Beauty at any cost
Beauty is a combination of the qualities which give pleasure to the senses. For centuries the canons of beauty have not changed to any great degree, and people from different cultures have had similar ideas about what is beautiful. A man is considered handsome if he is tall, muscular and athletic. A physically attractive woman is she who has big eyes, a small nose, delicate cheekbones, a petite chin, smooth skin, long legs, a slim waist and large hips.
As the old saying goes, beauty is only skin-deep and how somebody looks is less important than their character. Even so, it is commonly believed that beauty can help a lot in both one's personal and professional life. Therefore, many people who are dissatisfied with their bodies are ready to pay a fortune to improve their appearance. They frequently visit beauty salons where they have treatment to their hair, face and nails. Some of them decide to apply even more radical methods and undergo plastic surgery.
The demand for cosmetic surgery is enormous. Not many years ago, beauty parlours were popular only among film stars and VIP's 'oncerned about their body image. Nowadays, they are becoming more and more popular among ordinary people who regard them as a good career investment. And women are not the only ones who worry about the way their bodies look: men are just as obsessed. They want to look younger, more handsome and more attractive.
The most common plastic surgery is liposuction and nose, mouth and ear correction. Many women who are dissatisfied with the size of their breasts can have them enlarged, and balding men can have a hair transplant. In the United States and Italy, beauty clinics are as popular as hairdressing salons. Many save up to have defects removed. More and more young men and women want to imitate famous stars and look like Brat Pitt, Britney Spears, Gwyneth Paltrow or the immortal Marilyn Monroe. In China, a lot of young people who are obsessive about being taller undergo a series of painful operations to lenghten their legs. In Brazil and Venezuela, parents often treat their teenage daughters to the correction of lips which are too thin, protruding ears or snub noses.
Cosmetic surgery can perform miracles. A twenty-two-year-old Brazilian, Juliana Borges, underwent nineteen operations and became a beauty queen in 2001. Another woman from the US, forty-eight-year-old Cindy Jackson, had had a record number of thirty eight operations before she became a model. She paid one hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the correction of her coarse-featured face and over-plump body. She has got rid of her wrinkles, square jaw, narrow lips, fleshy nose and drooping stomach. Now she is slim-waisted and looks twenty years younger.
More and more people nowadays fuss over their appearance because they are convinced that beauty makes life easier and often guarantees success. Young girls want to be as slender as Naomi Campbell, and adolescent boys dream of Jean-Claude van Damme's muscles. They should remember, however, that good looks are not everything as you cannot judge by looks alone.