Ready to start your own body image revolution?
It seems more and more people who’ve had cosmetic surgery, need surgery to correct problems the surgery causes.
And it’s not the kind of help I thought it was when I read the headline in The Courier Mail on August 25. I thought it would be correcting botched jobs, but no, it’s correcting what are emerging as “normal” long term side effects!
For example, a woman who had liposuction and a tummy tuck on her stomach area said that she was initially pleased with the results of the surgery – a taut flat stomach like she’d had in her pre-baby years. “As the months went by, the state of my skin visibly deteriorated”, the story says. The skin on her tummy is now different to the skin on the rest of her body, she said it’s becoming increasingly grey and mottled and older. The skin on the rest of her body is vibrant and bright. She said her tummy skin looked at least 10 years older than the rest of her body.
The article cites Dr Michael Prager of the British Association of Cosmetic Doctors, who says you can’t improve the state of healthy skin by cutting it. “If you cutt through healthy tissues and blood vessels and detach the dermis from the underlying muscle, you inevitably create scar tissue and reduce effective circulation,” he said.
He also says 4 out of 5 people he sees who’ve had plastic surgery regret their decision. He believes cosmetic surgery actually accelerates the ageing process – initially the results are great but within a year the skin becomes thinner and loses that rosy volume of youth – so you have to keep stretching the skin.
That explains why you see that eternally surprised but vaguely happy look on the faces of people who’ve had surgery – I always think ‘Nancy Reagan’.
If you’re considering liposuction, I reckon you’ll need to make sure you never gain an ounce of fat again, because once the fat cells have been sucked out of say your stomach area or your thighs, your body can’t store any fat there because there are no fat cells! So it stores fat in the remaining fat cells – and that causes lumps and dents which, according to Dr Prager, look “odd and unnatural”.
So – odd and unnatural lumps and dents, and thinner skin that ages faster than the rest of your body. Sounds like a recipe for a permanent relationship with the cosmetic surgeon, to me! Can we say “villa in the South of France”, anyone? Not for you of course, for the surgeon…..