Tell me what you don’t like about yourself. Go on, do it.
Warning: this post includes some graphic post-surgery pics that may be distressing for some readers.
Take a long look at yourself. Is your nose too long? Is it too wide?
Let’s talk about your thighs. Are they perfect? Do they do they touch in the middle? Are they pleasingly free from lumps and bumps?
And your breasts. How are they holding up? Are they big enough? Small enough? High enough? Firm enough?
If you are a young woman, it is likely that you didn’t have to think too long about these questions.
You think about your body and what is wrong with it a lot. 80 per cent of women say that they’re unsatisfied with their appearance when asked*.
It’s likely, if you are a young woman, that you know what society thinks you should look like. The ideal, so easily accessible at the click of an app, that you’re meant to adhere to.
And while the hyper-connectedness of our lives means you can look at a million people a minute from all over the world, rather than making us more accepting of our differences, really, what many young women see when they are browsing Instagram, is what they are lacking.
And what they could fix.
Read more: Nine kick-ass quotes about body image as told by your favourite women.
Meet Rhiannon Langley, a 24-year-old hairdresser from Melbourne and an Instagram sensation. She has 190k followers, and currently, they’re following her decision to travel to Thailand for a nose job.
Rhiannon has a hashtag – it’s #RhiannonGetsRhino.
And on that hashtag, she’s posting lots of gorgeous pictures of herself and her boyfriend, enjoying Thailand, hanging out on beaches in a bikini, and generally having a great time.
And then she posted these pictures, of her face after she most likely had a small chisel inserted into her nose and hit with a surgical mallet. It’s what she looked like after she had the skin on her face cut open with a razor-sharp scalpel, after she probably had bones in her nose filed down with a plane, and then was stitched back up, bandaged and sent to heal.
Sounds like fun, right?
Rhiannon is being sponsored in her trip to Thailand by a company who specialise in sending women overseas (and, yes, to the Gold Coast) for a holiday, some cocktails, and a splash of serious surgery.
Her unflinching determination to show the reality of what rhinoplasty actually looks like is to be admired, but will it encourage, or deter others from doing it, too?
Last year, it was estimated that around 15,000 Australians travelled overseas for cosmetic surgery, but that number is conservative, and definitely increasing. Many of these people went on group tours, with their girlfriends, to take advantage of bulk discounts.
The company who sent Rhiannon on her rhino-journey – aiming to capitalise on her huge social media following – says its most popular package is to Thailand for breast augmentation, and its website is full of young women in bikinis with amazing boobs, smiling as they are scribbled on with a black medical marker, smiling as they show off the marks where soon a sharp implement will cut into their skin and insert foreign objects into their chests to better fill their bikinis.
Smiling as they fix what is wrong with them.
“The price difference between [Australia and Asia] is huge,” Rhiannon says. “I’m getting married in a year, so I couldn’t afford to have the surgery in Australia.”
Not everyone is so delighted with the trend for ‘surgery tourism’. Not least, as you might expect, Australian plastic surgeons, who are losing market-share to the package surgery companies, and who claim they’re dangerously unregulated, and might not follow the rigorous procedures you’d expect from a plastic surgeon within Australia.
“Some people seem to spend more time deliberating on their next whitegoods purchase than they do deciding about going overseas to have a breast augmentation or other cosmetic procedure, so just make sure you have enough time to reflect on your decision,” says Dr Tony Kane, President of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons.
Dr Kane says that if you buy a surgery-holiday package, you probably won’t meet your surgeon before the operation, you probably won’t get a cool-down period after a consultation, and that often, when you’ve come back to Australia on the plane with your new body parts, there’s no-one to follow up your surgical care – and to fix any problems you might have.
“Patients can come back with less than ideal aesthetic results, infections… there is a whole spectrum of complications that patients have come back with.”
Poignantly, other vocal critics of this trend include the family of Evita Sarmonika, 29, the Queensland woman who died in Mexico in March after travelling there for a procedure known as a “Brazilian butt lift.”
When her family arrived in Mexico to collect her body, they found that the paperwork she was meant to fill in at the clinic treating her was incomplete. They are now campaigning for a change to the guidelines for Australians travelling for non-essential surgery.
Read more: A 24-year-old was told she needs $17,000 of cosmetic surgery.
But wherever the surgery occurs, the question remains – why are ever-increasing numbers of women taking such very drastic action to fit a particular physical ideal? Just because you CAN look like Kim Kardashian, with enough money and bravado, SHOULD you?
Why does a young woman as beautiful, confident and successful as Rhiannon Langely, who almost 200 thousand people want to look at daily, consider herself worthy of surgical alteration?
Why would a stunning young woman like Evita Sarmonika risk her life in a far-away country for a rounder bottom?
Why is the message that is reaching young women about their appearance in this age of hyper-connectedness not one of accepting diversity – that women all look so different – but that there is no excuse not to strive for perfection?
The standards of beauty that we are bombarded with every day are rising to a impossible standard. And for young women, it isn’t only celebrities they are comparing themselves with, but an army of supposedly “ordinary” women, recording every move of their aesthetically-pleasing bodies.
It could be argued that appearance has never mattered so much.
And now, as well as admiring what your favourite Insta-inspo person is wearing, eating and rubbing on her skin, you can see her undertaking surgery to achieve an even higher standard of beauty.
Of course, what women do with their bodies is there own business and it not just important, but essential, that it remains so.
But it’s difficult to see what’s empowering about slicing yourself up to fit a very narrow (often, literally narrow) idea of what is beautiful?
The message that young women is taking out of these hyper-visual times is that there is no excuse not to be your best self, whatever it takes.
And apparently, sometimes what it takes is a broken nose.
Here are some photos from Rhiannon’s journey…
Would you go overseas for cosmetic surgery?
* Rhiannon Langley was contacted for this story. She said she would talk to Mamamia when she returns from her surgery. We wish her a full and speedy recovery.