Why do so many women (and men) go for elective plastic surgery?

If you ask me, I think plastic surgery is a wonderful thing and one of the great medical advances of the 20th century.  For people who have been born with deformities or who have been disfigured in accidents, plastic surgery is a godsend to help reconstruct both their physical features and their lives.  What I have difficulty in accepting is people having plastic surgery not for purposes of reconstruction but for cosmetic purposes, for the “improvement” of body parts that are perfectly fine.

For most of us, we are our own worst critics, and no one looks more closely at us than ourselves.  To other people, I’m an attractive 30-something slender woman with a porcelain complexion.  To myself, I’m a woman who no longer has the body of a 16-year old, has cellulite on her butt which at one time was smooth and firm, has a slowly developing jelly belly, and has minor blemishes on her pale face that need to be concealed with makeup.  Do I like what I see in the mirror?  Not always.  Do I want to have elective plastic surgery to tighten up my butt and belly?  Definitely not.

Of course, we all want to look our best and put our best foot forward.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  Nowadays, however, so many of us are concerned about preserving our youth–getting liposuction to shape our thighs, getting implants to make our breasts or pecs bigger, injecting Botox to get rid of the wrinkles on our faces.  The results of such procedures are clearly evident on celebrities such as Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton, Greta Van Susteren, and Joan Rivers.  I don’t know about you, but personally, I like their pre-surgery looks better.  Sure, they didn’t look perfect, but they looked normal and natural in comparison to the strangely fake way they look now.

What is wrong with accepting ourselves and our imperfections which are actually not imperfections at all.  According to the spiritual writer Don Miguel Ruiz, “We are born perfect, and we will die perfect.  The problem is that we create that character in our story that we pretend to be, or that we want to be, and we cannot hide that from ourselves.  We know that we are pretending to be what we are not in the name of perfection.”

Shouldn’t we stop imagining or pretending to be something or someone that we’re not?  Why can’t we just be content and acknowledge that we are perfect just as we are right now?

Why, indeed.