Plastic, but not fantastic

Cosmetic surgery for the rich and famous is booming. Why do they do it, wonders Clive James, in his Point of View column.

According to all media, so it must be true, plastic surgery is a growth industry world wide. People who've had face-lifts are having their face-lifts lifted. The Taiwanese are having New Year face-lifts to bring them luck.

Often the resulting luck looks bad, but it's hard to sympathise when someone becomes a victim of failed plastic surgery that they never needed.

Usually that's a decision that we make for them: that they didn't need it. Knowing what they looked like before they did it, we decide they didn't need to do it. But they mightn't have felt like that.

Anyone who undertakes major plastic surgery really doesn't like the way they look, even if we never saw much wrong with it.

There is a person called Pete Burns who went on Channel 4's Big Brother and got famous for being a forgotten rock singer. He got additionally famous for being a forgotten rock singer who'd had something unforgettable done to his mouth.

He'd had that thing done that people who want new mouths do. They don't want new mouths in the sense of a mouth like the old mouth, only young again. They want a new mouth in the sense of a different mouth, a mouth that has been seen nowhere on earth except below sea level.

"It's easy to laugh until you see the pictures, and realise he's in real trouble, physical trouble to match the psycho-logical trouble he must have been in the first place"

Interview with Clive James

Apparently the idea is that the top lip should be at least as big as the bottom lip, and the result, even done in moderation, always looks as if the original mouth has been removed, inflated like a small plastic paddling pool, and put back on upside down.

Pete Burns had the advanced version. I switched Big Brother on accidentally one night and there he was, so I switched it off immediately, but not before having my retinas seared with the image of one of those car-sized fish that lurk deep below the reef, waiting to ingest the brass boot of a deep sea diver.

After leaving the show, Pete mercifully sank out of sight, but recently he got famous all over again because he wanted to sue the surgeons who hadn't, in his view, put his mouth back the way it was, although he hasn't yet made clear how long ago he means by the way it was: he might only mean the way it was last year, when it was already uncommonly large but still more or less attached to him.

Apparently it now more or less isn't. It's easy to laugh until you see the pictures, and then you realise he's in real trouble, physical trouble to match the psychological trouble he must have been in the first place.

Original 'guinea pigs'

And there's the connection between plastic surgery that doesn't serve an obvious purpose and plastic surgery that does. The second kind started at East Grinstead Hospital, where a pioneering team of surgeons developed the techniques to help make continued life possible for Battle of Britain fighter pilots whose faces had been ruined by flame.