My name is Alex and I’ve been Botox-free for 500 days and I’ve never felt
better about myself.” Alex Kuczynski is 39 and, like a former alcoholic,
feels as if she has a second lease of life now that she has extricated
herself from the addictive world of cosmetic surgery. In her book Beauty
Junkies she writes about America’s $15 billion cosmetic surgery industry,
which caters to the growing obsession with looking eternally youthful and
perfect.
In the past nine years in America, the number of cosmetic procedures has more
than quadrupled. In 2004, 478,251 Americans underwent liposuction; 334,052
had breast augmentation surgery; 290,343 had surgery to alter their eyelids;
and 166,187 had nose jobs. Tens of thousands had more esoteric surgeries.
New procedures include belly-button enhancement, nipple enlargement, lower
body lifts (to remove the excess folds of skin resulting from gastric
bypasses).
Podiatrists offer “foot facelifts” to help women squeeze into their $700 Jimmy
Choos; there is even a growing vogue for vaginal cosmetic surgery, or
labiaplasty, as it is known. Kuczynski describes one ageing LA woman who
explains why she had it. “I’ve spent so much money for the rest of me to
look like Dolly Parton. So why should that [a modest downward glance] look
like Willie Nelson?”
And men are far from immune,accounting for 1.2 million cosmetic procedures in
2004: “I have a friend who’s a very serious lawyer,” says Kuczynski, “and he
spends as much money on his facial upkeep as his wife does — who’s a much
younger actress.” Appropriately, Kuczynski lives on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan, an area rich in collagen implants and surgically enhanced noses.
Here it is as easy to get a shot of Botox as a cappuccino.
“I can walk two blocks from here and have my nails done in a salon and get
Botox in the same place,” says Kuczynski, who is not, one would think, an
obvious candidate for plastic surgery. Photographs around the apartment show
her as a blonde, cherubic toddler, then a willowy teenage beauty. The
photograph on her book jacket, taken in her mid-thirties, shows a stunning
blonde, carefully made-up, with high cheekbones, beautiful eyes and an
aquiline nose.
But the woman who greets me at the apartment door looks nothing like this
picture and I wonder if there is some mistake. Tall, yes — she is 5ft 11in
(1.52m) — but this woman has dark wavy hair and looks a little less, er,
finished, a little more human than I had expected. She is wearing a
zip-front black Oi-lilly sweatshirt, black sweatpants and big clumpy lilac
Moon Boots. It is, of course, Kuczynski, but Kuczynski au naturel.
“I hardly wear make-up any more,” says Kuczynski, who shares the spacious,
elegant apartment with her husband Charles Steven-son, a hedge fund manager,
and has six step-children. “I’ve spent ten years dyeing my beautiful brown
hair blonde and bleaching it to straw, I used to get a manicure and pedicure
once a week and I’ve given that up and discovered I have really nice
fingernails with beautiful half-moons in them” — she splays out a hand so
that I can admire them — “and what is amazing to me, having given up the
Botox and collagen injections too, is how much time I have and how much
money I save.”
Not that she is above a little artifice — as long as it doesn’t require
surgery. As we sit sipping green tea from porcelain cups, served by her
housekeeper, the post arrives, including a large package from Victoria’s
Secret. “Oooh, my chicken cutlets!” exclaims Kuczynski. “They’re little fake
things you put in your bra: much better than breast implants.” A style
writer withThe New York Times, Kuczynski found herself in her twenties being
sucked into the New York obsession with looking good.
“You face incredible pressure as a young professional woman in New York. I
will never forget, when I was about 25, saying to a friend of mine: ‘Shall I
pay my mortgage this month or get that expensive new facial treatment?’ She
said ‘Alex, New York is a tough town, you’ve gotta do everything you can to
look good.’
