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| Europe |
| "Scalpel! Nobody's perfect!" |
| 2004-12-19 |
| We're getting back to normal. Fewer and fewer Independent and Al-Guardian articles about Bush the Fascist or Americans the Nazis. More and more articles about weirdos and freaks. Cosmetic surgery was always likely to become popular in Italy, where beautiful grooming and immaculate dressing are national obsessions. And the boom has arrived. The Italian Plastic Surgery Society records close to one million operations a year - business which is worth more than an annual €1bn (£680m). And the figures are rising rapidly. Italy is number one in the world for anti-wrinkle injections. A year ago, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi disappeared from view for weeks. After an avalanche of media speculation he came clean in mid-January, admitting he had had a face-lift. It coincided with the 10th anniversary of his political party Forza Italia. He gave his new face its first public outing at the party's birthday rally. His fans roared their approval. "Silvio, sei bellissimo!" they screamed. In the summer, at his Sardinian villa, he again ducked out of sight for a spell, re-emerging to greet the Blairs wearing his famous bandanna. Journalists were sure he had hair implants, and during his recent appearances in London and Washington he showed off a brave new crop of scalp fuzz. The new permissiveness was underlined in March with the launch of a reality TV programme on a Berlusconi-owned Mediaset channel entitled "Scalpel! Nobody is perfect!" Volunteers with prominent noses, large rumps or insignificant bosoms came on the show to have their wrongs put right by a top-flight plastic surgeon. The lure was that they did not have to pay. The downside (or not) was that the process was relayed liveand friends and relatives had a video monitor. The programme's host, a former politician called Irene Pivetti who had herself benefited from a dramatic make-over, said her programme was for the aid of people wishing to "remove a physical defect". And now the dam gates have opened, with results, like Loredana's lips, that are not always beguiling. A mischievous journalist, Roberto D'Agostino, coined the word labbrosaur to describe the bee-stung lip look that has blossomed up and down the country. The word Labbra means lip in Italian. Now he says: "In the 1980s it was only showbusiness stars who got on front pages thanks to their face-lifts, successful or otherwise. But from the 1990s everybody from starlets to the lady next door had started to think of the body as a machine that could be repaired. And it was then that the abuses began: the monsters whose parents can only recognise them by their voices, others who, to show expression, have to resort to their hands." |
| Posted by:lex |