Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery (Hardcover)

~ Alex Kuczynski (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A podiatrist shortens toes so her clients can fit into Jimmy Choos, and a lawyer who's argued before the Supreme Court routinely lies to a succession of doctors to feed his Botox habit. As this depressing survey of a global beauty business rooted in self-hatred and a fear of aging demonstrates, an unfortunate few are literally dying to be pretty: the Nigerian first lady expired after liposuction and a tummy tuck, and Olivia Goldsmith, whose novels lampooned middle-aged women afraid to look their age, succumbed during a chin tuck. New York Times reporter Kuczynski has attitude to spare as she outs Sarah Jessica Parker and Nicole Kidman as probable Botox users, and assesses the "traumatized" naked body of a litigator who's showing off the results of a total body lift after gastric-bypass surgery: "to be honest and brutal and bitchy, she doesn't look that great." A canny and witty guide to the excesses of a conformist society with more money than sense, Kuczynski discloses her own beauty addiction in the form of Botox, collagen derived from cadavers and fetal foreskin cells, liposuction, eyelid lifts and eventually a botched Restylane treatment that left her housebound for days with a disfigured lip.(Oct. 17)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Sometimes, out and about, I catch a stranger fixing me with a gimlet eye. Does she recognize me? Perhaps. I wrote a first-person story for Washingtonian magazine back in 1989 about getting a facelift -- with before-and-after mug shots on the cover. Maybe that stranger stashed it in a bedside drawer. I imagine her fishing it out after one of those blood-freezing flashes when she spots her own reflection in a shop window and thinks her mother's come to town.

Over the intervening 17 years, my own visage has slid back into its pre-lift contours. But millions more have surrendered to the knife, and a charming new vocabulary has been born: Carb Face, for example (puffy-cheeked); Bowling Ball Breasts; the Trout Pout; the Wind Tunnel (severely backswept facial skin); the Kabuki Mask (all-Botox, all the time). Mind-boggling new technologies have blossomed: lasers, microsurgeries, wrinkle fillers, wrinkle paralytics, power-assistant liposuction, endoscopic tricks and "thread lifts," in which barbed threads are stretched beneath the cheeks and anchored to the skull. Cheekbones are glorified with Gore-Tex, just like your L.L. Bean jacket. Gallons of collagen, cultivated in a vast petri dish from the stem cells of a single infant's foreskin, have been pumped into lips or nasolabial folds, an alternative to the locally fashionable "cadaver tissue," i.e., corpse flesh. (How do you know where it's been? Maybe you're sporting a snippet of dear old Alistair Cooke, whose own dead tissue went missing, in your kissable new Trout Pout.)

In New York, women have their toes trimmed to squeeze into pointy Jimmy Choo shoes. In Los Angeles, gals who've had everything else done now get genital beautification. Says one, "I've spent so much money for the rest of me to look like Dolly Parton. So why should that look like Willie Nelson?" Many under-40 men today think it perfectly normal for the breasts on a reclining woman to stand up like rockets at take-off.

The New York Times's racy feature writer Alex Kuczynski has written Beauty Junkies, an exposé of the cosmetic surgery industry. And she really knows her stuff. The 30-something beauty confesses that she hopped aboard the fix-me train at age 28. At first, it was just a couple of Botox shots to the brow. (Scowling over a computer all day, every writer knows, encourages piles, dowager's hump and eye trouble -- but exacts its most visible toll between the eyebrows.) Later, she was persuaded by her doctor to have her almond-shaped, slightly slanted blue eyes "fixed" to reduce the volume above the upper lid -- excising that enchanting, extended epicanthic fold that gives Charlotte Rampling, Kathleen Turner and, in an earlier generation, Simone Signoret their bedroom eyes. She's had lard lipo'd from her thighs. She's spent many thousands on "maintenance."

And finally, in 2004, in quest of that Angelina Jolie suck-the-chrome-off-a-trailer-hitch moue, she had her upper lip stuffed with Restylane, a mucus-like synthetic form of hyaluronic acid. It gave her a yam-sized Donald Duck disaster zone below her nose that kept her housebound for several days. That -- and the recognition that a friend had, in the course of various improvements, become a frightening "meat puppet" -- cured her of her addiction. Or so she says.

