Hello plastic surgery contestants!
Imagine THIS new category at the next Academy Awards: "Best performance by an actress with Botox." And the nominees are... You may snigger at the idea (even though you have an idea who should be nominated) but awards and pageants proudly touting who's been snipped, suctioned, resurfaced and injected may soon be commonplace.
Who knows when (or if) they'll do it again, but China has already crowned one "Miss Artificial Beauty" in a 2004 pageant in which nineteen finalists aged 17 to 62 competed. Contestants were required to present certification from their doctors to prove they had indeed been surgically altered.
Entering the competition as "the top man-made sunset rose of Hebei province," 62-year-old Liu Yulan said she cherished the chance to show off her wrinkle-free face and larger, more defined eyes.
"I want to send a message to society that the love of beauty is not limited by age," she said on the contest website.
That may well be true, but the crown belonged to 22-year-old Feng Qian, a student at Jilin Plastic Surgery Hospital. Feng said she had the surgery to enhance her appearance, but also to see what it was like as she planned a career in the field. (I wonder how many dental students have root canals for the same reason?)
"My whole body, apart from my face, has undergone operations," said Liu, who was a man until three years ago. "The operations have brought me a lot of (physical) pain, but I'm a girl at last. I have fulfilled my dream, I've become the person I wanted to be, that's my biggest reward."
Cosmetic surgery is booming in China, with billions being spent annually on hundreds of thousands of operations, and clinics opening all over the country.
Along with the increase in plastic surgery, beauty contests have also enjoyed a boom as China shakes off its Communist past.
In 1949, beauty pageants were outlawed as yet another decadent, bourgeois practice, but 54 years later, the government had a change of heart and hosted the Miss World Competition on Hainan island in southern China.
The idea for "Miss Artificial Beauty" came when 18-year-old Yang Yuan, an aspiring model, was cut from the Miss Beijing Beauty contest, part of the 2004 Miss Intercontinental Competition. Yang easily made it through the first two rounds but once the judges found out about her $13,250-worth of eleven separate cosmetic surgeries, she was disqualified, and declared a (gasp!) "man-made beauty." Yang later sued but her case was thrown out. Nonetheless, an enterprising Chinese businessman read the news and organized the first Miss Plastic Surgery Beauty contest.
ABC recently cancelled the fourth season of Extreme Makeover, the original plastic surgery reality show, after just one episode. The show was watched by an average of just 4.8 million viewers during its hour, while old repeats of Grey's Anatomy pulled in more viewers in the same timeslot. In a somewhat ironic twist, it appears we prefer to watch beautiful unreal people performing fake operations, rather than watch real people becoming beautiful.
In reality, cosmetic surgeons are in the same business as the gals behind the Clinique counter: selling dreams. The fact that so many people are now willing to have their bodies sliced, nipped and implanted, endure painful recoveries and even risk death shows how deeply-rooted those dreams are. The problem with plastic surgery prizes is not that they exist, but that there are people who will actively compete for them.