The Map Collector

Plastic and aesthetic procedures seem to have come a long way since the early days, when they were not yet in the domain of pure cosmetics. Plastic surgery came into being for the purpose of reconstruction. Ancient Egyptians and Asian Indians were doing rhinoplasties to reconstruct missing and broken noses as early as 800BC, and it is highly likely that reconstructive surgeries were being done long before that time. Amusingly, in 18th century India, British observers made note of an Indian potter doing quality nose jobs and restoring facial breathing apparatuses to his fellow men. Potters are good and sculpting clay, so why not human clay?

My deformity

When I was an adolescent, I was sold a bill of goods that I was "deformed" because I had an underbite. I was thrown headfirst into the braces/wisdom teeth/dental surgery mill when I was 10. I ended up having braces until I was nearly 19 years old. At 17, I had a sagittal osteotomy, which is a brutal procedure where parts of the jawbone are amputated on either side to set the lower jaw backwards in the face. The surgery required full anesthesia and 12 weeks of having my jaw wired shut. I had the surgery the summer between my junior and senior years of high school.

As a child, I did not have any notion of orthodontics and dentistry in general being a grift. I simply thought of myself as a mixture of defective and expensive. I hated my cavity-prone, crooked teeth, and I saw the chiclet veneers of celebrities and subconsciously presumed they were born with mouths full of straight, white teeth. When my orthodontist mentioned the term birth defect in reference to my lower jaw, I latched onto it with ferocious passion and beat myself into a bloody mental pulp via my own dysmorphia. My deformity was the reason why I could not make friends, why I was always so sad, and why the boys never noticed me. Once I get the surgery, my life will get so much better, I told myself. Never once did I believe the power to win friends had been in my hands the entire time. I was not capable of getting out of my head long enough to think that.

Year 17 rolled around and I got the surgery. It was very disappointing. I did not look all that different. My face was still asymmetrical and to add insult to injury, I still had a slight underbite. I had spent years in the purgatory of waiting for the surgery to change my life and honestly you could not tell I had anything done. Luckily for me, though I did not yet know it, I lacked the knowledge, motivation, and resources to complete the job the surgery had started. Perhaps had I been from a wealthier family, I would have gotten another set of surgeries: a second jaw reduction, a cosmetic rhinoplasty to straighten my crooked nose, a full set of veneers on my straight but stained and fissured teeth, hair straightening, liposuction on my chubby knees and butt, and heaven knows what else. 

Heidi Montag, wife of Spencer Pratt, underwent 10 plastic surgeries in one day in 2009 when she was 23 years old. She had a second breast augmentation, the first being done when she was 21, a second nose job, brow lift, facial fat injections, and liposuction. She also had a jaw reduction, with hers being more of the kind I had originally wanted with far more bone thrown away. I had two small parts of my lower jaw removed; she had her entire chin shaved down. I did not suffer anywhere near the pain she did. She had a full team of live-in and visiting nurses during her recovery, which I obviously did not. Like me, she remained dysmorphic after her surgery. 

I was an outlier back in the late 80s when I got my single surgery. There was another neighbor who had been taken in by the same orthodontist, and in her case he moved her lower jaw forward to correct her overbite. Other than that, nobody had plastic surgery except for the fabled uber-rich girls who allegedly got their noses done as graduation gifts. Not being of that set of people, I never knew of any of my teenage peers having nose jobs. 

Surgeries I once saw as a big deal are now everyday for the middle and even lower classes. I have known several women with boob jobs. I have seen lip fillers and facial fillers up close. I have seen rich women with facelifts in the real world. Plastic surgeries and procedures are now so normalized, it is more difficult to find an influencer or a star who has not had them than one who has. 

It's easy to gloss over how downright brutal these procedures are and how downright traumatic they are for the human body. Our bodies remember trauma even when our minds do not. When we are involved in car accidents, victimized in an assault, addicted to drugs, or kept in low-level fight or flight for long periods of time, it takes a toll. The trauma may show up immediately as pain or it could wait to inhabit our bodies as chronic disease later. Since our culture is so ignorant of trauma, most of us are walking around with trauma locked into our backs, necks, and hips, and we are mostly ticking time bombs because we don't take any measures to ameliorate accumulated trauma. 

Plastic procedures are barbaric because they are traumatic and that trauma is conveniently shoved under the rug like it never happened. How appropriate that famous people are at the bleeding edge of self-inflicted injury, because the entire System that holds them captive is a collection of ongoing humiliation and mutilation rituals. The famous deny, deny, deny that they are oppressed, as they must appear transcendent and glad at all times, lest they become the butt of many cruel jokes. On their own, they will never totally walk away from their masters and captors. No, that task is up to you and me.