A few choice statistics, now, from her sumptuously fact-packed Beauty Junkies: In 2004, nearly 12 million surgical and nonsurgical beauty procedures were performed in the United States -- including 290,343 eyelid jobs, 166,187 nose jobs, 478,251 liposuctions and 334,052 breast augmentations. Despite the fact that those dense, high-cohesive silicone-gel European breast implants known as "gummi bears" are generally illegal here, it's estimated that a third of all artificial breasts in this country are "in trouble." Still, since 1997, breast implants are up 147 percent. Liposuction's up 111 percent; tummy tucks, 144 percent; and Botox use, 2,446 percent.

Kuczynski emphasizes the two harsh realities that steer these soaring numbers. First, boomers are graying more reluctantly than any previous generation. Second, with the current state of the health care game, many surgeons and dermatologists actually prefer big-bucks, high-satisfaction cosmetic work to, say, cancer surgery. Which would you rather do? Take 15 minutes to squirt a face full of Botox, and get $1,000 in cash and a stiffish smile in return? Or painstakingly remove a freckle, slice by panicky slice, over a full hour or more, and then, a couple of months later, get 12 bucks from a grudging insurance company?

At its core, of course, the rage for "age management" is a ghastly business. Beneath those glamorous Chiclet-tooth veneers may lurk stinking stubs that revolt even the dentists who created them from perfectly healthy teeth. Very fat people who have gastric bypasses (140,600 Americans in 2004) find their new slender bodies swimming in gigantic sacks of skin -- dangling aprons, flaps, curtains, folds and hammocks that actually shock the plastic surgeons who must tailor them to fit the new frame.

To avoid even approaching that fate, Hollywood gals turn to Clen -- clenbuterol, a steroid used to treat asthma in horses and to help the human body remain a size two. Clen also increases the risk of stroke and heart attack, destroys endurance and stiffens the heart muscles.

But as long ago as the 17th century, the wise François, duc de la Rochefoucauld, observed that, "One must suffer to be beautiful." Today, 73-year-old Joan Rivers wistfully adds, "I wish I had a twin, so I could know what I'd look like without plastic surgery." As for Kuczynski -- well, she's gone off the Botox.

Reviewed by Diana McLellan
Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday (October 17, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385508530
• ISBN-13: 978-0385508537
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (34 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #475,306 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A History and an Awakening, November 23, 2006

By	R. Spell "raspell" (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Amazon Verified Purchase

This book has generated great buzz as written by a noted NY Times writer who becomes obsessed with plastic surgery at the age of 28 and have various procedures over the next ten years. It's an interesting story but it only occupies 15% of the book and is the closing.

Prior to that the book is an exhaustive summary of the history of plastic surgery dating back to the 1800s and sorted by the various body types being transposed, i.e., face,[..] botox, etc. Therefore the book is written somewhat as a clinical history until she closes with her personal story which is quite interesting. She uses herself as the new American who obsesses with not growing old and builds a compelling case that Americans will use more and more plastic surgery as some South American countries are currently experiencing.

Overall, a quality book on the subject. Personally, I preferred the recent "Confessions of a Park Avenue Plastic Surgeon" for a summary of the issue and more in depth personal stories from the perspective of doctor and patient.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent., December 17, 2006

By	Gretchen C. Rubin (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    (VINE VOICE)

I'm not much interested in cosmetic surgery (which is not the same as plastic surgery, one of the things I learned from the book), but I am a HUGE fan of Alex Kuczynski's work so will read anything she writes. For instance, I don't like shopping, but I always read her NYT column, Critical Shopper, just for the fun of it.

As I expected, I found this a fascinating book and whizzed through it in two days. Lots of great information. As the title indicates, this isn't a guide for people who are considering cosmetic surgery, but an analysis of the industry and the trends behind it. She throws in some of her own experiences, which are just as (or perhaps more) intriguing as the reportorial sections.

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars A little boring, November 5, 2006

By	Anonymous - See all my reviews

Maybe I'm just not old enough to appreciate this book fully, but I found it to be a boring read. I forced myself to finish it, thinking I would get something out of it, but again, I mostly found it to be dull. The other thing is ---although I don't think this was the intent of the author --- I felt a little bad about my appearance and for the next two days after reading this book, I found myself dwelling on how I would age. If you are on the fence about your looks, do yourself a favor and don't read this book. But if you're thinking about getting plastic surgery perhaps you would get something out of it. If I could I would give it 2.5 stars because I'm right in the middle, I was creeped out and bored but others might learn something about the state of the art and also how society views cosmetic surgery in 2006.