Cosmetic surgery has a culture of its own now, where Ashlee Simpson's nose job graces the cover of tabloids like Star, a magazine that also runs a regular feature called "Knifestyles of the Rich and Famous." TV shows like "Nip/Tuck," "Dr. 90210," "Extreme Makeover," "A Plastic Surgery Story" and "I Want a Famous Face" and magazines with titles like Skin Deep, New Beauty and Elevate are all entirely devoted to cosmetic surgery. There's slang like "trout pout" (for fishlike, overly plumped-up lips) and "kabuki mask" (a face so expressionless as to resemble a lacquered mask) that one can use while checking out Web sites like awfulplasticsurgery.com, which allow us to speculate on whether Avril Lavigne really did get a nose job or if Lindsay Lohan's breasts are fake. Kuczynski delights in naming names, calling out Sarah Jessica Parker, Nicole Kidman and Marcia Cross (whose face she uncharitably compares to the embalmed Lenin's) as Botox users.
We can always blame the baby boomers, who began to turn 60 this year, for the proliferation. Or Generation X, which has moved so far beyond the idea of what connotes adulthood -- marriage, children, jobs you hate -- that they've created a culture of being forever youngish. We can tell ourselves that the ubiquity of cosmetic surgery has lessened, and in some circles completely removed, the stigma of getting work done, or that we simply live in an image-based culture. But blaming our culture instead of delving deep into the self-hatred behind the quest for surgical beautification is an easy out. A knife-assisted makeover has become an increasingly common aspiration for teenagers and matrons alike, but shouldn't we be worrying why we're so looks-obsessed to begin with?
In her profiles of "regular" people, Kuzcynski appears to again blame the culture for creating a population who "view aging as a medical ailment that ought to be treated," and conveys their various plights with the utmost sympathy: For instance, there's a 19-year-old who's getting prophylactic shots of Botox and two women from California who go to South Africa every year for surgery safaris (their fourth trip, however, is just for vacation). There's Hollywood housewife "Mrs. X," who has made maintenance a full-time job -- including but in no way limited to injections of Gore-Tex (no longer reserved just for winter parkas), Botox, collagen, Restylane and Artecoll; liposuction; tummy tuck; brow lift; two variations on a face-lift -- who had her breasts done three times (implants in, implants out, larger implants in), and who recently partook in vaginal cosmetic surgery. Men aren't neglected here: There's the lawyer whose goal is to live without such indignities as wrinkles or sweat and who gets Botox every two months and has to lie to and rotate doctors in order to get it so frequently. More creative still is the former Navy SEAL who gets a faux bullet wound to avoid shame in the locker room.
However stoic Kuczynski remains in the face of faked wounds and labia-plasties, in the chapter devoted to weight loss surgeries, she lets loose her inner Mean Girl. Looking at photos of formerly obese people whose 280-pound weight loss after gastric bypass has resulted in drapes of stretched skin covering the body, she says she would have rather remained obese or die than look like a human character from a horror movie. When confronted in the flesh with a lawyer who had excess skin removed after losing weight, she's nonplussed: "To be honest and brutal and bitchy, she doesn't look that great."
Of her own experience, she's almost evangelical when talking about the restorative effects of a well-executed eyelift. She speaks of her own inner torment, torn between wanting to challenge a doctor who's trying to find a mathematical ideal to quantify a beautiful face and wanting to have her own face scanned in a computer to see what she should get fixed. She even tells her mom to get a nose job. She's quick to call her decade as a beauty junkie "foolish and vain" -- because no one serious relies upon their looks, right? -- and writes herself off as "weak, and easily susceptible to the pressures of a morally debatable, deeply intoxicating subculture."
She resents the pressure to conform to a beauty ideal, but at the same time she "won't be accepted by a culture that embraces beauty until I look like someone who belongs inside it. And I can't subvert what I can't get access to." She pays lip service to subverting the ever-escalating standard of beauty, but she doesn't address why so many women (and some men) are trying so very hard to fix themselves in the first place. "Beauty Junkies" does little to incite or inspire change, stating that it is ultimately "our choice that damns us or elevates us" in the end.
Kuczynski goes as far as to call the ultimately self-serving act of cosmetic surgery a political statement. "Looks are the new feminism" is a point she's so fond of she makes it twice over the course of the book. "Where once demanding equal rights and pay was a way for us to ask for an equal share of the power, the new way we show we have power is to be styled -- from top to bottom, from shoe sole to eye tuck -- to prove hat we have our act together. This is how we demonstrate to the world we have it all, both the yin and the yang, the masculine and the feminine."
But she also wants us to know she's opting out. On a recent appearance on the "Today" show, Kuczynski reported that not only has she been Botox-free for a year and collagen-free for two, but she is wearing no nail polish and has stopped dyeing her hair. She claimed to feel prettier than ever, but it's too bad that her brow, presumably slow to recover from a decade of Botox-induced paralysis, still didn't move when she spoke.
About the writer
Marisa Meltzer is a freelance writer in New York City. She is coauthor of "How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time," which comes out in April.
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