Call them the forgotten victims of the economic slump.
Over the summer, 53% of the cosmetic surgeons surveyed by the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery reported that their businesses were suffering as a result of the recession. That may not sound too terrible to you -- but the figure translates into untold thousands of Americans forced, by hard economic necessity, to soldier on without liposuction, breast augmentation or face-lifts.
As national unemployment and home foreclosure rates continue to rise, media commentary has been singularly unsympathetic to the plight of the nation's cosmetic surgeons and their too-broke-for-Botox patients. "Hardly the stuff of tragedy," wrote Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar in an article for this paper. In the online magazine Slate, William Saletan agreed: "Excuse me while I celebrate."
To Saletan, economic hard times are forcing an overdue "reaffirmation of the distinction between necessary and unnecessary procedures." He scoffs at surgeons who try to peddle cosmetic surgery as "an investment." Cosmetic surgery is "not health. It's not even disposable property."
But spare a little sympathy for those who now find cosmetic surgery unaffordable. In many ways, it's completely rational for Americans to think of cosmetic surgery as an "investment" -- maybe even a necessity -- and yearn for it, particularly during times of economic stress.
After all, we live in a society that rewards beauty (and penalizes ugliness) in a multitude of ways, often using the medium of cold, hard cash.
The benefits of physical attractiveness start early. Research suggests that nurses in maternity wards spend more time with the cute babies. Even parents, God help us, apparently take better care of cute kids than of ugly ones -- mothers of newborns smile and coo more if they have an attractive infant, and in a 2005 Canadian study, researchers found that parents with unattractive children were less likely to bother to buckle the little tykes' seat belts on supermarket carts.
When it comes to the workplace, the benefits of attractiveness continue. Attractive people are perceived as smarter and more effective in the workplace than their less attractive counterparts, and attractive job applicants are more likely to be hired than their less attractive competitors.
