The number of young people in their teens and early twenties turning up at hospitals to alter their appearances is on the increase. One cosmetic surgery in Taipei has been well prepared for this, every summer holiday having a "special concessions for young people and students" promotion.

Those coming to request "external improvements" are mainly students going up from high school to university, students preparing to go over seas, and youngsters preparing to step out into society for the first time. There are also more than a few junior and high school students who have specially returned home from overseas study.

Consumer power? Lu Hsu-yen, manager of the cosmetic surgery at a large hospital points out that the most frequent operation for students on holiday is enlargement of the eyes and repairing scars.

"The extent to which modern youngsters love to be good looking can at times be unimaginable," feels one cosmetic doctor with some regret. Young people can very easily get emotional about their own bodies. Just because of a "defect" that other people would not notice or even care about if they did, young people will spend their days being depressed and unhappy, and think of asking for cosmetic improvements.

A certain Ms. Wu, who works at another surgery, notices that there are also more young female students coming to have breast implants. "On the one hand they are afraid that people will joke about them having 'washerboard' chests, while on the other it could be the influence of media emphasis on 'curvaceousness.'"

Li Tsui-hu, a lecturer in domestic sciences, thinks that young people today have plenty of money and are willing to spend, and they especially will not feel bad if they spend it on themselves, so they have very quickly come to be gods in the consumer market.

So as to capture the great strength of these consumers, enterprises have naturally gone all out to create businesses around all kinds of things that young people "need."

Mum loves beauty, daughter is put to the knife: The promotion of the importance of image by the broadcast media also stirs up interest in cosmetic surgery. Star performers are packaged by their companies and cooked up by the media to become the idols of dreamy young people. Apart from worshipping them, young people also identify with these idols, with the result that they dress like them and even come to look like their models. It is not strange then that some young women will take the photograph of a star such as Lin Ching-hsia along to the doctor and say, "I want my chin to be made to look like Lin Ching-hsia's."

In the past, most students put their lessons first and the good student would always wear a grey shirt and "lank-noodle" haircut. Even perming one's hair or wearing a mini skirt was considered "strange." Things are different today, not only do young people love to look good, their parents even encourage them to study how they themselves dress, so that from a very young age they have already developed an attractive appearance. Ms. Wu observes that these days a lot of students are "escorted" by their mothers to come and have their eyes enlarged.

Visiting relatives and improving your looks on the side: In a society that puts a lot of emphasis on external appearances, everyone hopes to make a good start when they go into a new environment by giving a good impression to other people. This is why the boom seasons for the cosmetic industry are vacations when people are going to move up in the education system, when people are going into new jobs, and before people leave the country for study abroad.

What is rather more puzzling is the activity of junior overseas students who come back to the country to change their appearances. Lu Hsu-yen says that recently there have been many such students coming back to have their eyes enlarged or noses built up. Outside the country and on their own, such children do not want to be made fun of by western children over the shape of their eyes and noses, and they do not like to be mistaken for Japanese or Koreans. To have cosmetic surgery abroad is very expensive and has not reached the standards expected by people from the East, so coming back to "visit relatives and change your appearance" is the best "calculated" choice.

Among the many motives that lead students to change their appearances, the most common is still in fact peer-group influence. One fourth-year female university student, by the name of Guo, had her eyes enlarged because she felt the lids hung down too low. She never thought this would become a hot topic of conversation in the faculty and that a lot of people would follow suit and have the same thing done.

But there are also those young people who go in for cosmetic surgery simply for a laugh. One student had a wager with her friends that "the results of eye enlargement would be unnatural," and used her own body to prove it: Such is the unavoidable folly of youth.

[Picture Caption]

In the flower of youth why go in for campus cosmetics? (photo by Huang Li-li)