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Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery
Doubleday
October 2006
On Sale: October 17, 2006
304 pages
ISBN: 0385508530
EAN: 9780385508537
Hardcover
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Self-Help
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.
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