Young try to get leg up with plastic surgery(2)

During the "cultural revolution" (1966-76), the development of plastic surgery was ceased since individualism and vanity were denounced.

It was not until the end of the 1970s that China started to open up. Once again, it was good to care about personal appearance. Plastic surgery and beauty treatment became options.

Xu has performed plastic surgery for 23 years, treating more than 20,000 cases. He says the number is increasing every year. Most clients are young women born in the 1980s and 1990s.

Cathy Lao, 23, regularly goes to the plastic surgery clinic and gets a skin-whitening injection once a month, a dermal filler injection for reshaping her nose once every six months, and a BOTOX injection for her face. She has spent more than 150,000 yuan a year on these injections since she was 20.

"I saw my friend's nose job and face job. It was amazing, so I decided to give it a try. I don't think I can go back anymore," Lao says.

For her, life is like a beauty pageant: The prettier you are, the more opportunities you will get.

"You can't blame them for having thoughts like this," says Shanghai sociologist Gu Xiaoming from Fudan University. "Who doesn't want to be beautiful, especially when you are young? Plus beauty hegemony is now raging in the society."

People sometimes get discriminated against for plain looks. Their social circle, career and marriage all seem related to how they look.

"There is deformity in culture and aesthetics in the society now," Gu says, citing some celebrities popular among young people who are very pretty but shallow. "They can't act or sing, barely have any special talents except for their appearance. And that often is artificial. Yet they are rich and successful."

"I miss my chubby daughter," says Chen's father, Roger Chen. "Sure, she is much more confident now and prettier but she cares too much about her look.

"She gets upset gaining 1 kilogram and spends too much time online, shopping for garments," he adds.

The young Chen used to like Czech writer Milan Kundera and Chinese poems, but now she barely reads anything but fashion magazines and makeup tips, says her father. And she takes selfies many times a day and puts them on the social network.

"The dangerous part of plastic surgery is not how it has changed you physically but how it changed your personality," says Gu, the sociologist. "It turns a natural person 'unnatural' and she/he becomes a copy of some beautiful face prototype."

Another hot procedure for young women is breast augmentation. But it has safety issues that are always a top concern among both industry insiders and the beauty seeker.

Breast augmentation is done through medical implants using silicon gel or the person's own fat. The current technique is to use both medical implant material and the patient's own fat transplanted from her belly and thigh.

People considering plastic surgery should go to qualified, certificated hospitals or clinics, and those with a history of hypertension and diabetes must inform the doctor on the first visit, experts say.

"The medical accident rate of plastic surgery by licensed hospitals is 10 to 20 percent, just like the ordinary medical accident rate, or even lower," Xu says.

Backstreet beauty parlors should be avoided. They tend to use new, untested medicine and medical implants, which sometimes end up causing cancer. In the first five months of the year, the Shanghai Health Supervision Agency closed six such establishments, none of which was licensed to carry out surgical procedures.

Emotional condition is also very important for people considering plastic surgery.

"People should be clear what they really want," Xu says. "Don't rush to a doctor but instead think it over."

People have high expectations for cosmetic procedures but should be aware that results can vary and may not be as perfect as what they imagine based on posters and advertisements.

"Also, people suffering depression are not advised to do plastic surgery, since they can't accept even an obscure flaw in the surgery," he says. "And you have to fully understand the analysis from the doctor before doing the surgery."