Ease Reading-Find Your Next Favorite Book

Hot Search

Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Cosmetic Surgery

alex kuczynski

... Show More
A star writer for the New York Times Styles section captures the follies, frauds, and fanaticism that fuel the American pursuit of youth and beauty in a wickedly revealing excursion into the burgeoning business of cosmetic enhancement.

Americans are aging faster and getting fatter than any other population on the planet. At the same time, our popular notions of perfect beauty have become so strict it seems even Barbie wouldn’t have a chance of making it into the local beauty pageant.

Aging may be a natural fact of life, but for a growing number of Americans its hallmarks—wrinkles, love handles, jiggling flesh—are seen as obstacles to be conquered on the path to lasting, flawless beauty. In Beauty Junkies Alex Kuczynski, whose sly wit and fearless reporting in the Times has won her fans across the country, delivers a fresh and irresistible look at America's increasingly desperate pursuit of ultimate beauty by any means necessary.

From a group of high-maintenance New York City women who devote themselves to preserving their looks twenty-four hours a day, to a “surgery safari” in South Africa complete with “after” photographs of magically rejuvenated patients posing with wild animals, to a podiatrist's office in Manhattan where a “foot face-lift” provides women with the right fit for their $700 Jimmy Choos, Kuczynski portrays the all-American quest for self-transformation in all its extremes. In New York, lawyers become Botox junkies in an effort to remain poker-faced. In Los Angeles, women of an uncertain age nip and tuck their most private areas, so that every inch of their bodies is as taut as their lifted faces. Across the country, young women graduating from high school receive gifts of breast implants – from their parents.

As medicine and technology stretch the boundaries of biology, Kuczynski asks whether cosmetic surgery might even be part of human evolution, a kind of cosmetic survival of the fittest – or firmest? With incomparable portraits of obsessive patients and the equally obsessed doctors who cater to their dreams, Beauty Junkies examines the hype, the hope, and the questionable ethics surrounding the advent of each new miraculous technique. Lively and entertaining, thought-provoking and disturbing, Beauty Junkies is destined to be one of the most talked-about books of the season.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1,2006

This edition

Format
304 pages, Hardcover
Published
October 1, 2006 by Doubleday
ISBN
9780385508537
ASIN
0385508530
Language
English

More editions

About the author

Profile Image for alex kuczynski

alex kuczynski

... Show More

Readers also enjoyed

Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 51 votes)
5 stars
13(25%)
4 stars
23(45%)
3 stars
15(29%)
2 stars
0(0%)
1 stars
0(0%)
51 reviews All reviews
Profile Image for Kimberly .
minhgane
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
... Show More
Truly enlightening book! The fact that the author herself has had cosmetic surgery really brought an interesting perspective to the topic. Some of the sections about the current legality of cosmetic surgery were a bit dated, but the book is from 2006 so that's to be expected.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
bakaburg
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
... Show More
Revealed a lot about the world of plastic surgery and profit. Hope we reevaluate our beauty standards soon.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
cuzpLay
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
... Show More
Interesting read about the plastic surgery industry from over a decade ago. The writing flowed really well and had an anthropological feel to it.

Great book for fans of comparing the present and past as you get to see how much more extreme it’s become now and what current trends the author would write about today.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Oxybuzz
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
... Show More
This is pretty horrifying and sad, but it's important information about an aspect of American society.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
TFO1013
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
... Show More
Interesting read, but a bit dated. I liked how the author compared her own forays into cosmetic enhancements to how plastic surgery has changed over the years. It was especially interesting to learn about some of the ways different procedures were born.

For example, widespread reconstructive plastic surgery arose from treating soliders' injuries after WWI. As medicine advanced, soldiers didn't die from their injuries as quickly as they once did. The rate of death during wartime has continually decreased over time - in WWII, 30% of soldiers died from war-related injuries. In Vietnam, 24%. And despite how much destructive weapons have become, the mortality rate for Iraq and Afghanistan was 10%.

The first nose jobs date back to 600BC when it was a common punishment to cut off people's noses for crimes; the first reconstructions were done with tissue from the cheek. In the 1500s, Gaspare Tagliacozzi - known as the father of plastic surgery as he used modern anatomical medical knowledge alongside his surgical skills - took the nose job a step further. There was much unrest in Bologna at the time, and Tagliacozzi saw many nose injuries from duels, skirmishes, and assaults. He used skin from the patient's upper, inner arm by creating a deep incision in the arm and then placing dressings inside the wound to keep it open. The patient would then have their nose bandaged to their arm (sounds so uncomfortable!) until the scar tissue from the arm would start to grow onto the nose wound. It would eventually be separated and then there would be several more surgeries to shape the tissue into a nose-like structure. Since the new proboscis was made of scar tissue which doesn't have a full supply of blood vessels, they tended to stiffen in cold weather and hard sneeze could propel them right off the patient's face. !!

Plastic surgery eventually shifted from reconstruction to cosmetic. There was an interesting discussion about how cosmetic surgery is so at odds with the traditional healthcare model provided by doctors with insurance companies as the middleman and arbiter of what is considered medically necessary and how much they will pay for various tests, treatments, etc. Since cosmetic surgery isn't covered by insurance, the market tends to be very transparent as far as pricing goes. The industry's growth has been aided by bureaucracy of healthcare, allowing surgeons to practice more freely and often for more money.

Overall, an interesting and informative read though the book is a bit old.
0 0 Reply
Profile Image for Kimberly .
Inkeydo
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 25,2025
... Show More
Well written and often personal account by NY Times Style section author, but too frequently veers into irrelevant asides
0 0 Reply
Leave a Review
You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.