Tony Lambert delphine1939@videotron.ca

2 Nov. 2007

Risky business: Like property, plastic surgery has enjoyed a boom. But do the cons outweigh the pros?

By Claire Coughlan

Wednesday October 24 2007

PROPERTY and plastic surgery are the twin beanstalks that sprouted from the magic beans of the Celtic Tiger, if you'll excuse an analogy taken from a fairytale.

People's faith in the stability of the property market has already been dashed, with all the recent scare-mongering -- anyone who announces that they're buying now is considered foolhardy; young buyers are often being advised to wait, give it a year and see what happens.

And the same fear is about to be struck in the hearts, and sagging body parts, of potential candidates for Ireland's burgeoning mega-industry: cosmetic surgery.

It's estimated that one in three Irish people spent their SSIA windfalls on getting "work done"

but will they be so willing to go down the nip/tuck route now?

Just how will the aftermath of a woman's death, hours after having a gastric banding procedure started on her at one of Ireland's leading cosmetic surgery clinics, affect the budding cosmetic surgery industry?

Will this unfortunate incident becoming public knowledge make people less gung-ho about fluttering their cash on arguably unnecessary lifts, nips and tucks?

Cosmetic surgery has almost become a religion in these increasingly secularised times, the Church of If-You-Don't-Like-It-Change-It-Or-At-Least-Get-It-Lifted.

But people's faith can be easily shattered and it takes a lot to rebuild broken trust, as we know too well from our recent upheavals in religion and politics.

And seeing as how cosmetic surgery is still such a new industry, it wouldn't surprise me if the mighty beanstalk that it comprises in Ireland came crashing down around Jack's ears (Jack's us, by the way), in the same way that we've been warned for so long will happen to the property market.

As is beginning to happen to property, cosmetic surgery might become something that the discerning consumer will think twice about before investing in, because the risk factor will far outweigh the sweet guarantee of results.

The property boom gave us confidence in our shiny new economy -- suddenly there were houses anywhere you stood still long enough for land to be developed and we had amongst the highest house prices in Europe. We had arrived.

BUOYANT
Houses that you wouldn't have been able to give away in the late 1980s were suddenly a sizable retirement fund and the not-very-new phenomenon of first-time buyers stalling the leaving-home process seemed like a necessary evil in the grand scheme of living in such a buoyant market.

But now we're having a dark night of the soul -- first-time buyers still find it increasingly difficult to get onto the first rung of the property ladder, but now there's the added onus of, "what's the point?"

Some would argue that they'd prefer to continue renting, thanks very much, rather than spend the next 20 years eating baked beans out of a tin.

The next thing we couldn't help ourselves investing in, with our new-found wealth, was ourselves. The downtrodden Irish mammy was a thing of the distant past -- now she was undeniably yummier, smoother and perkier and far more likely to book into a medi-spa for the weekend than resignedly peel spuds. She was more "yummy gran" Halina Ashdown Shiels (director of the Advanced Cosmetic Surgery clinic) than Peig Sayers.

But now the business of the gastric band fitting will lead to only more questions. How safe is any procedure? We still don't know what side effects Botox and Restaylane have in store, years down the line, but there are still women (and men) queuing up for them.

So maybe the cosmetic surgery industry will suffer a blow, but perhaps not.

After all, it's always carried a certain amount of risk factor with it, as buying property has, and maybe that's why we've grown to love it.