Plastic fantastic

Article By: Roderick Jamer

Talk about your roller- coaster rides. On the track of public opinion, plastic surgery has endured more rises and falls and gut-wrenching loop-de-loops than a kid with a day pass on The Flyer.

Not so very long ago, the only people lining up to have plastic surgery were Las Vegas showgirls and Hollywood starlets - anxious belles who needed an edge, or a lift, to make it in "the biz." Most average folk thought fooling with what nature provided was highly questionable, if not morally reprehensible - an attitude James Ellroy deftly underscored in his 1990 novel of the '50s, L.A. Confidential, in which prostitutes are "cut" to resemble movie stars.

Not to put too fine a point on it, women who were thus artificially endowed may have possessed undeniable attributes for work in the theatre or red light districts, but they most certainly were not the kind of girls nice boys brought home to Mom. Nice girls didn't have plastic surgery.

There were exceptions, of course. A millionaire's fading consort might visit "a European spa" and come back more rejuvenated than any amount of mineral spirits and mud baths could reasonably explain. And wealthy families' daughters occasionally upped their odds in the matrimonial sweeps with "new" noses or other, more subtle, enhancements, while the family scion with the princely ears might have them "pinned." Such refinements to one's physical resume were understandable among the rich, since the rich, as F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have remarked, are not like you and me.

There was really only one area in which plastic surgery enjoyed grudging acceptance, even respect: in the refashioning of accidental disfigurement (burns, a shattered face), congenital deformities (cleft palates and the like), or in repairing the ravages of traumatic illnesses, such as cancer and arthritis. Few people stopped to consider reconstructive and cosmetic surgery as two sides of the same coin; there would have to be major changes in societal attitudes before that happened.

© October 1998 CARPNews