Awful Plastic Surgery and Aging... Where are you?

Most of the pictures in the site http://www.awfulplasticsurgery.com/category/cher/ are of celebrities. One woman's face, due to her perception of how she looked... was so altered that she wasn't attractive at all anymore. Joan Rivers is a good example, Michael Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and a slew of other actors and actresses all had nose jobs or work done on their faces and their bodies too.

The even have implants for guys arms to make their biceps and triceps look bigger. Talk about obsession. Wow.

I sat looking at these photographs in the site for about 40 minutes last night... I liked most of the before pictures, specially when you see what could happen if you go over board under the knife.

Saturday I went to my dentist. This is relevant :) bear with me. I went to the dentist and he did a big scaling and cleaning ... and he shaved my lower teeth down a little bit, and a top tooth a little bit too.

He handed me a mirror and before I looked I said, "If I don't seem to like it immediately, keep in mind that I've seen myself the same way for a number of years and it may take me a while psychologically to accept the newer view." He says, it looks great, you'll see.

I looked and it was "okay"... it took me until I got home and looked again to think... hmmm... yah, that's pretty good.

When I looked in the mirror, due to all the faces I was making and aging myself, all the fine lines in my forehead and around my eyes were really winking at me. Actually, they were waving madly! I told him, I think you just aged me 10 years... Yah, like they weren't there before? Suuuure they weren't.

Everyone is affected, whether they admit it or not, by what they perceive to be perfection in themselves. Heck, even the prettiest women in hollywood changed things about their faces.

As I age, I notice the fine lines, thankfully they're laugh lines, not frown lines. I have them in my forehead from the many expressions I make, not so much around my eyes, around my mouth ... you know those apostrophe's we can have there from smiling. Course, the skin begins to lose elasticity over time ... my neck started to get what I call chicken skin. Which is simply, if you look at a person in their 40's or up, the skin on their neck loses some of it's elasticity and doesn't bounce back like it used to.

Initially I saw these changes, which are ever so slow, but when you're tired or didn't do the whole face regimine thing they seem pretty pronounced.

Which brings me to face lifts. Wow, the botched facelifts I saw pictures of. The writer on the site called them "the wind tunnel" look. And it was true... how much skin can you pull back, while it's losing it's elasticity and have it look normal?

The face is going to age and the symetry will all be shifted with any work that's done. As that starts happening people start wanting to fix more and more. Have implants in their faces to make their face look... well, I guess younger and more youthful... I guess. But, it comes out looking ... all puffy and distorted.

My thing, is ... why not appreciate what we have? Accept aging as part of growing older. We can't change that, we're going to age. It's inevitable.

Same goes to lyposuction and the botched jobs you can see people have which make them think they're all thin and sexy. If they don't maintain certain lifestyle changes, it's going to come back.

Same goes for a tummy tuck or ... any other procedure you can come up with.

I'm not saying that I don't understand the ... perceptions people have about their body, face or aging. The desire to keep up, for the actor's and actresses in hollywood faced with the younger crowd, but ... I think that perception is a bit skewed... (sp?)

The desire to be more attractive or fix something they don't like about themselves is there. Lots of people go through a lot of negative thoughts and poor self esteem issues because of what they see and what they think others will find attractive.

And therein lies the answer... "What they think others will find attractive".

This isn't a new topic. It's been going on for years. All over... now they have shows about it like Nip Tuck and Extreme Makeover... Although in the show Extreme Makeovers they also promote an entire lifestyle change. HOwever, they're still promoting going under the knife to ... look better, to enhance their self esteem.

My own nose is crooked, I have a deviated septum, a doctor told me that once and I said... yup, that's why I part my hair this way. :) It offsets my nose. My deviated septum can stay right where it is, crooked and all. So there...

What I'd rather see... is people appreciate who they are, without buying into what other people say pretty is supposed to be.

Sure we have who we're attracted to, psychologically speaking people are usually drawn to people like themselves or who they think mirrors their own perceptions of themselves... However at what point do people give up the right to like themselves just as they are by getting major, costly surgery?

I'm not talking about people who had an accident either. You know where they have reconstructive surgery or things like that.

I mean, we're all going to age... We're all going to get wrinkles and chicken skin :) and things are going to go south...

What about enhancing what we have by say... hair color or make up or ... dressing to flatter what we already have?

That's still a bit superficial I guess but ... there are other things a person can do to boost their appearance and feel good about themselves. All that "feel good about yourself" starts from within anyway... right? Yes...

Then it shows outwardly ... Lets take, Ernest Borgnine for example. He's a ruddy looking fella, been in a number of movies and shows... I saw him in an interview one day a few weeks back and he's still him. Ruddy looking, with the space between his teeth ... still "him". I think that's pretty admirable. He is who he is...

Unfortunately, we're not taught to embrace who we are... everything swirls around what other people think and do.

It starts really young too. High school if not sooner. Whose the prettiest, whose the most likely to succeed... thank god no one said things about ... what's his name? That computer genius guy whose a kajillionare? Bill... oh ratts! I can't... GATES! Bill Gates! Not massively handsome... did his thing, is a massive success.

Can you imagine if he bought into all these things? Shame.

We can get so enticed... or lured into comparing ourselves to others as to what "we're not" that we forget to appreciate who we are in the first place.

This is where comparing is BAD... They do it in the tabloids all the time, who looks better in this dress and pit one actress against another in a photograph. All goes to perception right? Sure it does... because I"m sure both those women left the house liking how they looked in that outfit.

You never see... men compared like that. Now that I think about it. This sentence is subject to change if I find proof that there are comparisons like that going on.

Oh ... wait, high school year books. They do that... sorry, my mistake. They do it to guys too.

So how do we change these things?

I think, we can acknowledge that everyone is not created equal.

I think we can learn to focus on what good qualities we already have.

I think we can learn that we're okay as we are... and not compare ourselves to others.

I think we shouldn't be so romanced by TV and commercials and all those things that start us off comparing ourselves to others.

I think we can look at the younger generation and not think... "I'm aging, what's going to be left for me?" In any capacity.

I think we can learn to appreciate all that we are as an individual ...

We're going to change. We're going to age. We're going to be inadvertently compared to or see things that may entice us to buy into that mindset that we "have" to do certain things to keep up appearances or buy into what other people think ...

I think... accepting who we are ... right here and working up from there is the most important aspect of defining who we are and what we buy into.

But, this is nothing new... I'm not saying anything new at all. Yet, it's something that's been around forever.

In the end, when everything goes south :) and we have those laugh lines and furrows in our brow... the thing, that I think people are going to really focus on is...

Who you are... as a person. No?

Food for thought this morning.

Like who you are ... don't buy into all the commercial stuff you see, or the comparisons that are out there.

Be You... after all, you can't really be anyone else can you?