Opinion / Can you afford cosmetic surgery? Once a luxury, facelifts, liposuction and breast augmentation is now the norm – but what sets an exclusive service apart?
Nose jobs, tummy tucks, eyelid reshaping and forehead lifts are among the increasingly commonplace procures which, once the purview of the rich and famous, are now an affordable option for all – but there are still exclusive luxury options for the A-list crowd
This story is part of STYLE's Inside Luxury column.
Did she? Or didn’t she? One particular sector has been booming for many years: plastic surgery. Whether a facelift, jaw contouring, nose job, liposuction or a complete body makeover, what was once a procedure for the rich and famous is becoming increasingly mainstream.
There are estimates that the number of annual procedures in China exceed 10 million; between 20 and 30 per cent of Korean women underwent some form of plastic surgery; and more than a million people in the US submit to these procedures every year.
“The number one reason for women and men to come to my office for a procedure is the fear of not being as successful as they could be,” a celebrity surgeon once told me, when working on a consultancy project in California. As a consequence, clients reach out for fear of not landing a desired job, not finding the partner they want, or even being left by their spouse for someone younger and potentially more beautiful. This makes them feel vulnerable and insecure in their own, natural skin.
The increasingly curated digital existences that social media demands have likely only fuelled demand for plastic surgery. But while procedures themselves may be becoming more commonplace and even affordable, there is an exclusive, high-end market segment emerging in parallel and it teaches us what luxury really means – extreme value creation.
For many celebrities, plastic surgery is still something not to talk about openly – despite it being quasi-ubiquitous in A-list circles. As a result, discretion becomes a driver of extreme value and a means of differentiation – it’s this that turns the mainstream into luxury, creating a network of luxury services around the procedures.