Go away, richface - a rant on the new trends in plastic surgery

Okay, so maybe not so new. Surely by the time a trend makes it into the staid Globe & Mail, it has to have been around the block a few times. Here is the article: "The rise of richface: why so many young women are getting plastic surgery." Apparently young women in their twenties are willingly getting themselves injected with God knows what to acquire grotesquely bloated lips and "puffer-fish cheeks" or going under the knife to augment their breasts and change their faces, sometimes becoming practically unrecognizable (Heidi Montag, anyone?). This obsession is driven by celebrity culture, one-upmanship, and a shallowness and lack of foresight of truly, truly frightening proportions. According to the article the whole point of getting work done is to be seen as someone who can afford to get work done, so it can't be subtle, it has to be (pun intended) in your face. Big lips are a class marker the way being Rubenesque used to be -- it's just that while in days gone by the poor could not afford food, these days apparently what they can't afford is plastic surgery.

All I can say, and I am deliberately shouting here, is WHAT THE **** IS THE MATTER WITH YOU PEOPLE? You are young, you are beautiful, and your 40- or 50-year-old self will want to bitchslap you silly for your youthful idiocy once the trendy alterations you paid through the nose for are no longer in fashion. Honestly, have you got nothing better to spend your money on? No yen for travel? Or life experience? Or education? And in case you haven't noticed, the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, there is climate change going on, so by the time you get to middle age there could well be water wars and food line-ups for basics, and parts of the world, including south Florida and some New York boroughs, could easily be underwater, and there you will be with your duck lips and your inflated breasts and the shrunken rest of you wondering what the heck you did with your youth while the living was still good. Why hadn't you gone to Paris or Rome or London or Barcelona or Hong Kong or Australia on the money you wasted having poison injected into your skin? Why haven't you heard great opera in some of the great opera houses of the world, or visited the Gothic churches of Europe, or if you are not that way inclined, surfed in Hawaii or gone diving on the Great Barrier Reef, or hiked up Mount Fuji or Kilimanjaro, or sea-kayaked in Belize? You could have had some truly great food and wine or some transcendent life-altering experiences; you could have, God forbid, even helped some people in need near you or in some other part of the world. But, no, you would rather stick needles in your lips and cheeks to look like some inane celebrity than actually have a good life.

Not to put too fine a point on it, to my mind duck lips are the ultimate frivolity, a decadence to rival anything ancient Rome could offer. A hideous distortion of femininity, they aren't even attractive, but pure and simple grotesquery, pursued by the shallow for the shallowest of reasons. Welcome to celebrity culture, the end of civilization.