Harley Street Secrets

A journalist called my office the other day, asking if I wanted to be in a TV show about cosmetic surgery (as the real me, Snake is not that popular yet). Now, I would never go on TV, and the most I have done is an interview with a lovely woman during a radio program that, for what I could understand, was discussing cosmetic surgery together with some fusion cooking and the possibility that a shadow in a picture from Mars was really an alien as tall as the Empire State Building. But the woman was truly lovely, and we were only going to be over the phone, so I accepted to say few things that had to look original and spontaneous, but in reality were carefully planned during a previous phone call just fifteen minutes before.
I still remember the feeling of inconclusiveness that I had for the rest of that day. Apparently, when you say something on a program, you have to avoid any sensitive topic, and almost everything becomes a sensitive topic, if you are a journalist willing to keep your job. As a surgeon on show, you will normally only be allowed to say something really revolutionary, like ‘breast enlargement could result in bigger breasts and increased confidence’.
Even with these personal idiosyncrasies and previous experiences of my own, I still love when a journalist calls my office. You have to understand that journalists thrive on new stories, and, when there is nothing available, they start panicking a bit. They also love to copy each other (especially when the other journalist is writing from the USA), so sometimes it is true that a butterfly’s flight in the USA becomes a storm in Europe, given and taken the necessary ‘lost in translation’ bits to avoid the said sensitive topics.
When a journalist calls, I suddenly and effortlessly get to know what the entire category will put on magazines and TV shows for at least the following three months. This time, the refrain was going to be patients that want to have cosmetic surgery to look like their favourite celebrities. You know, stuff like Angelina Jolie’s nose or George Clooney’s chin. It was a bit disappointing, as I had heard of that already. Even the International Society of Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ISAPS), normally as reactive as a bradypus after a good Sunday lunch with relatives, must have sent me a questionnaire about this topic a year before. Or maybe everything was happening exactly because of the ISAPS. I seem to remember that ISAPS planned to run a campaign to bring the attention of the media to us, highly qualified members of the International Society.
One way or the other, this particular journalist was on the phone asking me to take part to a TV show, with a twist. I had to bring some patients of mine, carefully selected among those that came to me to look like a celebrity of their choice. There would have been preoperative pictures, a full presentation of the brilliant results, and possibly sponsored drinks and canapés.
I never operated on a patient willing to have his/her nose or any other body part cloned from a celebrity, but I had some people asking for it (and in case you wondered, yes, I did have more than one patient asking to have a penis the same size of a famous male porn star). I therefore confessed to having no patients for the show, and that was the first time in my life I really regretted not upgrading my office’s phone technology to video calls. The journalist was sort of chocking, and I would have loved to see what shade of rotting green his face was turning. Apparently, it is not possible, if you are a modern cosmetic surgeon, that you don’t do Angelina Jolie’s noses. I also confirmed I didn’t have a catalogue of the models of breasts and noses on offer, and I made it worse adding that I know a good psychiatrist I would normally refer this type of patients to. Unfortunately, even the psychiatrist is not happy to deal with journalists.
The conversation ended. No time to explain that you must really have a psychological problem if, instead of simply improving your own look, you want to become a poor clone of somebody else. No chance to say that this is also technically impossible and regularly disappointing, especially when you want Angelina Jolie’s nose and look but have the eating habits of a hummingbird (a tiny bird that eats several times its weight in food every day).
Over the recent years, I’ve been asked to discuss many other topics, most of them now not trendy any more, but still occasionally used to fill the pages of newspapers and magazines. You may as well have memories of teenagers asking their parents to have cosmetic surgery as their Christmas present, or of the ubiquitous theory that men are increasingly moving in hordes toward cosmetic surgery, and even better you must have recently heard of people spending their redundancy money in surgical procedures (normally, a breast enlargement: some enlightened journalists like to say that it helps to find a new job. Thankfully, journalists do not always have a very scientific approach and in this case they failed to elaborate on the real reasons why this should happen).
Excuse me for turning momentarily naughty, but my favourite topic of all times shall remain the ‘designer vagina’. I wish I could one day see the face of the man or the woman that came up with that definition, a stroke of pure marketing genius impossible to replicate. The words ‘vaginal tightening’ surely conjured connections to a painful past when women had no rights, while the ‘designer’ concept links to sexy car models and repetitive business: who would go out with a vagina that is the fashion from last spring?
Bringing fashion and cosmetic surgery together is the secret dream of any commercial company and any journalist. Year after year they could get new business out of the same patients. It has been tried even with tattoos, but unfortunately nobody managed to find a good way to remove them completely, leaving the skin ready for a new design.
And this is where we finally go full circle, with companies, my poor green journalist and the story of patients wanting the nose of Angelina Jolie. It is not that that they want to convince you that there is such a thing as a perfect nose. It is that they want to talk you into models of noses and breasts, changing them like cars after a year or two. It will probably be 2012 or so when a new model of nose from a different celebrity will be the trend of the moment, and the perfect breasts will change their cup size from DD down to D or up to F. You will definitely need a new procedure.