Reflections On The Beauty Industry

The Sunday Age

Sunday May 27, 2001

LAST week more than 3000 women in Australia suffering the effects of faulty silicone breast implants won a $38.4 million payout from the Dow Corning corporation. The payout ended a legal battle that began in 1992. Over the course of those nine years, Dow Corning declared bankruptcy, and the argument about whether the company was responsible for the suffering of the women took unexpected twists and turns. In 1997, a New Orleans jury found that the Dow Chemical Company had knowingly deceived women by hiding information about the health risks of silicone used in breast implants. Two years later, an independent American panel found that the implants, although they may have a tendency to rupture and cause scar tissue to harden, do not cause major diseases. This finding, made by 13 scientists convened by the Institute of Medicine at the request of Congress, effectively put an end to claims that silicone leaking from implants can cause systemic conditions such as lupus or rheumatoid arthritis.

Paula Shelton, of the law firm Slater and Gordon, which handled the successful Australian class action, said the American scientific finding did not affect the bulk of the Australian claims because the litigants suffered conditions directly connected with the implants themselves. These included granuloma - small, reactive lumps that form around leaked silicone, possibly requiring surgical removal. The claimants were generally not told of risks such as ``capsular contracture", in which the capsule around the implant tightens and, in extreme cases, can cause the breast to feel hard and painful. Nor were they told of the likelihood of rupture, or that the implants would probably need to be replaced.

Surprisingly, the controversy surrounding silicone implants has not diminished their appeal in this country. The president of the Australian Society of Plastic Surgeons, Keith Mutimer, says they are more popular than ever. He believes this is because they are safer than they used to be. He says a silicone implant today is less likely to leak or bleed, its outer wall is thicker and the implant is filled with a cohesive gel. But, even so, the implants will not last a lifetime, and anyone prepared to undergo the surgery faces the possibility of replacement surgery down the track. Although capsular contracture is still a risk, Mr Mutimer says it is less common than it used to be. Women are now more fully informed about what may go wrong before undergoing surgery. But not all of the risks can be foreseen. In Britain, 5000 women with implants filled with soya oil were advised to have them removed amid concern that leaking soya oil can be carcinogenic. Such implants have not been used in Australia but there are still fears that the devices remain, to some extent, experimental. The rules for silicone implants are not consistent worldwide. For example, in the US, implants are banned except in surgery involving breast reconstruction after mastectomy.

While the women in Australia were waiting for the class action to be resolved, they lived in a kind of medical limbo, unsure whether the silicone in their body would lead to serious, incurable illness; whether their tilt at implant surgery had ruined their lives. The women were also aware that in the eyes of some their plight was faintly ridiculous; that because their surgery was supposedly frivolous they had a slimmer claim on public sympathy.

The plight of these women reflects the contradictions in the popular culture. We are fascinated by what people are prepared to do to improve their reflection in the mirror, but also morbidly triumphant when the attempts go wrong. We reward youth and beauty, but disapprove of the lengths to which some people, particularly women, will go to conform to the ideal shapes on magazine covers and advertising billboards. Some women become so preoccupied with achieving this ideal that they go on strange journeys, like the American woman who has devoted her life to transforming herself (via surgery) into a living, breathing Barbie doll. Plastic surgeons, too, occupy an unusual position in the culture. Although they can perform wonders for the disfigured, and have the power to transform lives, they also cater to those who are tinkering at the margins, clinging to their youth, or aspiring to unattainable perfection. At the extreme end of the spectrum are those souls suffering from body dysmorphic disorder (imagined ugliness), which leads people to seek unnecessary plastic surgery, including amputation.

Beauty, like truth, can be elusive. As long as a disproportionate value is placed on a person's outward form, the temptation to augment that form will stay. Cosmetic surgery, for all its perils and paradoxes, is a logical expression of a value system that shows no sign of going away.

* OUR OLD friend Friedrich Wilhelm Viktor Albert, emperor of Germany and king of Prussia (1888-1918), has been a very naughty kaiser. This has nothing to do with starting World War I, but everything to do with his personal conduct, which has been most unbecoming, as well as an embarrassment to his family. Whatever the German is for ``the sleaze factor", Wilhelm has certainly been responsible for entering the term into the language, somewhat backdated but, nevertheless,still appallingly relevant. The latest edition of Die Zeithas the retrospective scoop that, in 1888, the kaiser was blackmailed by a prostitute, ``Fraulein Leben" (Miss Love), alias Emile Klopp, with whom he hadsado-masochistic sex. Klopp, clearly out for her pound of Kaiserfleisch, was paid the equivalent of $420,000 (in unmarked reichmarks, we presume) by the German government to stop her going public on the ruler's curious sexual habits, involving, it seems, bondage and ``unconventional methods of intercourse". The emperor's new ropes. Shortly thereafter, Klopp vanished into obscurity, followed unfortunately, a year or so later, by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, possibly sunk by the kaiser, who didn't like him before the scandal and even less after it. History has it that Wilhelm, to rest his brain, ``indulges in all those physical exercises in which he excels". He should have thought more before thinking less.

* IN ONE of the more bizarre combinations of literature and sport, the original manuscript of Jack Kerouac's On the Road is now the property of James Irsay, the owner and chief executive of the Indianapolis Colts gridiron club. Since the MS, typed, single-spaced on a 36-metre-long scroll, is about the length of a football pitch, it might come in handy as a sort of off-white carpet for particularly distinguished players to parade along. It is, to whichever use it may be put, an expensive piece of paper: it cost Mr Irsay $4.6 million at Christie's, Manhattan, and he will now, we imagine, be shelling out a similar sum to the insurers, not to mention the framers. Even so, he has made a wise investment in a prime example of what is becoming an archaic artform. The problem with modern manuscripts is there aren't any. A small square of plastic containing cybersquiggles is not exactly a First Folio or Kerouac scroll. Literary research is all the poorer for it.