By MELISSA WELLHAM
I don’t know about you, but if someone asked me whether this woman needed to have plastic surgery, my answer would be a fairly vehement ‘no’.
24-year-old Phoebe Hooke, a journalist for CLEO magazine, recently went undercover and visited leading cosmetic surgeons around Sydney, and asked for their advice on what she needed to do to “fix” her face.
The answers were varied – in the sense that the doctors recommend a variety of procedures, not that anyone told her she looked more than fine just the way she is. A nose job, browlifts, fillers and botox and pretox (a cosmetic surgery aimed at women in their 20s) were just some of the helpful procedures offered to Phoebe.
The first cosmetic surgeon she saw told her that, “Your nose is dominating your face.”
And followed that up with the very polite explanation, “We need a plan to fix it. I don’t want to see some hanging kamikaze hawk thing going on.”
Others told her she needed a non-surgical brow lift (for only $3500), medical grade skincare (for an absolute bargain at $400), or that she should do something about her “missing cheekbones”.
Hooke told News Ltd that one cosmetic consultant, “suggested plumping up my cheeks with fillers to balance out my ‘boxy masculine jawline’. I felt a lump in my throat. Being told my ‘best feature’ needs $1100-worth of dermal fillers is heartbreaking.”
“At first, there was a certain excitement that came from being told how I could improve my looks, a bit like having the offer of a real-life Insty filter,” Hooke said. “But there’s a comedown: are my flaws really that obvious?”
As CLEO editor Sharri Markson points out, this kind of advice from cosmetic surgeons is reflective of a society where increasingly younger and younger girls are made to feel they don’t compare to a Hollywood ideal where the standard of beauty relies on photoshopped images and personal trainers.
But more dangerously, advice like this from surgeons is actually exacerbating the issue.