When I first thought about this question my answer was “not really.” Then I spotted this article about giving compliments in the age of plastic surgery. I suppose walking up to someone and saying, “You look so much younger! Did you get a facelift?” probably isn’t going to win you any friends.

The women in this article said she went from an “A” to a “C” cup and now people come up to her and tell her “nice boobs.” Harsh.

And yet sometimes I see people on TV and wonder how far they really want to go with plastic surgery. You see some celebrity and they look so completely overdone that it does illicit a shocking response. But when you see someone in person, you have to remember your manners. The article recommends keeping all the questions to yourself unless the person in question brings it up themselves, and even then, don’t just blurt out some comment like, “Are they real?”

But you can still wonder silently!

Image: sxc.hu.

Post from: Blisstree

Etiquette in the Age of Plastic Surgery

I know you won’t read this, and even if you do it won’t change your mind. But there are some things I need to say.

Sometime in the next 8 hours, you will be lying half naked on an operating table, with orange antibacterial swipes across your breasts, surrounded by people who see dollar signs when they look at you, people who know this is a bad idea because you’re still so young that your body may very well change and you’re doing this for the wrong reasons but don’t care, because you’re paying for their big houses and their swimming pools and their kids’ braces. This image breaks my heart.

And after they swab your skin, they are going to cut into you, beautiful you, and you will never be the same again. There will be something foreign there, something that makes you feel even less connected with the body you loathe despite its utter perfection and perfect proportionality, and there will be scars where they stitch your flesh back together to hold the implants in.

It will not make you love yourself more. It will not make him want you back — and if it does I will personally kick his butt because that would mean that he’s not the person either of us thought he was. It will not make you better or more beautiful. Your breasts will be bigger but what’s on the inside won’t change, and that’s what you’re really trying to enhance with this surgery.

It’s your choice, I understand that, but I wish you would wait, think it through, decide against it. You’re, what, 19? Your boobs are still new, still figuring out what they’re going to do. And in a few years, who knows whether they’ll bust out on their own. It’s not like you can’t do it later if you want. But do you really need to do this right now? Do you really need the recovery time taken off from work right now? Do you really need the painful hours of lying half-propped-up with your chest bound, thinking about what you’ve done? Do you really need the $6,000 debt?

You made the decision a week and a half ago, on a whim, and it’s going to be with you forever. It’s not like a piercing that you can take out and have only the tiniest of scars remaining, or a tattoo that you can cover up or have remove. It’s not subtle. These are your boobs, the first part of you to enter a room, the most prominent part of your profile. Yes, you can get them removed later (for another $6,000, I suspect), but you’ll still have the scars, the stretched-out skin, the second major recovery period, the second set of risks from a surgery you just don’t need.

When I look at you, I will always see you as you’ve been your whole life until today, small breasts and all, and I will still think you’re beautiful. I just wish you could look in the mirror and see that, too. I wish you would see that it’s not going to change anything. I wish you would cancel your appointment and never go back.

Contents © Copyright 2007 Kristen King

Post from: Blisstree

To My Friend, on the Morning of Her Boob Job