Cosmetic Surgery – The price of getting on in life?

The ever increasing commercially driven pressures that our society puts on women to be beautiful (even though that means blonde and thin), is resulting in huge increases in cosmetic surgical procedures. There were over 10 million surgical and non surgical cosmetic procedures performed on women, and more than 1m on men in the USA last year.

However this huge increase in procedures is driven not just by vanity, but also by our society’s obsession with being attractive, as apparently we need to be attractive to get on in modern life! And it is a sad paradox that at a time when the possibility of living to a greater age with reasonable health has never been better, people resist the natural signs of ageing with a vengeance!

Constant exposure to idealised images of male and female beauty on TV, magazines and billboards makes exceptional good looks seem normal and anything short of perfection seem abnormal and ugly. It has been estimated that young women now see more images of outstandingly beautiful women in one day than our mothers saw throughout their entire adolescence!

And there are more practical social reasons why we are investing increasing amounts of time and money in our looks:

• Good looking applicants are more likely to get a job
• Attractive defendants are less likely to be found guilty in court
• We react more favourably to attractive people
• Society believes the stereotype ‘beautiful is good’

But what does it say about our society’s values that so many people feel they need to use surgical procedures to make them more attractive?

Would you consider having plastic surgery? Have you had cosmetic surgery? Did it improve your life? Would you recommend it?

Cicero

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