More than a million and a half Americans undergo cosmetic surgery every year. They want their noses shorter, their jaws tauter, their tummies trimmer and their busts fuller. And they wind up in the office of someone like Robert M. Goldwyn, M.D., who has written ”Beyond Appearance: Reflections of a Plastic Surgeon” (Dodd, Mead).
Q–”Vanity, thy name is woman.” Is that true?
A–About 85 percent of the people seeking cosmetic surgery, discounting hair transplants, are women.
Q–At what age do people start having their faces lifted and how often can they have it done?
A–At one point people did this in their 50s. Now people in their mid-40s and even younger are doing it. You have to have enough to work on to make it worthwhile. The more there is to work on, the longer the improvement will last. If you take someone who`s 55 and looks 65, the effect will last a lot longer than with someone who`s 38 and looks 38. It`s not unusual to operate on the same patient two or three times over the course of a practice.
Q–You write about the woman who wanted to enlarge her breasts to save her marriage. Does that ever work?
A–Almost never, and the plastic surgeon who doesn`t first take a complete and sensitive history does this type of patient an injustice. You have to ask, ”What do you want done and why do you want it at this point in your life?” The answer should contain reasonable expectations, not magic.
Q–Are there plastic-surgery addicts, women who have one cosmetic operation after another?
A–Yes. Sometimes they`re masochistic, sometimes they`re in a depression, sometimes they`re looking for self-esteem, sometimes they want a friendly relationship with their surgeons and sometimes they have nothing else to do. Whatever, I usually find they have unsatisfactory relationships with the men in their lives.
Q–Do you do liposuction, the vacuuming of fat cells out of the body?
A–Yes. We`ve been doing it in this country for about three to five years, in Europe for 20 years. On the right person who has good, tight skin and pockets of fat in localized areas, such as under the neck or in ”saddle bags” on their hips, you get very good results. But it`s not a procedure for someone who`s 150 pounds overweight.
Q–What are some possible future miracles of plastic surgery?
A–One of the major breakthroughs will be the ability to use substances, perhaps made up of the person`s own cells, that the body can`t reject. Imagine if we could reconstruct a breast, removed, say, because of cancer, using fat cells from the woman`s own body.