Breast implants

Boobs come in all shapes and sizes, yet there is only room for one or two idealized types in the eyes of men and women. The all-time favorite type of breast set is the large, natural type as sported by Sydney Sweeney. The second is the half-grapefruit, itty-bitty-titty adolescent kind, like what the late Farrah Fawcett had on her famous wank poster. Most breast implants that are not going for the openly fake look seek to imitate the above kinds of breasts. 

Common breast augmentation surgery involves squeezing in a plastic cutlet beneath the fatty tissue behind the nipple or shoving it underneath the muscle tissue. This is done by making a hole either beneath the breast at the line where boob meets ribcage or through the armpit. Literally zero attention is paid to any future concerns about a chunk of plastic rotting inside the body. Though some effort is usually put into rerouting nerves and the mammary duct in case the patient ever wants to breastfeed, this effort is wholly dependent on the surgeon. In many augmentations, the nipple is cut off and repositioned to a more pleasing position. A body part as sensitive as a human nipple cannot just be chopped out and stuck back on again without loss of function and numbness. 

What the hell is a BBL?

Before the Ozempic craze, Kim Kardashian and her amateur porn star ilk popularized an extremely dangerous procedure called a BBL or Brazilian Butt Lift. Fat is sucked out of the hips, lower back, abdomen, and thighs, processed and "washed" in a centrifuge, and hosed back into the butt cheeks. By "washed", I mean the dead, severed nerves and blood vessels are picked out and thrown away. Part of the transferred fat often dies, and this necrosis, which can be brought on by wearing the same tight pants for a long period of time or sweating too much, brings on BBL smell. BBL smell is the garbage-like, rancid aroma of rotting tissue.

BBLs look highly unnatural. Madonna has one, and her butt has a shelf-like appearance that looks like a permanent, fully-loaded adult diaper has been attached to her can. Kim Kardashian had the same problem before she had hers removed.

Deep plane face lifts

In any given face lift, the top layer of the face is cut off like a scene from Hellraiser and pulled tight like wrapping a Christmas present before being trimmed and sewn back down again. In a deep plane face lift, an deeper layer of the face is targeted for stretching and trimming, and that is the SMAS or the strata between facial fat and muscle. The fascia from which a face makes its expressions and wrinkles is manhandled into a semblance of youth. Jaw ligaments must be severed and stitched back into a new formation. The chunk of skin below the ear and near the temple is stripped off and thrown away so the new-old skin around the jaw can be hoisted up and tightened like a plastic bag. 

Injections

Angelina Jolie has always had naturally full lips, and it is the fetishization of her mouth that ushered in the lip filler era as we know it. Megan Fox and Kendall Jenner were later adopters, and it can be argued they built entire careers on lip filler. Lip filler segued nicely with the Botox craze, and before you knew it, normal women and some men were regularly racing off to the day spa to have their faces and lips pumped full of puffy juice in desperate attempts to appear "sexy" and "young". Injections are the easiest of all the procedures. They don't require a doctor. Some people do them at home. You can buy a groupon to be injected with all manner of anti-aging sauce at a local clinic. 

You will be warned that filler has a nasty habit of migrating. You will sign a waiver that has columns of tiny text about side effects. You will be a living, breathing experiment in vanity and FAFO. 

Flayed in China

When it comes to sheer brutality, nobody goes harder on cosmetic procedures than the Chinese. There is a sort of Wild West (Wild East?), no-holds-barred, anything goes attitude towards chopping and rearranging body parts in China that exists nowhere else. South Korea comes in a close second, with young Korean women especially lining up to have their eyelids doubled and their chin bones shaved down from every conceivable angle. The jaw surgeries these people have make mine look conservative. 

Limb lengthening, like many cosmetic procedures, started out as a way of correcting true deformity and disability. In 1905, Alessandro Codivilla invented the surgery, which involves completely severing the largest leg bone, the femur, and using the body's natural healing ability to fill in the blank with new bone. Over the next century, the procedure would be improved and refined by a series of white men. The bone "holders" that were lengthened via external pins (why is this crap always channeling Hellraiser?) are now able to be remote controlled, and there are no external pins needed. 

Having your femurs or tibias split in half in order to grow taller is still no walk in the park, but that did not stop Chinese plastic surgeons from making it the de rigueur procedure among a naturally short-leaning people. The procedure was only banned in China for cosmetic purposes in 2006, and it is fairly obvious that the ban is flagrantly ignored and gone-around by a thriving, underground industry. 

