| Chinese switching to Asian influenced plastic surgery styles |
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| Thursday, 08 March 2007 | |
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When the contestants on the Chinese extreme makeover show "Lovely Cinderella" were asked who they would most like to resemble, the names that they reeled off were exclusively Asian women: Li Jiaxin, a former Miss Hong Kong; actress Maggie Cheung; and Kim Hee-sun, a South Korean soap opera star. The interest and acceptance of plastic surgery represents a sea change in attitudes since the strict Mao inspired era just 30 years ago. "Your whole life was dedicated to revolution, to the Communist Party, to struggling for the communist cause," said Zhang Xiaomei, a publisher of fashion magazines in Beijing. In the southern city of Changsha, where "Cinderella" is taped, plastic surgeon Li Fannian's Yahan Cosmetic Surgery Clinic is filled with posters for implants called Magic Peach and Dream Xcell showing ivory-skinned women with bursting cleavage. The clinic's most popular procedures are reducing bags under the eye (Blepharoplasty), sculpting noses (Rhinoplasty) and shaving the jawbone to soften the face. While double eyelid procedures are still relatively common among Chinese patients, the technique is much more subtle than in the past and now gives the appearance of larger eyes, but do not try to make Asian women look Caucasian according to Li. One of the contestants on "Cinderella", Yang Shaqin, a Beijing undergraduate, said she had always wanted to look more like her mother. Having undergone eight procedures, she says that she no longer feels like an ugly duckling but claimed that she would never date a man shallow enough to have cosmetic surgery himself. "We have a Chinese saying, 'A man should possess talents and a woman grace,"' Yang said. "Men shouldn't be worried about these trivial sorts of things." Such proverbs are not keeping men away from the surgeon's knife, however. About 10 percent of clients at the Yahan clinic are men, said Li, and the concept of the "dushi yunan" or "urban pretty man" has arrived, being the Chinese equivalent of the metrosexual. There are estimated to be about one million plastic surgery procedures each year in China. However, this still represents a small proportion of the overall population. By comparison, in the United States, with less than a quarter of China's population of 1.3 billion, twice as many procedures were performed in 2005. However, until recently, some procedures were allowed in Chinese hospitals that would be considered barbaric by western plastic surgery procedures. One in particular, lengthening bones by breaking them and stretching them on a rack over an extended period, was recently banned by the Chinese government, except where the procedure was medically necessary. One patient, Wang Junhong, a 37-year-old fashion retailer from Guangzhou in south China's Guangdong province, spent $9,700 to gain two inches in a procedure that involved breaking her legs, driving pins into the bone and gradually cranking the pins apart to lengthen the bones as they heal. "The more I thought about doing it, the more I was convinced I had to do it," she said, as she recovered in a hospital bed in 2005, her legs enclosed in horrific-looking frames with spokes that speared her legs. However, the cultural demand for height remains embedded within the Chinese psyche, with recruitment ads sometimes stipulating the minimum height requirements for white-collar posts. "Taller people will have more opportunity for promotion," said Sun Honggang, an editor for Human Capital and Career Post, a Beijing newspaper dedicated to human resources. |
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