Culture of cosmetic surgery takes hold

• We imagine shallow socialites or vain movie stars desperately trying to forestall the ravages of time.
• But in fact, cosmetic surgery is not an industry built on vanity alone, but also on two much more powerful emotions: denial and envy.
• It feeds our envy of those who embody nature's most powerful but fleeting charms---youth, strength, beauty, and fertility.
• The result found that "82 percent consider age bias a 'serious problem,' up from 78 percent three years ago.
• Many of these executives---male and female---are turning to cosmetic surgery to help them stay competitive.
• Liposuction, a technique for removing deposits of fat using a tool called a suction cannula, was developed by French surgeon Yves-Gerard Illouz in the 1970s, and it is the most popular invasive cosmetic surgery procedure: 74,000 people had liposuction in 2002 alone.
• In the years to come, "there will be more cosmetic surgery done than all surgical procedures combined," predicts Dr. Weston.
• The democratizing trend in cosmetic surgery is nowhere more evident than with liposuction and breast implants, which speak to two American obsessions: weight and sex.
• Liposuction is the most popular invasive cosmetic procedure, but it is not a permanent weight-loss solution.
• In the end, democratic culture seeks authenticity, but it doesn't always find it in the old forms where conservatives tend to feel more comfortable.
• And so we need to ask less threatening but no less fundamental questions---questions about the excesses of individualism and the extremes of democracy, questions about what are and what are not genuine social goods, and questions about how we measure success and failure.