“I had this crushing realisation that in New York you have to have this
superfecta of qualities: an Ivy League education, a great body, a beautiful
face, a fabulous job — and if you don’t, why are you here?” Having grown up
in Lima, Peru, where her father, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, was recently Prime
Minister, at first she didn’t really get it. “I always thought I would never
ever do anything because in my view it was just not something that
intelligent people did. It was considered the purview of dopey Hollywood
starlets and ageing Palm Beach housewives. I think that what happened is it
somehow became OK, not only OK but REQUIRED, to care about your outer
carapace. It sounds bizarre but it’s almost as if it is disrespectful to
show up in a business meeting with a huge furrow between your eyebrows.”
And so ten years ago she started on her own slippery slope, which cost her
some $100,000: first Botox in the corners of her eyes, then her forehead,
then between her eyebrows. She had collagen implants to fill her nasolabial
canals (the lines that run from nose to mouth), using collagen derived from
cadavers and fetal foreskin cells. “It seems really creepy now, but at the
time I was deeply into the medical mystery of it.” Next she alighted on
liposuction to remove a little excess fat from her thighs, a process so
painful and degrading that she swore never to do anything to herself again.
As she writes in her book: “I had spent $6,000 — about the annual salary of
the average Hungarian, Mexican or Korean — to correct a minor imperfection
of my body, a flaw so trivial that ultimately no one, not even my fiancé,
would ever notice a difference.” And yet as the bruising and pain receded,
her vanity resurfaced: “I was a junkie with a problem,” she admits now. She
became obsessed with her eyelids: “I looked like a hungover lizard.” So she
had them nipped and tucked, and this time was thrilled at the result. “I
began to look around my body in a more critical, almost geographic way. What
could I do next?” The turning point came in the middle of a close friend’s
funeral, which happened to clash with an appointment with her plastic
surgeon to inject Restylane into her upper lip which, she felt, was on the
thin side and could use a little Angelina Jolie-esque oomph.
“There was nothing wrong with my lip but I was in this kind of consumer frenzy
and I wanted to try everything.” So she hired a car to whisk her from the
funeral to her plastic surgeon before attending the reception, where she was
due to make a speech.
Except she never got there. Her lip swelled to the size of a yam. “It was
enormous, a cartoon upper lip bigger than any I had seen, even in the worst
plastic surgery disaster photographs.” She slunk home and didn’t speak to
anyone for five days: “I couldn’t speak because my lips didn’t fit together.
I drank vodka from a mug which said ‘Happy 29th Birthday Again’. I realised
that something had slipped from my grasp.” As she adds in her book: “I was
terrified that my lip was damaged for ever, horrified that I had insulted
Jerry [her dead friend] so soundly.”
Eventually her lip returned to normal but her humiliation was not complete. “A
few days later the skin, which had been so inflated, sheared off in thin
papery strips. It was gross: I had to peel it off with tweezers.” Thus ended
her own flirtation with self-improvement. But for many, the wake-up call
never arrives. There is nothing new about the desire for self-improvement
but now medicine and technology have caught up with this urge.
“You can really devoteyour entire life to making your fleshy envelope look as
good as it can and I think this is the first time in history we live like
that. We’re moving towards this weird Utopian culture where we are all
extremely physically beautiful.” The mantra in the cosmetic industry is that
it is never too early to start. Some women begin getting Botox — which needs
to be reinjected frequently — in their late teens and early twenties as a
prophylactic measure. Kuczynski cites the example of a 23-year-old Ivy
League graduate who gets Botox three times a year in her forehead and around
her eyes. “This way I’ll never get wrinkles, ever,” she says triumphantly.
Teenage girls clamour for breast implants: it is not uncommon for parents to
give their daughters implants as a gift for high-school graduation.
“This is a gift of love from us, and we see a difference in her,” said one
Long Island mother last year about her daughter’s new breasts. In some
quarters “pumping parties” are all the rage — a social gathering attended by
a doctor who injects Botox or some other unguent into a room full of women
sipping cocktails.
Nor is cosmetic surgery the exclusive domain of the very rich and privileged.
Sure, there are more “tits on sticks” — the name given to skinny women with
breast implants — in Los Angeles than elsewhere in the country, but even
people with very limited means are prepared to take out crippling loans from
so-called “beauty banks” to pay for cosmetic surgery. More than two thirds
of Americans who choose cosmetic surgery make less than $50,000 a year.
