Lisa Rinna Recently Had Her Lip Augmentation Reduced.
Plastic surgery is a part of celebrity culture today. From reality stars like Heidi Montag, Kim Kardashian, Pamela Anderson, and “The Real Housewives of…” to comedians like Joan Rivers and Kathy Griffin, to actors like Lisa Rinna, Nicole Kidman, Meg Ryan, Micky Rourke and of course stage performers like Cher and Kenny Rogers. All of these celebrities and hundreds more like them appear to have had cosmetic work done, and most, save Kim Kardashian and Cher, seem to have gone too far and pushed the limits of what plastic surgery is capable of.
The force behind this Hollywood celebrity trend to use plastic surgery beyond what is rational is a collective obsession with youthful perfection. That is, in American culture, youth is romanticized and physical perfection is idealized. The problem is that we are only young for a brief time in reality. Indeed, this evanescent quality is probably an ingredient of the fuel feeding this obsession. Combine this with the fact that very few, if any of us, are genetically perfect and you end up with a majority of the country somewhat unsatisfied with their appearance. Add to the fire, the pressure celebrities are under to be examples of perfection to those who consume their movies, TV shows, and music videos and you can imagine the desperate feelings these people have to hold on to this image of perfection or lose their celebrity status.
Further complicating the mix is that the personalities who go into that line of work tend to already enjoy some degree of narcissism with their coffee and you have a perfect storm. Nowhere do we see example after example of drastic measures taken by desperate souls to enhance or hold onto any shred of perfect youth that medical science might be able to offer. Likewise, nowhere else do we see so many sad cases of the fuel of this collective obsession with youthful perfection igniting the fire that ends in plastic surgery disasters.
As a plastic surgeon who believes very much that plastic surgery, and other cosmetic procedures such as Botox and facial fillers, can improve a person’s appearance and make them feel more confident, I cringe when I see the next star to step onto the red carpet with lips the size of sausages or faces pulled so tight they look like, as a friend of mine recently described, “a screaming skull.” Likewise, it sickens me to see a breast augmentation disaster such as putting 700cc breast implants in a petite woman of 5 foot 2 inches as was done to Heidi Montag, so she ends up making Barbie look comparatively proportional! These cases are not medical science being used to improve lives, they are a shameful mockery of the fine art of plastic surgery.
The most difficult thing for me to get my head around is the process by which a trained doctor goes through with these surgeries. If he or she is even remotely educated in plastic surgery, or even the pretend plastic surgeons who call themselves, “cosmetic surgeons,” these doctors have to know how awful these results are going to be before they even put the patient to sleep. As a plastic surgeon, my job is to improve on nature while balancing these improvements with aesthetic principles of balance, physical limits, and genetic realities. And a reality of being a plastic surgeon is knowing that some patients will come in with unrealistic expectations. I regularly have to sit down and explain in no uncertain terms, that there is such a thing as “too big” when it comes to breast implant size. It is very common for small framed women who have A-cup breasts to request breast implants that are simply going to make her look very top-heavy, cause stress damage to the skin, and create discomfort to the point that she will need to have them removed. When I explain the physical limits and the reality, most women normally understand and opt for smaller implants. In cases where they are still unconvinced and determined to have the larger implants, I apologize and tell them that as an ethical plastic surgeon, I cannot perform the surgery with the implants requested and we go our separate ways. And yes, occasionally they come back to me to have their “too large” implants removed.
I can feel for these plastic surgeons who have celebrities for patients. I can imagine they hear a lot of desperate stories about needing “that edge” in order to stay relevant in the fast paced world that is Hollywood, where one day you may be the toast of the town and the next you are wondering why you can’t even get an infomercial job. I realize there is tremendous pressure to push the limits because if you don’t someone else will. At the same time, we are doctors first and we have to do what is right by the patient, even if the patient is demanding what is wrong. We know that lips that look like two sausages painted red will look like hell, we know that 700cc implants can not be sustained in a petite woman of 5 foot 2 inches, we know that if you stretch the face back too far you will create a lizard mouth. We know this because it is what we do. Just as an engineer knows what you can and can’t do if you want a bridge to stay standing, a plane to stay in the sky or a computer to crunch ones and zeros and end up with me being able to type this article.
One thing I always stress with my patients is that when all is said and done, a stranger should never be able to look at you and “know” you’ve had plastic surgery. Whether it is breast augmentation, lip augmentation, a tummy tuck or a facelift, all should be subtle enough to look perfectly natural. Sure, if you go from an A-cup to a C-cup overnight, your friends might notice, but to the world, you should just look shapely, balanced and aesthetically pleasing to the eye, not like a freak of nature. Similarly, a facelift should simply take 10 to 15 years off your face, not make you look like a new person. You should look like pictures of yourself from the past. If you look at Joan Rivers now and Joan Rivers from 15 years ago, it is like they are two different people. On the other hand, if you look at Cher now and Cher 15 years ago, she looks the same! That’s plastic surgery done right!
The collective obsession with youthful perfection will probably be a part of the American cultural reality for the foreseeable future. Perhaps, just being a little more aware of it and reminding ourselves and our children to actively work toward being less influenced by it and more happy with our own realities is the answer. Sure, a good plastic surgeon can improve on nature a bit, fix some of the effects of time and make your day-to-day life a little happier because you smile more when you look in the mirror. But youthful perfection is not something we are capable of producing and someone needs to see that Hollywood gets the memo.
