When you look in the mirror, do you like what you see? Too many facial wrinkles? A scar across your cheek? Pits left over from adolescent acne? Not enough hair on you head? Nose too big? Bags under your eyes? Belly hanging out? Thighs jiggling with fat?
Two million Americans each year grow tired of what their mirrors tell them. So they turn to plastic surgeons for an artistic re-sculpting of what nature, careless living, or accident has misformed. Most women and a growing number of men are no longer self-conscious about going for a “nose job” or a tummy tuck or having their face reshaped. Nor do they worry about spending anywhere from 2,000 to 30,000 dollars for the repair job. American plastic surgery is now a 4 billion dollars-a-year industry.
“I love being a grandmother,” says Ila Miles, a homemaker from Tucson, Arizona. “But I don’t want to look like one.” Mrs. Miles spent 5,800 dollars on nose surgery and a complete facelift.
For Timothy Rothrock, 20, a student from Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, plastic surgery totally restored his face after he was trapped in a forest fire. The worst damage, however, was to his neck: he had lost the contour -the curve from his chin line to his neck. Ugly raised scars marked the skin.
Ten operations were required to stretch, lift, and reshape Mr. Rothrock’s skin back to normal. “A few people still stare, and kids can be bothersome,” he says. “But now the scars are not quite as noticeable.”
For people whose faces are their fortunes, plastic surgery is strictly business. The roster of those who have had “repairs” reads like the guest list at a big Hollywood bash: Carol Burnett (chin augmentation), Frank Sinatra (hair transplant), Michael Jackson and Peter О’Toole (noses reshaped), Lana Turner and Phyllis Diller (facelifts), Mariel Hemingway (breast augmentation), and Eileen Brennan (face repair after a car accident).
“I feel blessed,” says Ms. Brennan, now the star of a new ABC-TV series, Off the Rack. “Every bone was broken in the left side of my face. I didn’t think I’d ever appear before a camera again.”
With the increasing demand for reshaping faces and bodies have come spectacular improvements in plastic surgery, making it safer and more daring than ever before. In addition to the facelift, which achieves only surface changes, plastic surgeons today can actually modify the bone structure below the skin through facial sculpting. New methods and materials for chin augmentation and reduction can create facial symmetry where it was lacking (as in Carol Burnett’s case). Techniques for eyelifts and nose surgery have been improved, so that the end result is a less “done,” less artificial look.
Along with common cosmetic repairs, the list of human sculptings now includes replacement of limbs, fingers, and hair torn from their anchors by accident; remolding to normal the faces of infants born with gargoylesque features; and redesigning noses, eyes, ears, chins, hairlines, and more to satisfy the patient’s deep emotional needs.
The rush to reshape nature’s work signals a fundamental change in the American outlook, says Dr. William W. Shaw, chief of plastic surgery at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. “Before the 20th century, people struggled to survive epidemics and famine,” he explains. “Medicine then turned its attention to chronic diseases like cancer, heart ailments – and to death. People now want to do something for themselves against aches, pains, and deformity.”
*140/266/5*