Designer Bodies

By Rosa Lyster

A cut above the average.

A few years ago, a reality TV show called The Swan was aired for the first time. It had a very simple premise: it combined the guilty-pleasure appeal of a makeover show with the guiltypleasure appeal of a beauty contest. A group of average-looking women underwent a series of cosmetic surgery procedures, which ranged from the routine to the seriously invasive, and then competed with each other in a beauty pageant, the outcome of which would be that one newly made over woman would be crowned “The Swan”. It wasn’t pretty. Rampant insecurity about your looks doesn’t just disappear overnight, no matter how much you’ve been lifted and lipo’d and airbrushed, and The Swan’s faux-beauty pageant became not much more than a parade of the most neurotic, obsessive women you could ever hope to come across. It wasn’t as uplifting as the producers had planned. It wasn’t uplifting at all. It was only remarkable because it was seen as completely unremarkable, as just another reality show. Its strangeness was never really commented on, and it died a quiet death a couple of years later.

                                

The fact that a show like this could even exist and that it could exist without being seen as bizarre, speaks volumes about the rise in popularity of cosmetic surgery. It is socially acceptable, and in some places socially required. It has become one of the biggest elephants in the room of the 21st century: it’s still rude to ask someone whether they’ve had a facelift or a tummy tuck, but everybody’s doing it, and everybody knows that everybody else is doing it, too.

This is especially obvious in South Africa, manifested in the existence of something called “cosmetic surgery tourism”. It’s a really good idea. Plastic surgery costs a lot of money in Europe and America. It’s much cheaper here, and just as safe. So, you tell your friends you’re going on holiday to South Africa, on safari or the beach or the mountains. When you get here, you’re booked into a private hospital or clinic and you have the procedure you want done. Afterwards, you recover on the beach or the game farm or the mountains. You look at lions or go swimming, or climb up and down hills while you wait for the scars to fade and the swelling to go down. Then you go home, and everyone tells you how great you look, how much younger and thinner. It must have been all that fresh air. It’s really a very good idea.

Cosmetic surgery has become unexceptional. Because it’s regarded as a normal thing to do, it’s easy to forget that it quite often involves a trauma to the body. Even the briefest examination of what a routine procedure entails can be quite alarming. Getting Botox means getting one of the most poisonous naturally occurring substances in the world injected into your face. Getting a nose job means getting your nose broken. Getting a tummy tuck means a whole host of violent-sounding surgical procedures, one of which involves the belly button “stalk” being removed and then reattached. And those are the easy ones. Cosmetic surgery is a big business, $15 billion dollars big, and new procedures and methods are constantly evolving to meet the ever-increasing demand so that something which would have been completely unheard of a few years ago, now seems commonplace. Some of them are relatively benign.

Body thermage, the Next-Big-Thing to hit the market, is a noninvasive, non-surgical procedure that allows the patient to lose a dress size or look years younger without apparently doing anything. Radio-frequency energy is sent through the skin, heating the deeper skin layers and causing it to tighten. It only takes a few hours, and the results are impressive. Plus, there’s no slicing required. But there are other procedures that are a bit more elaborate. There is a whole new subsection of surgeries and procedures which fall under the heading “gynaecological cosmetic surgery”, and which do not bear thinking about for very long.

There are doctors who specialise in belly button surgery, creating belly buttons that sit in rather than stand out. It is possible to get silicone implants on the upper legs, lower legs and buttocks, as well as the breasts. It’s possible to get a lip lift, a neck lift and a sub-orbicularis oculi fat lift, which involves the lifting of the fat pad at the top of the cheeks.

Advancements in the field of breast-enlargement surgery mean that incisions are made in the belly-button, and there is no visible scarring. Nipple/areola reduction is becoming more popular, as people become more focused on perceived minute imperfections. These are only a very few of the procedures and surgeries available and new ground is being broken all the time. It means that something resembling a generic physical perfection seems like a possibility. The advancements in cosmetic surgery mean that people are able to design their bodies, down to the finest details. And while most people tend to restrain themselves and aim for a physical perfection that sits somewhere in the arena of relatively normal-looking, there are others who do not. Extreme body modification is on the rise as well, and it’s a whole other world, a whole other universe. There are people who want their ears shaped so that they closely resemble those of an elf. It is possible to implant jewellery in the outer layer of the eye. It is possible to “iron” the breasts of a pubescent girl so that they remain flat. It is possible to split the tongue so that it looks like a snake’s. While none of this has to be regarded as an inherently bad thing, examining a list like this should cause you to pause and think about what it means, just for a minute.

The recent death of Kanye West’s mother has refocused attention on plastic surgery. She died while after having undergone a tummy tuck and breast reduction surgery. Events like this will always cause a surge in articles and books about the 21st-century obsession with physical perfection. But they will have no effect whatsoever on the always-growing cosmetic surgery industry. That horse bolted a long time ago and trying to shut the stable door now is futile. From the generic to the grotesque, there are an infinite number of ways to modify and design the body, and an infinite number of procedures that can make it happen.