 1, 2006 | Just in case reading Alex Kuczynski's "Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery" wasn't enough to convince me that the plastic surgery craze has saturated society, my mother called me a few days after I started the book to cheerily announce she had made an appointment to get veneers put on her teeth.
My mom, a wiccan who wears clogs and writes poetry in her spare time, is not exactly the Joan Rivers type. But 50-something years of hating her teeth has driven her to the ranks of Faye Dunaway, Ben Affleck, Tama Janowitz and countless others whose smiles are veneer-perfect. She's still a far cry from Michael Jackson or Jocelyn Wildenstein, the New York socialite who had plastic surgery to make her face appear more feline, but that's exactly Kuczynski's point; growing numbers of Americans are opting for a cosmetic fix. As she notes, in 2004, almost 12 million surgical and nonsurgical beauty procedures were performed in the United States. That's up 44 percent from the previous year and includes 166,187 nose jobs, 290,343 eyelifts, 478,251 liposuctions and 334,052 breast augmentations -- a surgery that has become so commonplace it may have contributed to an increase in the average bra size from 34B to 36C over the past 15 years. And then there's Botox, injections of botulinum toxin A that can paralyze muscles in the face and erase wrinkles -- which are up 2,446 percent since 1997.
Lest we get bogged down by the numbers and worry she's penned some kind of alarmist polemic, Kuczynski blithely assures us she's not out to shame us for our obsession with beauty. She notes that it was helpful for her, when attending plastic surgery conferences as part of her research for the book, to offer up her own work -- then the doctors and pharmaceutical reps "don't think you are a confrontational reporter hoping to root out the evils of vanity. By telling them you've tried Botox or lipo, you are saying that you're one of them. You understand. You've been converted."
Kuczynski, the author of the New York Times' "Critical Shopper" column, confesses to a Botox habit that started at age 28 in this part memoir, part exposé, which has been both anticipated and mocked (often in the same breath) for what seems like an eternity at the New York Post and Gawker. She's also had liposuction on her outer thighs, collagen in her lips and an eyelift. Now in her late 30s, she looks well preserved, and has the serene author photo (looking very pretty, I might add -- hair liberally and expensively highlighted, creamy skin, wry smile and not a wrinkle in sight) on the back cover to prove it.
"Beauty Junkies" is most gripping as a history of plastic surgery -- from the Koomas of circa 600 B.C., an ancient Indian caste of potters given the task of fashioning new noses for women who had had theirs cut off as punishment for adultery, to the surgeons who used plaster of Paris moulages to help reconstruct faces disfigured from air combat and grenade wounds during World War I. She gives us a laundry list of today's zeitgeist-worthy procedures, like buttock implants (if you want the posterior of Jennifer Lopez), bellybutton enhancement (if the shape of your navel is the bane of your existence), and nipple enlargement (if your areola simply must match a new set of breasts). As a reporter covering the trend beat, she's received solicitations for an array of procedures including snap-on temporary teeth, a "Russian thread lift" (in which barbed threads are pushed beneath the skin and anchored to the skull as an alternative to a face-lift), fat-dissolving herbal tonics, and a particularly painful-sounding operation that cuts open toes and removes the bones to better fit pointy heels. The Times doesn't allow her to accept services from news sources, but that's fine: Of the 600 or so offers of free treatments, she says, she would have considered becoming a patient of only maybe five of the doctors. She's skeptical of physicians eager to have a signature cosmetic procedure or who need to hire public relations gurus to lure clients and can't just rely upon word of mouth -- and urges us, potential patients all, to adopt her standards as well.
She breaks down the new economy of cosmetic surgery, where Botox is the most profitable treatment for doctors, who can squeeze $3,000 worth of injections out of a $488 vial and, as an added bonus, don't have to fuss with health insurance. These procedures were once the domain of the rich, but have increasingly become de rigueur across economic levels; credit cards, high-interest plastic surgery loans and even "cyberbegging" Web sites like myfreeimplants.com, where women seeking money for their boob jobs can post images and pleas to would-be male benefactors (Kuczynski tries it and makes $96 in three weeks), all facilitate expensive surgeries for the cash-poor. She pauses in her own cautionary tale of getting an allergic reaction to Restylane, an alternative to collagen made of hyaluronic acid, to marvel at how her housekeeper, a Guatemalan grandmother, manages to save up for an eyelift, and ultimately seems relieved to find this common ground between the two of them.
Next page: Does Marcia Cross look like an embalmed Lenin because of Botox?