If anyone was considered the unlikeliest candidate for a breast reduction, one might have been forgiven for thinking it would be Katie Price, the glamour model formerly known as Jordan, whose defining feature was her gigantic and ever-expanding boobs. Yet in recent months Price has jetted to and from America to drop from a highly inflated 32FF to a 32D.
What is even more surprising, perhaps, is that she is by no means alone in wanting to relinquish the prize assets on which, presumably, she has spent a small fortune.
Dubbed the undo-plasties by surgeons in America, some of whom claim that 50 per cent of their work is now rejigging jobs of this type, a growing number of those who have been under the knife for everything from facelifts to buttock implants are now regretting it. And they are now coughing up more cash to have operations that will return them to a state of being (almost) “natural”.
The rocker Courtney Love recently wrote on her MySpace page that, after vowing not to undergo any more cosmetic surgery “until I really need it in my sixties”, she had relented to revert to a more “natural” look for her surgically changed nose and lips.
“I hated that nosejobby nose, it was like a little beak. I've had my nose fixed. It looks like the one God gave me so I'm happy not to have crazy lips and a crazy teensy unnatural little nose,” she wrote. “All I care about is that my self-esteem is limitless and intact.”
It is not just celebrities who wish they had never visited a surgeon. Tina Lovente, a 38-year-old dental nurse from Newcastle upon Tyne, recently paid for a second operation to reverse a rhinoplasty (nose job) procedure that she had four years ago. “I had always had a slight bend in my nose at the top and I hated it, although nobody had ever mentioned it or teased me about it at school,” she says.
“When I started work I began to save up to have it straightened at a clinic in London. But it never felt right from the start. After having the procedure done it looked too narrow. I regretted it very early on and I just thought ‘My God, what have I done to myself?' More people commented that I looked odd than ever before.”
One thing is certain: the growth in “cosmetic revision” is not indicative of a move towards ageing gracefully with wrinkles, eyebags and floppy jowls intact.
Cosmetic surgery is more popular than ever. A recent Mintel report predicts that Britons are likely to spend £1 billion on tummy tucks, liposuction and the like in 2008 with the number of procedures having doubled in two years to 1,600 a day in 2007. Facelifts and breast surgery are the two most popular operations, although one in five facial surgery procedures last year was a nose job.
Nothing, it seems, will stand in the way of those intent on altering their looks.
A survey by Sainsbury's Bank revealed that more than £5 million a year is now taken out in personal loans to fund cosmetic surgery. But it does seem that as these enhancements become more common, so does consumer dissatisfaction with the results.
Nigel Mercer, a consultant cosmetic surgeon in Bristol and president elect of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (Baaps), says that European women are increasingly tending to regret the more extreme “American-influenced, Barbie-doll adjustments” such as browlifts, lip augmentation and significant breast enhancements. “Some surgeons, particularly in America, now run their businesses on certain aspects of revision surgery,” Mercer says.
Common requests for surgeons are to reverse the “pinched” look after a nose job, the post-facelift “windswept” look, and badly positioned cheek implants.
“Reversing browlifts is particularly common,” Mercer says. “Women realise that if you change the position of eyebrows, you can end up looking surprised all the time. Now they come back and want that look softened and the brows put back where they used to be.”
Last year Dr Michael Yaremchuk, a cosmetic surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and a leading expert in revisional procedures, reported a boom industry in brow-reversal operations in a paper he published in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal. Over several months, 22 women aged between 32-62 who were unhappy with their “unnaturally over-elevated eyebrows and hairline”, came to his clinic for surgery to correct them.
Naresh Joshi, a surgeon who specialises in eyelid surgery at the Cromwell Hospital, in southwest London, estimates that 15 per cent of his work is now correcting operations done by other surgeons, such as reversing the “round eye” appearance after lower-eyelid surgery.
Certainly, some of the corrective procedures are the result of more operations going wrong, especially those done on “cosmetic vacations” abroad. A report last year by Baaps indicated that one third of British surgeons have carried out “much more” repair work than they were asked to do five years ago, with 44 per cent of surgeons claiming to have seen at least three to five dissatisfied patients who had been treated on holiday in the past year. But it is also the general move towards more natural-looking alterations being requested within the nip-tuck industry that is fuelling the number of undo-plasties.
At the Harley Medical Group of clinics around the UK, breast augmentation remains the most popular operation, but women are asking for smaller increases in size.
The demands for breasts of football proportions are diminishing. “Typically, ten years ago almost half of patients who had a breast augmentation wanted a visible difference and went up three bra-cup sizes,” says Lisa Littlehales, a regional nurse manager for the group. “Now they don't want people to notice. Over the past 12 months, the most commonly requested size increase was two cup sizes, which is equivalent to what they'd get with a good padded bra.”
Dr Maurizio Viel, a surgeon at the London Centre for Aesthetic Surgery, has seen a sharp increase in “clients wanting improvements that are undetectable to everyone else”. Botox remains the most popular non-surgical treatment in the UK, but women are apparently now falling over themselves to get “baby Botox”, a new approach using smaller doses to avoid the frozen-mask appearance typical of the injections.
“To some extent,” says Linda Blair, a clinical psychologist and spokesperson for the British Psychological Society, “there is probably a backlash against identikit looks and the sameness of appearance that many people who have had facial alterations possess. Erasing wrinkles can iron out facial expressions, a mark of individuality and a conveyor of someone's characteristic personality traits.
“People who care enough about their appearance to change it could be deeply affected by the realisation they look like everyone else,” she says. “They think that their appearance defines them and so they enter into this seductive process trying to put everything ‘right'.”
Having surgery to correct what was usually an unnecessary operation in the first place is part of what she calls the “redecorating effect”. “When you decorate a room in your home, the rest of the house looks a lot shabbier,” she says. “It can be the same with cosmetic work. You have one op and then you are not happy with something else so have that done. Then you become disillusioned with what you had done first.”
Blair thinks there are additional psychological underpinnings for the trend in cosmetic revision. “Cosmetic surgery has its place if people are doing it for the right reasons,” she says. “I guess that a lot of those who go back to change their original operations initially had work done because they thought it might change their career, fortune or relationship. Anyone who has surgery for those kinds of reasons is likely to end up dissatisfied with the result.”
In the Mintel report, 60 per cent of those questioned said that it was their self-consciousness that would push them to change the way they looked. For them, Blair says, having a cosmetic procedure “is like sticking a plaster on top of their problems” and does not address the real issues of low self-esteem.
It is something with which Shireen Brown, 54, from London, identifies. “I had long felt insecure in my relationship with my husband,” she says. “Five years ago I had a boob job to make myself more attractive to him. It didn't solve anything and he left not long after. I was left with this ridiculous pair of breasts that made me so self-conscious and were just not me. Last year I had an operation to go back to my natural state and I am so much happier.”
Mercer says that reputable clinics in the UK adopt stringent and lengthy measures to make sure people are fully aware of the psychological implications of cosmetic surgery. But he admits that someone who is determined to have surgery will get it done somewhere, even against the best advice. Iman, the former supermodel, has said that she regrets the surgery she had on her breasts after giving birth to her first child in her twenties.
“I clearly remember waking up after the operation and not feeling the slightest bit different within myself,” she says. “And it didn't fix a single thing in my head.”
