Cosmetic Surgery

Cosmetic Surgery

Do you ever find yourself with so much time to kill that you end up doing something utterly pointless? Well yesterday whilst I was waiting for a check up at the doctors, I did exactly that. The doctor was running so late with his appointments, that I found myself wedged in to the corner of the stuffy waiting room reading a magazine. Now to most of you this exercise will not seem completely pointless, because everybody likes magazines-don’t they?

Well, I for one have never liked them. Perhaps it’s the perfect and glossy covers and size zero models that are displayed throughout or the gruesome gossip from the lives of celebrities that we really DON’T care about. But no actually, it’s the articles inside. Its not that they are badly written or too lengthy or even too condensed (and there is such a thing as not saying enough), its not even the ‘get in your face’ headlines that carry the worst puns ever invented but it’s the actual storyline of the pieces that irritate me. The fashion articles and the beauty tips, telling me how I can look exactly like Katie Price within a maximum of three days, it’s the stories that have no substance and focus completely on looks that get to me most. If you were to flick through a magazine- go on I dare you- I could guarantee that 90% of all articles have some focus on looks. As a society we are image obsessed.

As I sat in this crowded waiting room, flicking through a month old copy of the magazine in question, I found a prime example of this. About three pages in to the magazine (usually the place for headline stories) I was presented with a huge image of what at first glance I believed to be a Barbie doll. The ‘doll’ in fact proved to be a 30-year-old woman who had just had surgery to look exactly like her childhood hero ‘Barbie’. Extreme or what? Granted, this woman looked exactly like her idol, but the fact that she went so far as to have surgery to do so really baffles me.

Doing a little research of my own, I came to discover that Barbie herself (Barbara Millicent Richards-if you please) if she were an actual person would have 6-7ft frame and a weight that would register her as dangerously anorexic. Now who would want to look like that? Obviously somebody who is not comfortable with their own body! And I believe this is a common issue, besides the little gripes we might have about eating too much or our noses being a little crooked, how many of us would go the extreme of having surgery to fix these things? Not me.