Women who refuse to face up to vanity

Published on Wednesday 1 September 2010 14:24

Most women having cosmetic surgery believe it is only other people - never themselves - who are motivated by vanity when they choose to go under the knife, according to research by a Scottish sociologist.

Clients do not see themselves as following in the footsteps of celebrities such as Jordan, Joan Rivers and Cher, famed for their surgical enhancements.

And they create the notion of a "surgical other" - women who have cosmetic surgery with little consideration of its risks - to justify having surgery to create what they insist is a natural look.

The findings will be officially revealed today by Dr Debra Gimlin, a sociologist at Aberdeen University, at the British Sociological Association's medical sociology conference in Durham.

Dr Gimlin said her research was based on interviews with 80 women in Britain and America who had undergone cosmetic surgery. She found that more than 60 per cent of those interviewed had created the notion of a so-called "surgical other" - women who went under the knife with hardly any regard for the risk involved, had unreasonable expectations of its effects and were obsessively concerned with their appearance.

These women, on the other hand, justified their own need for cosmetic surgery by insisting they wanted to look normal. They defined the surgical other as "narcissistic and shallow" while at the same time stressing their own "greater concern with the more important things in life: jobs, family and health".

Dr Gimlin said: "When it comes to women like Jordan, Joan Rivers, Cher and Pamela Anderson, they insist 'I am not one of them.' They would talk about Michael Jackson as being a sort of icon for the surgery junkies and say 'I'm not like that.'

"They feel that some of the women they see in magazines have gone too far and insist that they are not going to go too far with their surgery. And I think it's to explain something that remains socially problematic."

She revealed: "A lot of them say they just want to look normal - they just want to be able to walk down the street and have no-one pay any attention to them. I have talked to a lot of women who have lived their whole lives with breasts that got way more attention than they wanted or a nose that got way too much attention.

"I think it's much more difficult for a woman to sit there and say it's about wanting to be beautiful."

But cosmetic doctor Nicholas Rayner said that in his experience, women tended to use public figures as reference points as to how they wanted to look.

"I have not had a huge number of women who have come to me who said they felt they needed to justify or rationalise their desire for surgery."Most of people I see tend to have seen the idea on other people and want to look more like that, rather than distance themselves from that."

He said that they tended to reference people in the public eye, or friends and family, who have had work done.