Scar tissue is the scourge of surgery and scar tissue had disastrous effects on breast surgery - stiffening all that squishy loveliness

Scar tissue is the scourge of surgery and scar tissue had disastrous effects on breast surgery - stiffening all that squishy loveliness into a hard ball Appearances are all. It was as if this form of beautification brought a new inflection to that poignantly feminine form of mutiny, self-harm. It therefore created the fashion for the nose job no less than racism drives the reduction of the Brazilian breast while elsewhere sexism creates the compulsion to make bigger and better breasts.The science of breast enlargement brought its own catastrophic consequences. Racial stereotyping stigmatised the Jewish nose - indeed given that only a tiny minority of Jews possess this particular phenomenon it could be said that anti-Semitism invented the idea of the Jewish nose.

The result - something prized for a woman in film noir - was, as someone once said, a mouth "poised somewhere between sadism and masochism".But it is Fanny Brice whose body unites a couple of the defining imperatives of cosmetic surgery - race and sex. This Jewish star of the Ziegfeld Follies had her nose "bobbed" in the Twenties by plastic surgeon Junius Shireson, who came to be known as the "King of the Quacks". The spread of racism, scaffolded by the ideology of eugenics and racial purity in the 19th century, focused on assimilating and affluent Jews. What appeared to be sacrifice and self-hatred was the ultimate in self-control. No director or leading man would ever get those lips to move. She was powerful because her directors discovered when they saw the rushes that she was always right. Grahame took literally a Russian film theorist's belief in actors' facial immobility She thought her own top lip was too deep So she got it done.

Gloria Grahame gave new meaning to the notion of stiff upper lip The siren was notorious as a "difficult woman" Difficult because she would not be directed. Gloria Grahame is the epitome of the plucky cracker, the brittle wit whose lisping wisecracks came out of a mouth that doesn't move a lot. I'm afraid that's the sad, pathetic point of all the surgery."As a man, Jackson is not alone - about 20 per cent of cosmetic surgery in the US is now performed on men And 20th-century stardom is unthinkable without surgery. One of the more eccentric surgery stories belongs to a scarlet woman of film noir, who starred with Humphrey Bogart in In a Lonely Place, an elegant, cold study of violence. According to one of them, "with each operation he distances himself not only from his father but from his whole family. Friends and intimates have testified to Jackson's mania to wipe his father from his face.

Here is a boy, we are told, who wants to look like his mentor, Diana Ross. Here's a man who wants to be white, and if he can't be white he'll have white women and pale babies.Vanity does not help us understand Jackson's reincarnation as a masked and mysterious icon. For good or ill, plastic surgery promised he could be someone other than himself. If Jackson's life and time synchronised with the rise of black pride, it seems his own experience was shrouded in shame. Male liposuction has increased by 200 per cent since 1992, and it is also the most popular procedure for American women. British women, while still opting mostly for breast enlargement and face lifts, are also increasingly drawn to liposuction.Perhaps the most mysterious and public display of racial and sexual anxiety this century is manifested by MichaelJackson. His profile is simultaneously one of the most visible yet most masked.

Indeed, Peking boasts one of the largest plastic surgery hospitals in the world with 400 beds.Ironically, in the US it seems Eastern slightness is more the ideal. Nose jobs have in recent years enjoyed an explosion in popularity with wealthy Mexicans, eager to hide their Indian heritage behind a European profile.Western notions of beauty also dominate in Japan where there is a rampant trade in eyelid surgery, a technique first introduced in 1896. From this time to the present, according to Gilman, some 32 surgery techniques have been developed purely for the aesthetics of the eyes It's a similar story in Vietnam and China. Mexico is another country which attempts to shroud its racial heritage. Argentina's myth of powerful, big-bosomed Amazons is rivalled in Brazil by "white" women's determination to assert their difference from black women. Hence the Brazilian invention of the buttock lift in the Seventies, another attempt to Anglicise the South American shape.