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Candidates for plastic surgery should be realistic about its benefits
Tuesday, December 29, 1998 By Anita Srikameswaran, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Maria in "West Side Story" sang that she felt pretty, witty and bright because she was loved by a wonderful boy. These days, such feelings of elation and confidence can be the result of a surgeon's expertise with a scalpel.
According to Dr. Anthony Geroulis, a cosmetic surgeon who has practiced in the Chicago area for 21 years, that post-surgical glow is similar to the pride people get from losing 10 pounds and buying new clothes, or getting a great haircut.
"You go, 'Boy, I feel great,' and you go out that evening and the next day, and everything starts happening right," he said. "If you're really happy about the way you look, that comes out. And if you're happy with yourself, other people have a chance to really like you."
Geroulis said there has been a dramatic increase during the past decade in prospective patients' knowledge of the procedures, but there are times when he refuses to operate. For example, he turns down people whose expectations cannot be met because of anatomy or aesthetics - meaning the result won't look right.
He also advises people to reconsider surgery if they make statements like: "this will save my marriage.
"This is not going to get you your raise at your office, the new promotion, or the date with the man or woman you've been hoping for," he said. "Most people are pretty honest about it. They say, 'I'm not expecting it to do a whole lot of anything with my life.' "
Elizabeth Haiken, of the University of Tennessee, wrote about the history of cosmetic surgery in her 1997 book, "Venus Envy," and said many surgeons cite the "look better, feel better" concept.
"Since the 1920s, Americans have been telling each other the world is a very unforgiving place, this is a very competitive society that we live in, you need to give yourself every advantage," she said.
After the nose jobs of the'20s, other cosmetic surgeries were devised and refined: facelifts after World War II, breast augmentations in the'50s and'60s, and liposuction in the'80s. The public has not totally embraced all the opportunities for change, so patients are still more likely to say they were on vacation than display surgical scars to friends and co-workers.
"There's sort of a constant tension between admiration for people who do this, because they're embodying that American dream, and suspicion of vanity," Haiken said. "There is still this idea that if you had to have it done, there was something wrong with you, and you don't want to go trumpeting that around."
Haiken noted that the idea of the inferiority complex, proposed by Austrian psychoanalyst Alfred Adler, was mentioned frequently in scientific articles about cosmetic surgery, lending a healing air to what was called beauty surgery.
As a surgeon put it a few decades later, "it's no longer vanity surgery, it's psychiatry with a scalpel," Haiken said.
She pointed out that no beauty standard is suitable for all places and times, but cosmetic surgery in the United States has pursued an Anglo-Saxon model. In the 1920s, many Jewish people had their noses altered to fit the larger society's idea of beauty. Lately, surgeons have created an operation to turn an Oriental eyelid into one that looks Anglo-Saxon.
The result could be a physically uniform society that makes even more people uncomfortable with their looks. "The fact that plastic surgery can help people on an individual level tends to obscure the broader implications on a societal level," Haiken said.
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