The Desire for Beauty

It's sort of obvious that the very best plastic surgeons are in the beauty business. It's a good business to be in as the demand for more beauty never seems to fade. However, it was a story from North Korea that revealed a sort of black market in cosmetic surgery that really made us think. It seems that the human desire for beauty is very persistent indeed.

The piece that got us thinking is the latest installment of a regular feature at Business Insider, in which they ask a North Korean resident about some aspect of life in that notoriously oppressive and impoverished country. The woman they spoke to this week told of regular inspections in her school to see if anyone had obtained a procedure popular in Korea known as double-eyelid surgery.

These operations, alas, are not delivered by the highly skilled equivalent of American board certified plastic surgeons you would likely find in neighboring South Korea. In fact, they are very inexpensive -- the equivalent of a few dollars -- even as the ultra-hardline communist government looks askance at them as symbols of capitalist wealth. Being caught with one of these surgeries has been known to result in incarceration in a forced labor camp.

While here in the U.S., we are used to stunning plastic surgery before and after pictures, it's kind of moving that people are willing to risk jailing by one of the world's most brutal regimes in order to look just a little bit more beautiful to themselves. You can do very bad things to a people, but you'll never dampen the desire for beauty. There's something beautiful about that.

Speaking of beauty, if you think you can benefit from a cosmetic procedure, give us a call at 310-300-1500.