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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Navel battle
Most bellybutton innies don't realize that outies feel like outcasts.
By Jon Bowen
[08/12/99]

Urge
Episode 10: Thighs wide shut
Hillary Clinton fund-raiser leads to a close encounter with a client.
By Tracy Quan
[08/12/99]

Brave new world?
Some researchers say we're on the cusp of a contraceptive revolution. Carl Djerassi, the father of the Pill, doesn't think so.
By Dawn MacKeen
[08/11/99]

Column
Lip service
Is kissing the most intimate act or a coming attraction for sex?
By Virginia Vitzthum
[08/10/99]

Urge
Black market, black book
Allison breaks down and decides to profit from her business.
By Tracy Quan
[08/09/99]

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Growing quickly bored of the talks, this uninformed browser wandered into the Technical Exhibit Hall, where plastic surgery product companies hawk their wares to the surgeons. It's a giant living infomercial of the sort you would never see unless perhaps your cable package included the surgery channel. The first thing I saw when I walked in was a salesman demonstrating a "skin resurfacing" laser skin peel device. The downside of this sort of product demonstration is that it's godawful hard to find a volunteer from the audience. The laser bloke had settled for a tomato. The tomato had firm, smooth unblemished skin and clearly wasn't in need of a peel other than the one it had. Later in the day I saw a man dermabrading an orange. For the first time in my life, it struck me as unfair that fruit could not sue for malpractice.

Find out more about plastic surgery. Mary Roach Mary Roach's column appears in Salon Health & Body every other Friday. + Biography + Archives

Since no surgeons were around to listen, the laser man delivered his spiel to me. The older lasers, he said, as wisps of smoke rose from the hapless beefsteak, require "wiping between passes." It sounded like one of those rules of good hygiene, like "front to back." As it turns out, what gets wiped is blood, or in this case, tomato sauce. I left the man to his gratuitous surgery and crossed the aisle to talk to a friendly looking woman holding a puzzling but decidedly less threatening-looking gadget.

"For all your micropigmentation needs!" chirped the brochure. It was a device that tattoos pretend nipples and eyebrows, for those of us who don't, owing to surgery or burns or overzealous laser demonstrators, have them anymore. "It can also do permanent lipstick and eyeliner," said the friendly woman. While I pondered this concept, a surgeon from Argentina appeared. The woman picked up a banana, put on her glasses and began to tattoo it. I hung around for a while to see if the banana was going to get a nipple or an eyebrow, or whether bananas had special micropigmentation needs of their own. It came away with a brand new brown fleck, a little large for my tastes, but quite lovely.

"Gracias," said the surgeon from Argentina.

Out in the hall, a belligerent-sounding man on a pay phone was shouting. "We're gonna have to end up suing him for the money! There's no other way to explain it except that he's an asshole!" It was hard to imagine a man that this man would think was an asshole.

Next page | "Stick it in, and feel the resistance!"