Would you drop $30K to look like Ivanka?
More women are saying yes, some plastic surgeons say
When a woman shows a celebrity picture to her plastic surgeon and says, “I want to look like her,” the face glowing on her phone might be Jennifer Lopez, Kim Kardashian, Angelina Jolie or Scarlett Johansson. And now, some surgeons say, the new star is Ivanka Trump.
“In my practice, Ivanka is sort of the new style icon for plastic surgery,” says Houston surgeon Franklin Rose, who has done extensive work on “several” women who wanted to look more like President Trump’s elder daughter.
And why not? “I think she’s exquisite,” Rose says.
So does one of his patients, Jenny Stewart, 37, who had more than six hours of surgery last summer to reshape her nose and augment her breasts. She got liposuction to harvest fat to lift her buttocks, and she got injectable fillers for her face. All of it cost about $30,000, a discount because Stewart agreed to do interviews with reporters.
( People magazine profiled another of Rose’s Texas patients, Tiffany Taylor, who spent $60,000 to look like Ivanka.)
“At first the healing process was painful ... but after that I’m absolutely happy with the results,” Stewart says.
Stewart had seen Ivanka in the media before the election but hadn’t really thought of her as a model for enhancing her own appearance. But she took notice when Donald Trump ran for president, and Ivanka, 35 and formerly best known in New York, suddenly was all over global news feeds.
“I was very much interested in the election, and that’s when I started thinking she was pretty,” says Stewart, a mother of two and an IT headhunter consultant who lives in Houston and Los Angeles. She Googled images of Ivanka and picked three she thought exhibited the features she admired: Ivanka’s small nose, the way her breasts fit her frame, and her rounded cheeks.
“I thought Ivanka was classically pretty and not overdone,” she says. “I had always admired her appearance, but then I started seeing her more often.”
Oh, and politics had nothing to do with it, she says: She voted for Hillary Clinton.
In the old days, Rose says, patients would come in with pictures from magazines — say, Play
boy — and now they come in with pictures on their cellphones. In recent years, patients would say they want buttocks like Lopez’s or Kardashian’s, breasts like Johansson’s or lips like Jolie’s.
Now Ivanka has reached movie star-level celebrity — more visible than her stepmother, ex-modelturned-first lady Melania Trump — thanks to her steady presence on the campaign trail, her carefully curated Instagram page and her position as an unofficial adviser to Dad at the White House.
“Absolutely, I have had a lot of patients in the past six months or more who ask about Ivanka’s great and sculpted, clean facial features, including her high cheekbones and beautiful skin and elegant nose,” says Rod Rohrich, a plastic surgeon in Dallas and professor of plastic surgery at the University of Texas Southwestern. He says she’s “in the top five” on the list of people patients cite when they ask for fillers on their cheeks and for rhinoplasty.
“There’s always been an interest in the appearance and the trends of public figures, and (Ivanka) has been a good example, because she’s a very pretty woman, she’s articulate and she has classic features,” says Alan Matarasso, a leading plastic surgeon in Manhattan, a professor of surgery at Hofstra University Northwell School of Medicine and a vice president and spokesman for the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
(Matarasso and other plastic surgeons say it is crucial for would-be patients to consult board-certified surgeons, no matter whom they want to look like. The plastic surgeons society’s website provides a free service to help link patients with doctors.)
The trend is not visible everywhere. Surgeon Lyle Leipziger, chief of plastic surgery at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, N.Y., and at Long Island Jewish Medical Center in New Hyde Park, N.Y., says his patients don’t come in with celebrity pictures — or any pictures.
“In my practice, patients don’t usually come in asking to look like someone else; they want to be a more enhanced version of
themselves,” he says. “Over the years, there isn’t a patient who hasn’t said ‘I want to look natural.’ ... The best plastic surgery doesn’t leave you looking plastic.”
Nor does Leipziger believe most surgeons are seeing an increase in Ivanka-copying patients. “I certainly understand that Ivanka Trump is a beautiful, stunning and poised individual, and I can understand how people can identify with her,” he says. “But I don’t know if this is happening elsewhere.”