Men and women want plastic surgery for all sorts of reasons. A few want to look like their favourite celebrity. Many think a part of their body should be bigger or smaller. Or maybe they just want to follow a new fashion trend, by altering their image to stand out from the crowd.
There are less superficial reasons though – such as having plastic surgery to treat life changing injuries from accidents to the body. For example some people have had to have facial reconstruction following car accidents, acid attacks, and war. These disfigurements have devastativng effects on the sufferers, and so plastic surgery is used to try and restore as much of their previous look as possible.
There is evidence that deep down, no matter how much we pretend to love ourselves, we wish we looked better. Some of us leave it at going to the gym or applying make-up, or anything other than a costly medical procedure.
But celebrities particularly often go further. In recent years we have seen people such as Kim Kardashian, Iggy Azalea and Jennifer Aniston go through with plastic surgery to change their body. They have a lot of procedures to choose from: breast and/or bum enlargement, nose sculpture, lips made to look plumper… and so the list goes on.
And now even men increasingly resort to the knife. Rodrigo Alves – known as the ‘Human Ken Doll’ – spent £373,000 on a whole list of different procedures, completely changing himself from head to toe. If celebrities with such a big following making cosmetic changes to themselves, it is not surprising that their fans sometimes do the same.
One diehard fan who said she had done this was a 19-year-old from Iran called Sahar Tabar – who claimed to have had 50 operations to look like her idol Angelina Jolie. The fact that it turned out to be a hoax just shows that this phenomenon is so common that it now even attracts satire. Before Sahar spilled the beans she attracted lots of comments in which she was likened to a ‘corpse’ and a ‘zombie’ – but she also attracted thousands of followers!
So one of the attractions of plastic surgery, even if it’s just pretend, is that it might make you famous, and therefore might make you money.