Consider some of these new features. Surgery is cross and not the privilege of the rich, lower social classes spend comparatively more money. Operations that were previously concealed now made public, with undisguised pride. There are television programs to show the before and after these interventions.

Increasingly, it blurs the line between dermatology and surgery. Arises the phenomenon of addiction to surgery in connection with disorders like body dysmorphic disorder, which leads to concentrate all the ills of a person in a single trait. We analyze the cosmetic surgery as the crossroads between medicine and consumerism.

There is already a ’surgical tourism’. Are held ‘preventive facelifts‘. They even increasingly operate parts of the body for aesthetic purposes: even the genitals. And it conceals a truism of cosmetic surgery: that carries real risks, such as doctors remember Margaret Riley, towards a more rigorous.

This was marked by purifying a medical discipline since its inception, the suspicion: regardless of their first-and unsophisticated-application in the Napoleonic battlefields, cosmetic surgery, primarily confined to the nose, had quite a few suspicious applications .

First, was applied to syphilitic nose sunken and criminal offenders with partial amputation of the nose, which was not honored much fame surgery. Secondly, he served for eugenic purposes: getting rid of an Irish nose, black or Jewish, or, as time passed the broad-match bust to waist fine Latin Aryan ideal of beauty. In any case, gradually dissolving the old tradition that vanity was not reason enough for surgery.

The current situation certainly is very different, and reflects very different motivations. Holly Brubacher notes how, in some parts of the USA, and nobody knows what a woman of fifty-five years according to their natural development. Witness the popularity of the surgery.Spain is the first country in Europe and the fourth worldwide, since 2004, in amount of plastic surgeries performed, especially among those under age 21 who copan four in ten operations.

According to statistics from the Spanish Society of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgery, in 2006, there were 300,000 operations. Botox, commonly used by non-specialists, takes the cake with 14%. A year are placed also over fifty thousand breast implants. In places are more discreet interventions of rhinoplasty-nose-and collagen injections. Situated in a global perspective, aesthetic operations have quintupled in twenty years. And they continue to grow, with new features.

In his history of the facelift, E. Haiken tells how the actress Fanny Brice in 1923 caused amazement of the American public to appear in public after visibly tweaked the nose.

Forty years later, when singer Barbara Streisand goes first on stage, the debate audience, as Haiken, had changed: the strange thing was that Streisand-hooked-nose feature had not tweaked the nose. It was popular as :  cosmetic surgery, however, was not yet known that the business of beauty would have unlimited potential.

The date of 1923 is not responding at random. The ravages of the Great War had a side effect: the medicine had to answer so many wounded soldiers who seek to rebuild their tissues to return to their normal lives.

However, this part military origin of cosmetic surgery is overlapped with a phenomenon even more decisive: the passing of a puritanical society to a secular, consumerist culture. Add the contribution of psychology in 1927, Adler first speaks of “inferiority complex”, a concept known enormous roots and involved, among other things, the notion that physical malformations fed a complex which in turn, triggered other dysfunctions of psychological.