“Looks matter more than they ever have — especially for women,” says
Kuczynski, citing the high divorce rate and the need to get back into the
dating game at an advanced age.
“Making oneself over — one’s home, one’s car, one’s breasts — is now a part of
the American lifestyle.” Even well-publicised disaster stories do not deter
the stampede.
“People who go in for cosmetic surgery are capable of an enormous amount of
denial,” says Kuczynski. “The surgeon takes a picture of you, then, using
software, shows you the new you. You think ‘How great, it’s like shopping, I
can own that nose in two seconds’. I thought if someone famous and important
died while having unnecessary cosmetic surgery, that would create a
backlash. And then the novelist Olivia Goldsmith died [she suffered cardiac
arrest during a chin tuck] but it didn’t change anything. Let’s say George
Bush’s daughter died while having liposuction. I wonder seriously if it
would change the rates of long-term cosmetic surgery in this country, and I
hate to say it but I don’t think it would.”
I ask Kuczynski if she feels that she looks significantly different to the way
she would look if she had done nothing at all. “I wouldn’t look that
different,” she says with a laugh. “Perhaps I would have some more wrinkles
and I would have droopy eyelids. But in finishing the book and realising
that we have to decay, I think it is better to decay with a sense of
self-respect. Having stopped everything I feel so completely at rest with
myself. I’m much more beautiful, I look healthier and I feel so much more
relaxed.”
Kuczynski says that she is still trying to wean herself off a critical
appraisal of everyone she meets. “I would literally not hear what people
were saying, I was just mesmerised by how they looked and would be thinking
‘Oh just tuck it up and get some Botox’.
“When I stopped doing everything [to myself] my inner pledge was not to look
at people and think ‘Oh she might look good if she fixed that’.”
Nevertheless she is studying my face earnestly as she speaks and cannot
resist asking my age. I tell her I am 38 and ask whether she thinks I’ve had
any work done.
“You haven’t had a thing done and you shouldn’t do anything,” she says, then
hesitates: “Of course if I were a plastic surgeon I would say you should
definitely plump up your upper lip, I would put Botox there and there [she
is pointing to my nasolabial folds], I would do a little laser on these red
patches here [what red patches? I didn’t even know I had any]. As for your
neck,” she says with a frown, “your neck is remarkably good for your age,
you don’t have any wrinkles but you obviously sleep on your left side. Other
than that I think you’re perfect.”
Fortunately my squeamishness exceeds my vanity and, having read Beauty
Junkies, I know enough about the futility of cosmetic surgery not to go
there. As Kuczynski writes: “No matter how much money you spend, or how much
plastic surgery you have, or how many dermatologist visits you schedule,
inevitably, time’s winged chariot will catch up with you and march all over
your face.”
Beauty Junkies, by Alex Kuczynski, Vermillion, £7.99, published on
March 1, available for £7.59 (incl P&P) from Times BooksFirst (0870
1608080 or timesonline.co.uk/booksfirstbuy)
Women under the knife
The number of cosmetic surgery procedures in the UK rose from 19,601 in 2005
to 26,469 last year, 92 per cent of them on women. The most popular were:
Breast augmentation
6,156 (up 9 per cent from 2005). Cost: £3,400-£5,000
Eyelid surgery
5,065 (up 48 per cent). Cost: £2,850-£3,600
Liposuction
3,986 (up 90 per cent). Cost: £1,550-£5,000
Face/neck lift
3,281 (up 44 per cent). Cost: £4,200-£5,800
Breast reduction
3,219 (up 19 per cent). Cost: £3,700-£5,500
Abdominal wall surgery (tummy tuck)
2,743 (up 47 per cent). Cost: £3,800-£5,200
Nose jobs
2,678 (up 18 per cent) Cost: £3,000-£4,000
Sources: The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons, (www.baaps.org.uk
for more information.) Private Healthcare UK
