Plastic surgery has always been associated with Hollywood; not just because people who are filmed and photographed more often than most national monuments call it their home, but because of the sometimes less than favorable outcomes. With surgery horror stories like Michael Jackson and Jocelyn Wildenstein, it’s easy to cast plastic surgeons as stars of their own Frankenstein film, hacking, slashing, and liposuction-ing up creatures that weren’t meant to be. As with any type of surgery however, with time comes greater procedural precision, a body of research on both successes and failures that let these surgeons pinpoint just the right way to go about augmenting or downplaying people’s various features. Along with ease of procedure comes a decrease in price, and all of a sudden plastic surgery isn’t just for the opulently vain. The reason we’re afforded cautionary tales like Jocelyn Wildenstein is because she had the money to keep going, to undergo every procedure in the book multiple times. People are figuring out that much like with any aesthetic statement like make-up, tattoos, or even knick-knacks around your house, a little bit can be beautiful—it’s when you add too much that things start to get strange.

Ten years ago, plastic surgery was still seen largely as a personality flaw; that somehow wanting more than what nature gave you made you a bad, greedy person. Maybe it was a function of who plastic surgery was originally available to, only the movie and rock stars that needed to find something to do with their obscene piles of money. Maybe it was a deeper belief that society had grafted onto our psyche through centuries of fables featuring destructive hubris; likening ourselves to Icarus, augmenting ourselves was akin to daring God to send us plummeting to earth. People went to great lengths to hide that they ever had plastic surgery for fear of ridicule. We looked down our noses at people with puffed-up lips or the tell-tale stretched look of a face-lift. "They don’t know what’s important" we would scoff. Fast-forward ten years later when even someone with a fairly modest salary can afford to go under the knife, and our puritanical haze seems to be lifting. While the stigma does persist to some extent, many people are beginning to incorporate plastic surgery into their own cultural dialogue of respect and confidence. It’s been revealed that the U.S. military actually gives discounted breast augmentation to women in uniform, and the wives of men in the armed forces. There are, of course, detractors to this concept, but proponents argue that it helps with confidence in battle zones, something infinitely valuable in life and death situations.

It’s more than likely that plastic surgery will never become universally accepted. People will always see it as somehow cheating at life, stealing a visage from someone else who only bears passing resemblance to your former self. Luckily we’re at a point where we at least get to choose whether or not these arguments have validity, instead of just submitting to the majority because the subject will never come up. Everyday people can now decide which face to show the world, and more choice is never a bad thing.