The Real Plastics

• Thursday May 4, 2006 in: Female Perspectives Tag(s):

  Normally, teenage girls splurge on pizza, clothes, makeup, Avril Lavigne CDs, or whatever cool stuff in existence whenever they get their hands on some money. Apparently, nobody told these teenagers featured in the May 1 online issue of Australia's The Courier Mail newspaper about that.

  While most teenage girls, like the members of "The Plastics" clique from the movie Mean Girls, would be more than happy spending hundreds of dollars on a shopping spree, the Australian girls featured in the article plunk literally thousands of dollars shopping, not for clothes, not for make-up, but for a brand new pair of breasts.

  According to the piece, cosmetic surgery procedures have become quite accessible to teens with the advent of the so-called "makeover mortgages". To pay for, say, breast implants that cost somewhere in the vicinity of $8000 and $10000, these girls take out loans in the appropriate amount and pay something like $55 a week over the next five years.

  It's not exactly the easiest of payment terms for someone still fresh out of high school, but it appears to be bearable enough. That probably explains the 30% increase in the number of Australian women below 20 undergoing cosmetic surgery over the past three years.

  But if I were the father of these girls, I'd probably suffer a massive stroke, lapse into a coma and get fed through the nose for the rest of my natural life.

  Don't get me wrong. I think plastic surgery is a good thing, and every human being on the planet has the right to get it done. It's just that personally, I don't agree with the idea of girls going under a cosmetic surgeon's knife at such an early age. Being adolescents, these girls' bodies are still in the process of fully developing, and therefore should not be messed with, at least until their growth hormones finally max out. This is not to mention that plastic surgery requires a certain degree of emotional maturity, something I doubt many of these teenagers possess.

  But peer pressure, their own personal insecurities, images of incredulously perfect beauties in mass media and the growing notoriety of plastic surgery-based reality shows like Extreme Makeover and The Swan are getting the better of these kids. Even the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) is with me on this one, as it voices concerns in the article that more and more teenagers are being driven to have plastic surgery by peer pressure.

  But what really gets my goat is the Big Brother Australia contestant named Krystal who traded her C-cup breasts in for "D" ones "to improve her self-confidence". Maybe no one told her that her C-cups, coupled with her already drop-dead gorgeous looks, are more than enough to make any alpha male her slave for life. But nooooo, she had to get bigger tits, with her mom, a fellow contestant on the show, cheering her on.

  If a hottie like Krystal is that insecure, then God help those who stood last in line while He handed out beauty, then ran out of it.