A Seattle-based plastic surgery site that functions like a combination of Yelp and HotOrNot, RealSelf.com claims that it helps “millions make confident health and beauty decisions.” Users of RealSelf, which has been around since 2006, discuss and review cosmetic procedures and the doctors who perform them. From Botox to breast augmentation, the site is a one-stop shop for people (mostly women) looking to alter their appearance in a doctor’s office.
The site’s layout is slick, but its posts have the unvarnished, confessional feel of a long-abandoned message board thread. A 19-year-old from Spokane, Washington discussed her upcoming breast augmentation on August 5, 2015 in a typically candid manner:
As everyone I have been reading many reviews on this site, I go on here daily . Ever since I hit puberty I was waiting for the day I would get boobs . Ive had the same size basically since the first day I had my period. Ive always been wishing I had larger breast for YEARS and kept waiting thinking I was a “late bloomer” an I had hear that breast done fully develop til 18 years or older. Well here I am 19 years old still tiny as ever.
The $7,000 operation is scheduled for December 4, 2015. How do I know such specific details about a stranger’s upcoming breast enhancement surgery? The date, location and cost of the procedure are listed at the top of the post.
The treatments are sorted by category—liposuction, facelift, breast lift, rhinoplasty—and most deal with reversing the ravages of time on the female body. “I love being older, I just don’t want to look it,” writes a woman from Little Rock, Arkansas about her eyelid surgery. “The result is beyond my exceptions [sic].”
There are 2,400 reviews total for eyelid surgery (average price: $4,525), accompanied by 4,546 pictures and 334 videos. Users can sort these reviews by rating (worth it, not worth it, not sure) or the condition that prompted the surgery (eye bags, wrinkles), or the ethnicity of the recipient, or their gender. In general, eyelid surgery is reported as “worth it” by 94 percent of this website’s population: most of the surgeries have “worth it” ratings above that 90 percent marker, or close to it—rhinoplasty, for example, comes in at 89.
The “mommy makeover” (average price: $12,375, 98 percent worth it) is a series of treatments including a tummy tuck, breast lift and liposuction “to help you get your pre-baby body back.”
“After two kids born natural and one c section, my body has definitely seen better days,” gripes a 38-year-old Newport, California mother of three.
Another “mommy makeover” patient, a 33-year-old women from Manchester, New Hampshire writes of a husband willing to put off the purchase of a new car to foot the bill for her surgery, because he “knows that this is the only thing that will fix me.”
“With the advent of consumer culture after the turn of the [twentieth] century, outward appearance, achieved solely by external means made available by the growth of commercial beauty culture, easily superseded inner character in the quest for beauty,” wrote Elizabeth Haiken in her 1997 book Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. “Women were given to understand that they must avoid mental and physical exertion to avoid the appearance of aging—that conserving unwrinkled skin was more important than anything else they might achieve—and older women were not only allowed, but expected, to spend time and effort maintaining their looks.”
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