That’s right. Now that the love you’d thought would last forever is officially gone for good, well, there’s no better time to make a change, especially in your appearance. I mean, you do want to eventually meet someone again, right? Well, don’t waste time adopting a new, happier outlook and a healthier lifestyle. No, now’s the time to be impulsive… to make radical physical changes you probably weren’t even considering prior to your divorce.
At least, that seems to be what Transform Cosmetic Surgery Group in London thinks you ought to be doing.
In the “Beauty and the Beat” section of November 2007’s Allure, Em and Lo (credited as sex columnists) breakdown various break-up “spa packages.” The Post-Divorce Pick-Me-Up is a combination procedure that includes breast enhancement, liposuction, teeth whitening and BOTOX® Cosmetic. Now, I work with a surgeon who performs plastic surgery in Phoenix, including a combination procedure, and up until now, I’d never heard of this PDPMU (kind of wish I never had).
Obviously this breakup makeover is a take-off of the Mommy Makeover offered by many plastic surgeons here in the U.S., including the aforementioned client practicing plastic surgery in Phoenix. But, whereas the mommy makeover combines breast enhancement (augmentation, lift or reduction), tummy tuck and liposuction to correct the physical changes a woman’s body experiences following childbirth, this post-divorce pick-me-up seems to be more concerned with fixing a broken heart (and as we know, only time can heal those wounds).
Plastic surgery obviously – at least, I hope it’s obvious – is for those men and women who are physically and emotionally healthy. Personally, I’m not confident that someone in the aftermath of a divorce is exactly in the right state of mind to be making the best possible decisions about their bodies.
In Allure’s article, they quoted the President of the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), Douglas McGeorge, who said, “Targeting newly divorced women like this is incredibly unsavory marketing and not the sort of thing we would advocate.” Agreed.
Mike
Well, Mike, I have to say I just don’t think the issue is as black and white as you make it sound. Sure, I would agree with you that deciding to have plastic surgery as a post-divorce pick-me-up sounds pretty frivolous at first. But in the work I’ve done with several plastic surgeons, I’ve heard many tales of people, mostly women, choosing plastic surgery to help mark some sort of important transition in their life or even to launch a new phase. The San Diego plastic surgeon I’ve been working with lately agrees with me.
My client is not alone. As a matter of fact, one plastic surgeon in Northern California, Dr. Loren Eskenazi, has written a book on the topic, noting that the desire for external transformation is often connected to internal transformation. Maybe that’s just what’s happening with the mommy makeover surgeries you reference. As they pass from the stage of being a mom with small children to point when they’re starting to get more time to live their own lives again, that’s when many women choose to have a surgical makeover.
Whose to say, then, that a post-divorce makeover isn’t a perfectly valid way to affirm your new status and start your new life? What if you’re a newly divorced woman who finally got up the courage to leave a destructive marriage? In that case, wouldn’t plastic surgery to improve your appearance be a positive statement about this new phase of your life? If such a patient made a consultation appointment with the San Diego plastic surgeon I’ve been working with, I bet he would be supportive.