How the dread of ‘Muppet face’ scared Britain off plastic surgery
DEMAND for cosmetic surgery ‘fell of the cliff’ last year after nearly a decade of surging popularity, according to the industry’s leading professional body.
The British Association of Aesthetic and Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) publishes its annual audit tomorrow, giving the only accurate insight into how many people in the UK have ‘nip and tuck’ procedures.
I was given an exclusive look ahead of the report’s release.
It reveals that the market shrank by nine per cent overall. Most marked was a plunge in numbers of men opting for a nip and tuck, with a little more than 4,000 going under the knife – a 15 per cent decrease on the previous year.
Nose jobs, which were last year’s most popular procedure for men, plummeted by a third, with 713 being carried out, and even the number of ‘moob’ reductions has dropped by ten per cent.
Eye-lift surgery – blepharoplasty – is now the most popular procedure for men, with 849 patients having theirs ‘fixed’. However, there was still a four per cent fall in blepharoplasty cases overall.
For women, breast augmentation remained the most popular procedure, but numbers deflated by almost a quarter.
The second most popular procedure in women was blepharoplasty, with 7,750 choosing the operation.
So what does it all mean? Well, it could indicate a more cautious approach from the public after a record 50,000 plastic surgery procedures were carried out in Britain the previous year.
Although there’s been a downturn in business, BAAPS – which represents the vast majority of NHS-trained consultant plastic surgeons in private practice – certainly welcomes the trend.
Its former president, Rajiv Grover, told me: ‘It’s not just a slight dip – numbers have dropped off a cliff.
‘But if the public are being more thoughtful, cautious and educated in their approach to cosmetic surgery, we are thrilled.’
I’d like to think so. Two years ago, The Mail on Sunday launched its Stop The Cosmetic Surgery Cowboys campaign, which urged the Government to regulate the sector and called for commonsense rules, such as allowing only surgeons trained in boob jobs or nose jobs to offer such operations.
Despite this and an independent review led by the Medical Director of the NHS in England, Sir Bruce Keogh, which backed all our demands, little has changed.
But there has been a growing impetus within the medical profession itself to hammer home the importance of education, and perhaps that’s now paying off.
It’s possible that the disturbing rise of what’s dubbed the fake look (or, in some quarters, the ‘Muppet face’) has also turned more rational adults off.
Some celebrities popular with the teen, tween and even younger market, such as reality stars the Kardashians, the girls from Towie and singer Tulisa Contostavlos, opt for cartoonishly unreal facial augmentation – and happily admit to it.
These characters were extremely pretty before they had their work done. But their enhancements – apple-like cheeks and protruding lips – are almost grotesque.
They are mostly due to injections of Botox and fillers rather than full-on surgery, but such extremes have resulted in more subtle effects becoming the new aesthetic ideal.
The BAAPS audit shows that liposuction, the surgical removal of fat through fine tubes, was one of few procedures to rise in popularity, with ten per cent more cases being carried out.
Intriguingly, the number of breast reductions also increased slightly, by three per cent.
Coincidentally, both erstwhile glamour girl Katie Price and Victoria Beckham – once poster girls for the pneumatic boob job – have gone down a few cup sizes in recent years. The former is often brutally honest about her regrets at having extreme surgery.
Despite all this, the horror stories continue. Just last week, this newspaper saw pictures of one well-known reality star who is suffering from a hideous, painful lip deformity after botched filler injections. This once-gorgeous woman is likely to need reconstructive surgery and may well be left permanently disfigured.
It seems the cowboys are still going strong. Don’t expect the law to step in and stop them any time soon. The hope is that we’ll all just get better at spotting them before they can do any more damage.