Gift of beauty

The wallet-sized box underneath Jackie’s Christmas tree in Altadena, Calif., wasn’t a wallet. Nor was it jewelry. Instead, the gift-wrapped box held a handwritten note from her husband asking, “What better present can you give someone than helping them feel better about themselves?”

Jackie’s gift wasn’t diamonds, but a face-lift performed by Dr. Richard Fleming at the Beverly Hills Institute of Aesthetic and Reconstructive Surgery.

Christmas is the busiest time of the year for plastic surgeons as people schedule surgeries to look good for the seasonal festivities or simply because the holidays offer a convenient recuperation time from a face-lift, nose job or breast implants.

The number of Americans undergoing both surgical and nonsurgical cosmetic procedures has skyrocketed in the past six years.

The American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (ASAPS) prohibits cosmetic surgery to be awarded as a raffle item, charitable donation or promotion. As a result, most board-certified surgeons also shy away from issuing Christmas gift certificates. But Dr. Fleming says family members arrange to give surgical gifts for the holidays.

“Christmas gifts [of plastic surgery] are very, very common,” the California surgeon says. “It’s been going on for a long time.”

Dr. Robert K. Sigal, a staff surgeon at the Austin-Weston Center for Cosmetic Surgery in Reston, says his clinic does not issue gift certificates, but he does see couples come in together and it is clear that a gift mentality is involved.

“He gets the car; she gets the face,” he says.

The trend has not reached all clinics.

“I’ve had lots of couples come in over the years and say the surgery per se was a gift from someone else, but it wasn’t necessarily a Christmas gift,” says Dr. Robert W. Bernard, who operates from a clinic in White Plains, N.Y., and is the president of ASAPS.

Dr. Mark Sultan, chief of plastic surgery for Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan, says he is not aware of any surgery as a gift and he discourages the practice.

“It changes the doctor-patient relationship,” Dr. Sultan says. “It makes it less medical and more social almost. … Plastic surgery, when you cut through all of the fluff, is still a serious situation. It’s still incisions and weighing benefits and risks.”

Although Dr. Bernard says he has no qualms with the idea of surgery as a gift, he cautions that the social environment must be right.

“I think it’s very hard to give a generic $500 gift certificate toward a cosmetic procedure — whether that procedure is collagen or botox or toward a face-lift — from one person to another because that person may not have wanted something to begin with,” he says. “So the giver has to know the receiver.”

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