What motivates them? Don’t they have eyes with which to see? Can’t they tell that all plastic surgery looks the same?

—There’s the perpetually surprised face—There’s the retaining water face—There’s fat giant lips face

That’s it. those are the only options. some choose all three, saying, “I wanna look like a puffy lunatic, plus old.”

You would think that plastic surgery would evolve beyond cartoonishness, but it hasn’t. if a celebrity says “I wanna get my lips done,” what she actually means is, “I want my lips to look like two hotdogs.”

There are human lips, which come in all shapes and sizes and colors, and then there are plastic surgery lips, which come in one shape (fat), one size (vast), and one color (fluorescent pink).

Some of these women, instead of aging elegantly into grand dame-ness, have opted to spend their final years as complete freaks.

Nicole Kidman was once beautiful, but now she looks like a frozen Pillsbury Dough Boy. Joan Rivers was once funny, but now she’s horrifying.

Women are by far the largest consumers of plastic surgery. in the entertainment industry, there is only one type of breast implant as far as I can make out: “Ball Boobs”. but men get plastic surgery, too. Johnny Depp has started to look a little strange lately, for example. some men would rather be puffy than wrinkly. why, I don’t know. they get facelifts to look continuously surprised, the works. they just don’t do it in the numbers of women.

Ashley Judd has recently turned all puffy. Of course, she’s denying plastic surgery. they usually do. “I’ve never had plastic surgery,” says the person who so plainly had plastic surgery it boggles the mind with its cosmic obviousness.

I was talking with a friend about this and she said that you can’t spot the ones who get plastic surgery done well.

Then why get it done at all? I wondered. if you go under the knife and come out looking exactly the same, why not just look exactly the same and be done with it? Sorry, but you’re not going to look ten years younger all of a sudden. This is not “Dr. Who”. It’s reality (sort of). if someone actually did become ten years younger, it would be creep you out and you know it. but plastic surgery can’t do it, so not to worry. It can make you look inflated and balloon-like. It can make you as expressionless as a corpse. It can make you smoother, like the porcelain of a thoroughly cleaned toilet. but it can never, ever make you younger.

I suppose one could say a thing or two about how our society demonizes getting old, especially women who get old. One could also say something about impossible standards of beauty. but I’m too amazed at how off the mark plastic surgery really is to say anything at all about it. What about regular old possible standards of beauty? Plastic surgery actually turns them on their head. I simply have trouble wrapping my small town, mountain boy mind around why anyone would do this to their own face.

I reiterate my question from the first paragraph: don’t they have eyes with which to see?

Michael Kindt is writer living in South Dakota whose work has appeared in College Times, Midwest Lit Review and in the poetry anthology “It’s dark & Scary in here.” He’s the author of “Early Onset of Night, Volume One” and blogs at Early-Onset-of-Night.tumblr.com. Twitter: @MichaelKindt

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