Who Should You have Cosmetic Surgery for?

As my homepage came up on the computer today I noted an article on Slate.com concerning a college student who was worried about her summer at home because her mother has been nagging her to look better and pushing her to have cosmetic surgery to improve her life. Surely, this is the stuff of daytime television. The scenario was that of a “Dear Abby” sort of thing, with the young woman seeking advice about how to keep her summer at home pleasant and resist her mother’s need to “improve” her. Some how we see such posts and figure that this can’t be real, yet as a plastic surgeon I can assure you this is the world we live in today. When we see individuals in the consultation room to discuss a concern as to how cosmetic surgery will improve one’s life, it can be helpful to understand just whose life is in need of improvement.


Pressure to look good, or the need to defy aging, can be intertwined into our family relationships, those with a spouse, or even with those who we interact with at work, in very complicated ways. It can make perfect sense for a mother to want the best for her daughter and use persuasion to encourage her to fix a nose which is less than beautiful. Or perhaps, she might bring her daughter in to consider a breast reduction because she knows how difficult her daughter will find the unwanted looks she may get from others, or the clothing issues she will face in a fashionable workplace. The arguments can make perfect sense, a mother wants the very best for her daughter, knows what is right for her, and her daughter must consider what her mother is doing for her and the family, not to be ungrateful. The drama can be considerable in the consultation room, and as one familiar with drama, romance and life’s complexities, I recall the torment of Anne Elliot in Jane Austen’s novel Persuasion as she struggles to fit in with her blended family and turns away her first love, Frederick Wentworth.


Anne could tell us that the decisions are not so easy when so many others are involved. Just who should you have cosmetic surgery for? Should a young woman have her nose fixed to fit into the family photos? How about a woman I had seen, with her husband looking into breast implants to enlarge her breast as he considers what size she should be? That can be a scary one. Though the rhinoplasty might be the ‘right’ thing to do, or even the breast implants for that matter, I have come to the conclusion that cosmetic surgery is something we should do for ourselves. Like so many decisions in life, others you trust, or those who care, may have an opinion; yet cosmetic surgery is for you and about you alone. Seems rather selfish, though we live best following our own insights as to how we should look and feel.


The breast implants by the way, they decided on a D cup (unknowing to him it was her idea all along), and did, as far as we know today, live happily ever after. The young woman we knew did not have the rhinoplasty (as her mother did at her age) and did not look like the family in the group photo. She became engaged to a young man after graduation, just the way she was and the way she felt and looked her ‘best’, for better or worse, as all marriages are. As I always have known, Jane Austen had it right. And Anne, too, finally, after much persuasion did what was right for her and her alone. She and Frederic lived happily ever after. Thank you, Jane.