Continued from Plastic Surgery: Is It Worth It?
Like the rest of the beauty doctors, L.A. dermatologist Dr. Jessica Wu tries to steer her patients away from “getting” someone else’s features.
“I always say, instead of Angelina’s lips, let’s give you your lips from 10 years ago.”
But should you insist on Angelina Jolie‘s lips, the Restylane Wu uses to make them will eventually disappear, she observes. “The beauty of what we do is that you can change your mind. Once you go under the knife, there’s no going back.”
Dr. Larry Koplin concurs with Wu; there’s an aesthetic move away from perfection: “We don’t want people to look perfect. We just want them to look like they did when they were younger,” he notes.
Koplin parts company with Wu, however, on the subject of fillers. “All those temporary fillers give you what I call schizophrenic lips. With Restylane, their lips are one size when they’ve just had it done and another size when it’s time to go back.”
The man who is rumored to have given Barbara Hershey her luscious kissers for Beaches prefers fat grafts to injectable fillers. “We steal from the rich and give to the poor,” he explains.
The rich, in this case would include the butt, thighs and abdomen, and the poor would include the cheeks, lips and under the eyes. “Young people have very full, round faces; that’s what you want to achieve.”
Perhaps the most interesting new development in aesthetic enhancement is the pre-procedure test run.
Using a combination of medical glue, saline injections and computer imaging, the beauty consumer can get an idea of exactly what they’re going to look like once the real filling, cutting or burning commences. Or the re-filling, re-cutting or re-burning commences.
Factoid: The Cost of Perfection
- Americans spent approximately $12.4 billion on cosmetic procedures in 2005
- Americans spend more than $12 billion per year at health clubs and $5 billion on personal gyms
- Americans spend some $17 billion annually on dietary supplements
- Americans spend more than $33 billion on weight loss products and services every year
Dr. Robert Kotler of E! Network’s “Dr. 90210″ and author of The Essential Cosmetic Surgery Companion offers a non-surgical technique for fixing botched nose jobs, which has the added benefit of allowing patient input.
But before he does any permanent filling on a nose job “revision,” Kotler injects areas in question with incremental amounts of saline solution, which gives the patient an idea of what their completed nose will look like before Kotler injects silicone, the permanent solution. Note: To be continued…