14 DAY TRIAL // As they’re growing older, female workers come to prefer minimally invasive procedures to fight the signs of old age instead of paying for plastic surgery, a new report suggests.
According to Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, plastic surgery is simply not an option for those older female workers who want to look younger because of competition in their field.
Aside from the high cost of an intervention, the long recovery period also works against plastic surgery, which remains a last resort for when everything else fails.
This also explains the rise in popularity of alternative methods to fight signs of old age, such as dermal fillers, Botox and laser treatments, which has prompted even plastic surgeons to offer them to their patients.
Not only do these alternatives keep the finances of older women afloat in a still bad economy, but they also help meet standards for ever-young-looking employees.
“If you are a woman who has to come back to work full time or a man who isn’t going to be able to retire any time soon, you’ve got to look like you can compete,” Wendy Lewis, plastic surgery and skin care consultant, says for the aforementioned e-zine.
“And if you are working in a field like media where everyone is really young, you don’t just want to look good for your age, you want to look good, period,” Lewis says.
This also explains why Botox remains the most successful product on the market right now: it eradicates wrinkles, it’s cheap, lasts for half a year and comes with results visible in just a hours.
Oppositely, a facelift, for instance, costs anywhere between $6,000 to $15,000 (or even more) and can take months of recovery. It can also accompanied by a lot of pain, swelling and bruising, which almost never happens with the minimally invasive methods.
Because of this, older female workers tend to save plastic surgery for last, namely, for when the time comes when a facelift is a must because anything else simply doesn’t work anymore.
“With a downturn in their primary business, many plastic surgeons are now competing with dermatologists to offer injections and fillers, while steering patients back to surgery for problems – such as sagging jowls – that can’t be fixed any other way,” Health Blog notes.
“Jonah Shacknai, CEO of Medicis Pharmaceutical, tells the Health Blog that surgeons now account for 50% of its sales of Dysport (a competitor to Botox) and the dermal filler Restylane,” the publication further informs.