Dr
Thangasamy Sankar wouldn’t last a week in Hollywood. They’re not big on
ethically minded plastic surgeons out there, and the British consultant for
Ramsay Healthcare has been so concerned by the influx of young girls – many
still under 16 – coming to see him for breast reductions, lip fillers and
liposuction that he took the surprising step of publishing an infographic
yesterday detailing the optimum ages to have some of the most popular surgical
procedures done. Not one of them, you won’t be surprised to hear, is advisable
for the under-18s.
I, on the
other hand, am apparently an ideal candidate for breast implants, a spot of
lipo and a whole smorgasbord of injectables – all of which sound considerably
less appealing than weeping-willow breasts, thighs the size of South America
and a giant crevasse where my face should be.
At 13,
however, I could have drawn up a shopping list of physical inadequacies I
simply “couldn’t live with”. Because fixing yourself wasn’t either such a big
industry or a respectable life philosophy back then, and because my mother
isn’t Kris Jenner, I did end up living and making peace with most of them.
But now
that young girls (and boys) have affordable solutions at their fingertips and
we live in a culture in which we are all encouraged to wage war against our
physical idiosyncrasies – beating them into submission until they fall in line
with the accepted look of the day – making peace or making do seems laughably
old-fashioned.
It may be
putting both the roof extension and that fortnight’s break in Bora Bora at
risk, but I would have urged Mr Sankar to take things a step further and call
for a law to be implemented banning any form of vanity-related surgery in those
under 18 – even with parental consent. Because parents can’t always be trusted
to behave responsibly in these matters.
Under
current UK law, anyone over the age of 16 can consent to cosmetic surgery, and
even those under 16 can have procedures, provided the surgeon “feels they fully
understand what is involved” – a get-out for the more ethically ambiguous
members of Mr Sankar’s profession if ever I heard one.
I once
travelled down eight floors in an LA lift with a sobbing girl of 13 fresh from
a full rhinoplasty. With the blood from her nostrils collecting in a tray
adhered to the base of her nose with surgical tape, she had just caught sight
of her disfigured face in the mirror. Had she “fully understood” what was
involved? Can anyone at that age?
As one of
the most outspoken advocates of female body confidence in Hollywood, the
actress Chloe Moretz, whom I have interviewed for the September issue of
Glamour magazine, agrees that surgery “shouldn’t be allowed before you’re an
adult”.
At 16,
Moretz told me she begged her mother to let her have “a boob job, the fat pad
beneath my chin removed and a butt reduction. But luckily, my mum and my
brothers never let me get caught up in all that. Because if I had done any of
those things I wanted back then, I wouldn’t know who I am today.”
Sticking
to that #LoveWhoYouAre philosophy will have been additionally hard for a child
star who was told at a young age by Hollywood industry players that she needed
to fix a number of things about herself in order to succeed. “I used to get
told to change my teeth all the time, because I had a gap,” she says, “and I
was told that to help give me more of a waistline, they could take out some
ribs.”
Just how
far have we come from 13th-century Chinese foot binding and the wearing of
corsets if the young women that girls admire and emulate – women who, by the
way, have talents beyond their looks – are being advised to have ribs removed
in order to propagate some absurd ideal of beauty? And yet our freedom to toy
with surgical excess from a young age is championed by some as a form of
emancipation. They’re our bodies and we’ll do what we like with them.
Teen
reality star Kylie Jenner was only 16 when she had her lips inflated to
Toontown proportions – something she says she now regrets. “It’s an insecurity
of mine,” she explained when she revealed that she’d been having filler
injected for years. And, of course, in our new “fix-it” world, neither
insecurity nor anxiety can be allowed to exist.
Only
here’s the thing: stamp out one rampant physical insecurity through artificial
means and another will spring up either elsewhere or in its place – hence poor
little Kylie cheerfully declaring that getting her lips deflated “was a crazy
process. Thank God I didn’t end up on Botched!” – a US reality television series about plastic
surgeons remedying extreme plastic surgeries that went wrong.
Give it
time and she may. Because start on the fixing mania too soon and all you, your
parents and the attending surgeon are really doing is indulging the insecurity.
Yes, thin lips are your problem, you’re basically saying, but once that’s
resolved… ta-dah! Then when it doesn’t quite work out that way, you’re back to
chasing the dragon – until finally one day you wind up looking like one.
Celia
Walden
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