The show is over, the previews of next week’s miracle surgeries have come and gone, and the credits are rolling. Do you feel like calling the cosmetic surgeon’s office? Well, sleep on it. Tomorrow you can start to research your options. You will defi nitely encounter the following:
• More company. Economic and demographic forecasts predict that the U.S. population will increase 12 percent between 2001 and 2010 and that the segments of the population who are most likely to seek cosmetic interventions—most notably the baby boomers—are the segments that will grow the fastest. As a result the demand for cosmetic medical care is predicted to increase 19 percent during the same time period.
• More vendors. Economists predict that soon we will see outlets along the lines of “Sam’s medi-spa-mart,” which will be the place to go for your sunglasses, toiletries, vitamins, massage, Botox, and laser hair removal. Some doctors will still focus on the patient, but the mass market will always care about the price.
• More snake oil. Tomorrow you will be exposed to ever more fantastic claims from the beauty industry. For example (as if privacy concerns weren’t an issue), you will someday soon be asked by a skin-care manufacturer to send it a sample of your DNA so that a “custom” skin formula can be developed for you based on your genetics. If it sounds fabulous, the industry will be right on the money with this concept.
What is less certain is how in the future we shall deal with the tougher issues, the concerns that are less about money and more about values.
• Media and medicine. How do we protect society’s interests from unethical advertising and unsafe practices by those who are entrusted to protect individual patients and the public welfare?
• Appearance- based social discrimination. Is this a biological imperative or can a society evolve beyond it? As historian Sander Gilman points out, beauty is culturally constituted, and what makes a person fit in to the present generation can make that person stand out in the next.2 In the same way, tolerance for difference is culturally determined. One who questions this perspective should contemplate the congenital deformity of cleft lip, for which plastic surgeons have generations of cumulative experience repairing, and yet which was recently the justification reportedly given by a couple in Europe to terminate a pregnancy.
It seems certain that cosmetic medicine will remain popu lar for quite a long time. Of course, it is always possible that society will start to honor aging faces. Nip/Tuck has already addressed that question—and tossed it aside—in an episode in which Joan Rivers asks to be surgically restored to the woman she would have been had she not undergone multiple cosmetic procedures. As soon as she saw the computer image of what she would look like, she changed her mind.
The members of society most affected by our predilection for permanent physical alterations are, of course, our children. Every generation of parents is doomed to wonder if its teenagers will come to regret those tattoos and piercings, and now we can add an array of more extensive cosmetic procedures to the list of emerging popculture fads. One can only hope that parents will always look beyond peer pressure before consenting to cosmetic interventions for their teenagers.
As for those boomers who are kicking and screaming their way through middle age into their later years, the choices are many. Still, cosmetic medicine can offer only so much, and the quality of the second half of one’s life hinges less on looks than on outlook. Regardless of your age, try the following:
• Keep busy with a variety of interests; this helps everyone adjust better to the stresses of getting older.
• Give yourself plenty of credit for where you have been and what you have accomplished.
• Adopt the attitude of “live and let live.” Rigidity of attitude about others and their behaviors will not win you any friends and will push the ones you have away.
• Don’t let your pride tie you down: Accept a little help when it is offered, and ask for it if you need it.
• Accept the things you cannot change (you know the rest of the saying).
• Be realistic about your body: Even the best cosmetic surgical result cannot turn back the clock.
Tags: Appearance- based social discrimination, Media and medicine, snake oil