Surgery for the Stars

While plastic surgery might remain for many of us something of a pipe dream, the thing we'd do if we won the lottery, for those in the entertainment industry, it has slowly but surely become akin to an entry pass into Hollywood. While there are still a large percentage of women in the general populace who are quite content to sit around with their girlfriends and talk about what they would have done, there is a certain faction of womankind - though as the pressure to conform to a particular 'look' increases, the male membership of the group increases also - for whom plastic surgery is simply inevitable.

It is very difficult to find a woman in tinsel town whose only surgeon has been the natural passing of time - in fact, there is a growing subsection of the entertainment and gossip industry that thrives off the maudlin reportage of what stars are having done, and how wrong it is going. While there is undoubted interest, and even admiration, for the woman who has had plastic surgery go right, we seem to take greater delight in perusing photograph after photograph of some former beauty who has suffered the misfortune of having something not quite go to plan in the surgery room.

Because regardless of the star who succumbs to the knife, and regardless of the surgeon who wields it, the fates sometimes frown on surgery, and the rich and famous take the same risks with plastic surgery that the rest of us do. But this inherent danger seems to be of little consequence, as the list of surgery supporters grows ever larger. And while we continue to gaze with wonder at the beautiful celebrities that fill our magazines, it becomes increasingly difficult to find one that has not yet been surgically enhanced. Because it seems that to succeed in a world where talent is only second best, the surgical manipulation of physical appearance really is inevitable.

Jeff Lakie is the founder of Plastic Surgery Resources a website providing information on cosmetic surgery.