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There’s something grotesque in the business of selling beauty. Bruce Keogh’s review into the regulation of the cosmetic treatment industry – covering implants, surgery, fillers, injections, and every other way of primping, plumping, shrinking and smoothing your face and body – reveals a world of hard sell for hard bodies. Loss-leading free consultations draw customers into clinics (and despite the fact that the industry offers invasive medical procedures, the review shows that it treats those in its care as customers, not patients), and multibuy offers put the decision to get silicon bags inserted in your chest or fat siphoned out of your thighs on a par with chucking an extra packet of chicken joints into your trolley during a supermarket offer. |
And if your treatment doesn’t work out quite the way it was sold? That is a tough issue: there’s no clear legal responsibility for cosmetic practitioners to provide aftercare. If your supermarket chicken pieces are bad, the shop doesn’t just take the bad pack back: it’s also obliged by the Sale of Goods Act to replace or repair it. Yet the rules for surgical implants are apparently more lax. I can’t even say the cosmetic surgery business treats women like meat, because actually it offers a lower standard of care to its patrons than your average butcher. And for decades, shamefully, this has been tolerated, with inadequate legislation allowing inadequate treatment to continue.
Slack regulation of advertising allows surgeries to use high-pressure tactics like time-limited offers while minimising the “cutting you open, putting something inside you” aspect of their procedures. There’s no specialist register of cosmetic surgeons – and amazingly, the title “surgeon” isn’t even protected, meaning that practitioners may use it while having no surgical expertise.
The whole industry starts to look like a nightmarish, tentacled beast stretching secretively through clinics and salons, invading bodies and injecting its poisons, and the people who are undergoing these treatments are often those who should have a particular claim on protection.
The cosmetic surgery industry is based on telling women (and increasingly men, though they’re still in the minority of patients) that they could have better, happier lives if only they’d make themselves look a bit more perfect.
The Keogh review shows how much the cosmetic interventions industry needs to do to fix up its face, but its ugliness runs way below the surface. – Guardian News & Media