African American Women Should Avoid Cosmetic Surgery - Essay Example

"African American Women Should Avoid Cosmetic Surgery" is an incredible example of a paper on wellness and lifestyle. 
Every day there is at least one black woman who looks in the mirror and says” what if my nose was smaller or my skin lighter?”  Every once in a while we all take a moment to compare ourselves with other people that we view in the mass media and then we unconsciously formulate notions of physical attractiveness based on the concept of true beauty depicted through the media. May it be Beyoncé’s attractive bottom or LL Cool J’s rippled six-packs. The answer to these incessant envious thoughts comes plain and simple in the minds of each individual – cosmetic plastic surgery; whether it’s one’s desire for larger breasts, a face free of wrinkles or a flat stomach, making drastic surgical changes to your appearance seems to be the solution.

In this newly emerging and fast-growing trend to achieve cosmetic perfection, African American women have occupied a very prominent and shocking spot in this predicament. According to research conducted by Dr. Satoshi Kanazawa on the subject, it was found that in 2011 African American women have a higher tendency to find themselves lesser attractive when compared to other races (Ebony, 2011). Furthermore, according to Afro.com, statistics show that recently there has been an increase of 5% in the number of plastic surgeries among African American women, with the number of procedures rising from 942,571 in 2008 to a shocking 985,907 in just a year. Additional research shows that these women are most unsatisfied with their physical appearance with a major focus on opting for cosmetic procedures such as breast reduction, liposuction, and reshaping the nose.  And it’s a little wonder that these African American women opt for these procedures with their celebrity role models, who serve as a ‘standard’ of beauty, flaunting their newly done lighter skin colour and smooth skin resulting from Botox injections.

When you look at the basic facts you realize the negative implications of opting to undergo cosmetic surgery. Not only does one have to endure the pain, the swelling, and the numbness but also the black and blue bruises that cover the part worked on. It is even more complicated for African American women mostly because the procedure is not based on their personally perceived standard of beauty. Furthermore, it is standard for people of colour to risk more when they undergo the surgery, because of the appearance of keloid and hypertrophic scars emerging during the healing process. Research shows that about 374,000 African Americans opted for cosmetic surgery in 2001 and out of all of those about 227,000 had to undergo additional procedures to get rid of the scars (Crystal, 2006).

This brings us towards how effectively African American women fall into the ploy of the carefully highlighted glamor which they are lead to perceive cosmetic surgery results in. Look at the example of ESSENCE magazine which has over 1.5 million copies circulated each month that target African American women who are between 18 to 49 years of age, making them ideal candidates for wanting plastic surgery. Furthermore, their website alone has over 1 million visitors within a certain period of time. TIME, Inc brought ESSENCE magazine in 2005 making it a no longer Black-owned publication, compromising the original objective of the upliftment of Black women. Under the new ownership, the views ad ideals injected into the readers will vary greatly. This example is also applicable to television networks, an example being B.E.T, that changed ownership, and hence it leads one to question where these notions of inadequacy as far as appearance, love and confidence are concerned come from?