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 Health & Beauty | January 2005 
Botox Nation
 Forget the days of the 50-year-old face-lift. Today is the age of cosmetic surgery as youthful maintenance routine. Of minimally invasive wrinkle filling at 29 and gynecomastia treatment at 35. Of Botox, Restylane, Radiance, and a variety of other treatments that are quicker and easier to perform than a smog check.
As far as guilty pleasures go, last season's Fox reality hit The Swan - a Miss USA beauty pageant meets Extreme Makeover, featuring sixteen plain Janes magically and medically transformed into stripper-quality hotties-was hard to resist. It was classic twenty-first-century TV and, like most things on Fox Broadcasting, less a sign of the times than a hyperdriven take on a new cultural phenomenon: the casual appeal of plastic surgery.
"Half the men's procedures I do are for people 40 and younger. That's a huge shift from five years ago," says Nikolas Chugay, D.O., a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and pioneer of the male-buttock-sculpting technique and the biceps implant. "It's about men in their thirties looking for smaller, less invasive procedures with shorter recuperation time - Botox, line fillers, eyelid and temple tucks. But once they become patients, they start to say, 'What do you think of lipo-ing my flanks?'" Can you say gateway drug?
Botox is like marijuana for the plastic-surgery set: an easy first step that can lead to many more procedures. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, in 2003 the number of men receiving Botox injections increased 152 percent from 2002. A National Consumers League poll on cosmetic surgery found that 50 percent of men believe looking younger is important to professional success. (Men ages 35 to 44 say the ideal looking age is 30.)
While a core constituency of guys interested in buying a stronger chin or Brad Pitt's nose will remain, it's much more common to seek out smaller treatments that can hold back Father Time, nasolabial fold by nasolabial fold. In effect, cosmetic surgery has become an evolutionary extension of the modern health-and-fitness routine - another tool to complement Clinique Skin Supplies for Men, the Pilates machine, and that $60-a-month Propecia habit.
"Out here, it's all about worrying about how old you look while you're still really young," says Fraser Ross, owner of Kitson, an L.A. boutique that now sells more eye cream to men than to women. "The MTV generation has you over-the-hill at 30, so it makes some weird sense to go out and get Botox on your lunch break."
One of the unique ironies of Botox is that it's effectively a younger man's drug. "By and large, the people who respond best to Botox are between 25 and 55," reports Christopher Zachary. M.D., a clinical professor in the department of dermatology at the University of California, San Francisco. "As we age, our muscular activity and skin elasticity decreases, and as a result, the body is less responsive." In other words, come and get it while the getting's good.
So, are we approaching the day and age of the MTV Spring Break Botox Bash? Not quite. But will cosmetic surgery continue to get quicker, easier, cheaper, and more readily available, to the point where it's just another service offered at your highend gym? Probably so. Will Fox ever televise a sweepsweek special featuring certified male nerds who, after being surgically transformed into virtual Heath Ledger clones, go back and seduce the girls who snubbed them in high school? Count on it. Will we watch? What do you think?
-Robert Moritz |
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