July 29, 2006
The Horrors of Plastic Surgery
I guess I should be thankful that I rarely have to see the dark side of Los Angeles's obsession with plastic surgery (read: I don't live in Beverly Hills). The concept of people willingly paying someone a shitload of money to stretch, hack on, contort, and inject shit into their faces to indulge their vanity and temporarily soothe their fear of *gasp* getting old is still foreign to me. I've seen quite a bit of travesties to humanity while living in this city, like the shriveled, ancient old woman with the rack of a porn star, the woman with lips so plumped from collagen it looked like she had a fucking pink couch on her face, and the obviously balding, paunchy middle-aged guy with a set of hair plugs that looked like plague-infested sewer rats had ravaged his scalp clean.
And no matter how often I reassure myself that this is normal for L.A., that an unending obsession with beauty is normal for most of these people, and that if I had a shitload of money I'd probably get a little bit of liposuction in the stomach area to get rid of my decreasing gut just to expedite the process, I still get a little weirded out when I see someone who looks like a walking mannequin.
Which is precisely what happened this morning as I was headed to the post office.
I was strolling along, looking at stuff, listening to the big-band morning show on KJAZZ (don't laugh, it's good shit), when a woman turned the corner and headed towards me, with a tangled herd of yipping Pomeranians trailing behind her on a series of leashes. I immediately got a kick out of the sight of five annoying dogs bugging out and attacking each other while some bimbo dragged them along in hopes that they'd just wrap around each other after a while and form an easy-to-carry cocoon. As she and the dogs grew closer, however, she turned from a normal person into a bizarre spectacle that would have made Picasso scratch his head. Dumpy blonde hair. A 60 some-odd year-old body. But her face?
Jesus.
Her face was....bone-chilling. It looked like it had been scrubbed with bleach and steel wool, and the rest of it was stretched back, making her look like a caricature of a person rather than a real live human being. Her eyes looked almost Asian thanks to the lift, and her skin was so botoxed up that her face appeared to be frozen in a mask of indifference. No lines anywhere. You could have used her forehead to smooth out plaster. Her lips had been chopped and thinned out to where they formed a thin pink slash across her face, almost like a knife wound. A fish wearing lipstick, even. I tried my best to keep my eyes from widening in terror and fought off the urge to run screaming and flailing wildly to the safety of the other side of the street. She looked at me as I passed and tried to smile, and I swear to god it was like watching someone stretch a rubber therapy band. I'd have almost felt sorry for her, except I realized that she voluntarily did that to herself, and that pity would be wasted.
I can totally understand the reasoning behind reconstructive plastic surgery. If someone had an accident and was missing part of their face, get it fixed if it'll make you feel better about yourself. Liposuction? It's pretty commonplace after people have bariatric surgery or lose a ton of weight, so I can get behind that. But as I said before, it baffles me how people can willfully fight like hell against the natural process of aging. They'll willfully inject a paralyzing fungus into their face, they'll get shit shot into their lips that makes them look like Mick Jagger after a bar fight, and they'll hack off and re-arrange pieces of their nose just for the sake of vanity. All that money, all that pain, and all you'll really have in the end (if you're lucky) is a good-looking corpse. I'll never understand it.
Maybe they won't either.
Posted by Jake at July 29, 2006 09:11 AM
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