Beauty is in the Scalpel?

An article in the Evening Standard caught my eye the other night, and has occupied my thoughts on and off ever since (the off times being when I am busy obsessing over Big Brother although I hate everyone in it, even the gay Canadian who I had a crush on to begin with, or sleeping.) It was a profile on an eminent American brain surgeon (so eminent I've forgotten her name – what have I been saying about my memory?) during which she talked a lot about a procedure – naturally I couldn't make head nor tail of it, so maybe I could do with it – which she referred to as a "brain lift." She believes that one day it will be as common place as face lifts. It is a procedure that can potentially improve memory, comprehension, capacity: essentially, it will make patients smarter. And she wasn't talking about patients who are mentally disadvantaged or chronically underdeveloped; she spoke – potentially – of patients of perfectly average intelligence who want to simply want to be a bit brighter. I'd say that they might want to improve their careers, but at the price scales quoted in the article, you'd have to be doing pretty well to afford it in the first place. It's got me in a bit of a quandary.

I mentioned some time ago that I am not much of an advocate of cosmetic surgery. While as far as I am concerned, anyone who is big and ugly (no pun intended) enough to be able to plonk that amount of cash down on a straighter nose or bigger boobs and chooses to do so rather than invest in, say, shoes, or a nice holiday is big and ugly enough to do so without my blessing, it is something that bothers me and if anyone asks my opinion on it I will gladly give it. Which I did recently, when one of my oldest friends mentioned that she was thinking about a nose job, As I say, her cash her choice, but as she'd asked me, my main comment was "why?" This is what gets me about cosmetic surgery – when it comes down to it, what difference does it make? Thinking about my friends who I would consider the happiest, the most successful, the ones whose lives I wouldn’t mind trying out, not one of them is the most classically physically attractive person I know. The diabetes-inducing couples; those shooting up the career ladder to dizzying heights; those who can have a room full of people crying with laughter at their stories - none of them are in any danger of gracing catwalks. Not that I am completely discounting how lovely it is to feel attractive, anyone who doesn’t get a little thrill at someone checking them out or their other half reminding them that they’re gorgeous is a big fat liar, but I don’t believe that it is only those with perfectly straight noses or flat tummies or full lips that get checked or whose other halves think they’re lovely. In fact - and yes, I do know I am getting off the point, but bear with me, it’s still on the horizon - the amount of times I have gone to a club all dolled up, looking (in my humble opinion) a million dollars, and narry a male type person has so much as sneaked a peek, and the following morning I have run to the shops for a pint of milk in my pyjamas with my hair flying, medusa like, in a flurry of creative directions and the kind of spot throbbing on my forehead that could guide a ship into a harbour, and it’s been double-take-horn-honking-’alright-gorgeous’-city. Which doesn’t so much prove my point about attractiveness as suggest that men are a bit odd. But anyway.

My main issue with cosmetic surgery is its fakery. As much as it would be perfectly nice to have been born with jaw droopingly stunning model looks, I feel as though the rest of us have qualities that those people don’t so why not focus on those and leave the stunning model stuff to those who were born that way? I honestly believe that I would rather look like me than Kate Moss, even if I was given the choice, just because… it’s me. I wouldn’t know what to do with Kate Moss’s face.

However… if given the choice to be just a little bit more intelligent, even if it wasn’t naturally me, I think I would be tempted. I feel as though I would have more use for a bit more memory than I would a nicer nose - so somehow I can justify the fakery. Does that make me utterly hypocritical? If I was a bit more intelligent would I know better?