Though it is entirely possible to AI yourself into a flesh-like anime fantasy as a Chinese livestreamer via filters and never let the world in on your secret, cosmetic surgery offices are full of Chinese women and men vying for a peculiarly difficult beauty standard. The current Chinese, Douyin-led superimage is that of a black-haired waif with huge, glassy, doll eyes, copious eye bags, a thin nose with a high bridge, skin so pale it could be Irish, giant elf ears, a heart shaped face that terminates in a pointy chin, a long, thin neck, strangely ample breasts, stick-person arms and legs, not much in the way of a butt or hips, and small feet.

I would argue that the Chinese beauty standard for women is the modern-day yoke of foot-binding as applied to the entire face and body. It's a great way of keeping women in their place and from doing anything important. Men, however, are also captives. The Chinese beauty standard for men tells them they must be tall, thin, and as pretty as girls with soft facial features against the backdrop of an oval chin and flowing hair. The eyes are more cantal tilt than doe, but the same prettiness and femininity are present and accounted for.

Maybe it is because their population is more conformist, maybe it is because they are more urbanized, and maybe it is another reason entirely, but Chinese people seem far more likely to volunteer themselves to the experimental surgery and procedure mill in order to "get ahead". Chinese livestreaming is a veritable freak show of creeps and whackjobs who have had every procedure on the menu and then some, and there is a culture of acceptance for the plastic-altered that does not exist in the West outside of California and Paris. China has taken influencing to a level that is far beyond our own, where one's social credit as an influencer determines everything from income to finding a mate. Plastic surgery procedures are deeply embedded within this competitive framework, and the insecurities driven by the weird images of Douyin and Weibo feed the legitimate and illegitimate plastic procedure industries. 

What reliably tends to happens is that an insecure person will see an ad on a Chinese social media app and spend large amounts of borrowed money on an array of procedures in order to look like the picture in the ad. Some will look like the picture and it will get them public approval and popularity for their livestreaming platform. Others will be temporarily rewarded and will go whole hog on surgical makeovers, like Zhou Chuna, the dead-faced Shanghai girl who had over 200 procedures in the span of two years . . .  as a teenager. Plastic surgery addiction in China is the new normal, and it is no big thing for teenagers to morph into the pornime, high-voiced, schoolgirl fantasy while they are still actual schoolgirls.

Surgeries, especially multiple ones, have consequences. In China, it is quite common for a maimed plastic surgery victim to livestream her trauma for views and donations. There is a disturbing, cavalier attitude about being butchered over there that we don't really have in the West, or at least not yet, anyway. Anything for more views. 

Is getting old so terrible?

For some, growing old is an escalating nightmare that must be fought every step, sag, and wrinkle of the way with needles, scalpels, and fat transfers. The beauty standard, whether Chinese or Western, does not aspire to be Droopy Dog with his sad eyes and prominent jowls. 

Cher was 71 when Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again was filmed. The movie came out in 2018. She makes a cameo appearance at the end of the movie, singing Fernando, an old ABBA hit that was technically her radio competition back in the day. Her emergence from the shadowy hotel is more Nosferatu than what I believe was intended. We don't expect a jump scare in a cheesy musical sequel but Cher provides it. She is someone who looks terrifying but does not understand she looks terrifying. Her face now has a weird, ersatz Asian-ness that was never there before, even when she had straight hair and naturally tanned skin. Her appearance actually is not the creepiest thing about her. It is her vibe, which you can feel from the screen. She reeks of desperation and PICK ME and WHY OH WHY AM I NO LONGER BEAUTIFUL? Ick.

Narcissism

At the root of every plastic procedure that is not about correcting an actual deformity (my jaw never qualified) or war wound, there lies an inconvenient truth. Cosmetic surgery is for narcissists and narcissists all secretly hate themselves. I was a narcissist, so I know. The trouble with the myth of Narcissus, the man-nymph who inspired the term, is we never get a glimpse of his self-hatred. His longing is to be with his own doppelgänger, more or less. The picture is incomplete. The heart of a narcissist is one of hatred for the self and deep fear that the self can never measure up to the object of envy. The desire of a narcissist is to look in the mirror and view ultimate perfection, and it is the nagging humility of imperfection that drives her to inflict self-trauma in order to match the desired image. 

Because who honestly would get chunks of her skull removed in order to look sweeter, kinder, and calmer than she actually was? A narcissist would, that is who. There is no humility in cosmetic surgery. The whole point is to get it in order to gain an advantage over humbler, uglier people. I know I am going to catch crap for this and I don't care. I am calling a spade a spade and if you don't like it, too bad. Whether the cosmetically altered end up looking "good" or "bad", it hardly matters. Beauty, as I have said, is in the eye of the beholder. The whole point of the industry is to make us extremely unhappy with what we are given so we don't appreciate it and attempt to soothe our pain by consuming and spending. It is a familiar plot. The only amazing aspect of this grift at this point is that so few have caught on.