London (ANI) - A study has found that most women, who have cosmetic surgery, refuse to believe that it is vanity that motivates them to go under the knife.
The women do not see themselves as following in the footsteps of celebrities such as Jordan, Joan Rivers and Cher, famed for their surgical enhancements.
Dr Debra Gimlin, a sociologist at Aberdeen University, officially revealed the findings at the British Sociological Association's medical sociology conference in Durham.
Dr Gimlin said her research was based on interviews with 80 women in Britain and America who had undergone cosmetic surgery.
She found that more than 60 percent of those interviewed had created the notion of a so-called "surgical other" - women who went under the knife with hardly any regard for the risk involved, had unreasonable expectations of its effects and were obsessively concerned with their appearance.
These women, on the other hand, justified their own need for cosmetic surgery by insisting they wanted to look normal.
They defined the surgical other as "narcissistic and shallow" while at the same time stressing their own "greater concern with the more important things in life: jobs, family and health".
"When it comes to women like Jordan, Joan Rivers, Cher and Pamela Anderson, they insist 'I am not one of them'," the Scotsman quoted Dr Gimlin as saying.
"They would talk about Michael Jackson as being a sort of icon for the surgery junkies and say 'I'm not like that'.
"They feel that some of the women they see in magazines have gone too far and insist that they are not going to go too far with their surgery. And I think it's to explain something that remains socially problematic," she stated.
But cosmetic doctor Nicholas Rayner said that in his experience, women tended to use public figures as reference points as to how they wanted to look.
Today : Saturday - May 26, 2012, 03:51pm (GMT+5.5)
