The ugly side of the quest for beauty

Behind the engineered publicity of the Ms Ugly and Mr Ugly contests lies a real trend. Cosmetic surgery is big business on the mainland. Legitimate clinics cannot do surgeries fast enough. Shady practitioners, too, have no shortage of clients.

Unfortunately for mainland women (and an increasing number of men), there are few ways to tell the professionals from the hucksters. The casualness with which so many are brushing aside the dangers of surgery for rounder eyes, a sharper nose, bigger breasts or a touch fewer wrinkles truly captures the zeitgeist of consumer culture on the mainland today. Pragmatism, rising affluence and an unrelenting emphasis on self-improvement have conspired to make going under the knife an inevitability for more and more young mainlanders.

And they are young. In the west, plastic surgery gained prominence as a way of turning back the biological clock. Facelifts remain one of the most popular operations. On the mainland, the overwhelming majority of patients are women under 30. Nips and tucks are given by parents as high school and college graduation presents. Enhanced - and by the reckoning of many, more European - looks are seen as a ticket to a better life. Painful, costly operations are looked upon as a relatively small price to pay for future success. Risks are seldom discussed.

Yet there are risks, and they are not just physical or monetary. To be sure, the government needs to close the loopholes that allow unqualified surgeons and unlicensed clinics to operate. There might have to be public education on the dangers of unqualified plastic surgeons. Other problems, such as the dangerous notions behind the rising popularity of cosmetic surgery, the government is likely powerless to do anything about.

There are some telling details in these high-profile makeovers being carried out by clinics such as Evercare in Beijing, details the eager press tends to gloss over. Evercare surgeons, for example, told patient Hao Lulu that the results of her six-month marathon of surgery would hold for perhaps three to five years. The 24-year-old has, in essence, committed herself to a lifetime of surgical upkeep, in the name of celebrity and beauty. Some have decried the exercise as shameless capitalism. Others have chimed in to say she looked just fine before.

The surgery craze and the casual way in which Chinese people are submitting to it is in some quarters being portrayed as empowering and part of the nation's modernisation. The trend just as often plays to old-fashioned and chauvinistic ideas, like the worship of youth and the judgment of women based on their looks. Perhaps sometime soon, the country, along with Hao Lulu, will find they have been chasing a costly - and not-so-genuine - version of the real thing.