When It’s the Wrapping That Counts
“Ho, ho, ho-o-o-o-l-d still just one minute for the injection . . . “
Lucky, lucky L.A. Your Santa doesn’t wear anything so common as a beard and red plush suit over a bowling-ball belly; he wears a surgical mask and a lab coat and he’s thin as a straw in a glass of mineral water, and almost as plastic.
It wouldn’t be the holidays here without those discreet envelopes conveying the gift of a new nose, or one chin fewer, or one bra size bigger. Cosmetic surgery: the gift, its practitioners remind us, that keeps on giving.
Living here, you tend to forget the desperate weirdness of teenagers asking for liposuction for their 16th birthdays, of an eerily gamine 32-year-old actress/writer saying she’s 18 so as to pass for a wunderkind. The ads, the gorgeous, preposterous, ubiquitous ads, make it all seem quite unexceptional. A visitor, perusing our glossy Gold Coast publications, was boggled by them, and bleated out something like, “What are you people, nuts?”
Nuts we may be, but gorgeous, without a doubt.
“We” is the smattering of ZIP Codes that obsesses the tabloid gossipistes. When some Brentwood friend of Nicole Brown Simpson remarked nonchalantly that she didn’t know any woman who hadn’t had
breast implants, I realized how declasse my life must be--I don’t know any woman who had.
“We,” decreed Norma Desmond, “had faces then.” We still do; it’s just that now they cost an arm and a leg.
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In less fabulous Thomas Bros. neighborhoods, folks facing the flywheel of age may lay off the leftovers, cruise the Clairol aisle, and buy one of those new baby boomer girdles that goes by any name but “girdle.”
They do not shop the hemorrhoid remedy section for beauty supplies, as happened some years ago, when the chic set took to dabbing on Preparation H for a few Cinderella hours’ relief from crow’s feet.
Today’s miracle-in-a-syringe is a diluted botulinum toxin, as in botulism, injected cosmetically to paralyze for a time the muscles that create unsightly forehead lines. (Lucky for us that we don’t live in the ignorant days of lead-paint makeup and arsenic for clearing the complexion.)
Plastic surgeons have been reporting a December gift rush, some of it of their own making. Yet their once-daring ads look a little fatigued and coy. If going under vanity’s knife is so mainstream, the ads should be likewise bold, witty, self-aware:
--Tell the Melancholy Dane wishing that “this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and dissolve itself into a dew”: “Hamlet! Stop moping over that skull and come to our clinic for a whole new princely you! We’ll melt away that solid flesh until you’re so supple you can wear tights again without Rosencrantz and Guildenstern smirking!”
--And exhort Dickens’ moral make-over, Ebenezer Scrooge: “Why stop at fixing Tiny Tim’s leg? It’s Christmas! Give Ma Cratchit a Retin-A facial, and for Bob Cratchit, how about making this a merry lipo Christmas?”
And Muzaked through the medical building, this old favorite made young again:
On the first day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . spider-vein sclerotherapy.
On the second day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . thigh liposuction.
On the third day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . eyelid resculpting.
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . new cheekbone implants.
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . a new nose through rhinoplasty.
On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . . chin reconstruction.
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . tucks for my tummy.
On the eighth day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . . Botox injections.
On the ninth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . saline breast implants.
On the tenth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . cellulite removal.
On the eleventh day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . collagen lip injections.
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love gave to me . . . nipple augmentation, cellulite removal, saline breast implants, Botox injections, tucks for my tummy, chin reconstruction, a new nose through rhino-plas-tyyy . . . new cheekbone implants, eyelid resculpting, thigh liposuction and spider-vein sclerotherapy.
And on the thirteenth day of Christmas, I gave my true love a card asking, What in the first place did you ever see in me?
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Patt Morrison’s column appears Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is patt.morrison@latimes.com
