Explained (2018–…): Season 3, Episode 10 - Plastic Surgery - full transcript

[woman 1] There is definitely
a look that is very on trend

and you see it anytime you open
SnapChat or Instagram.

-[woman 2] The Coca-Cola body.
-[man 1] Shaped like a guitar.

[woman 3] I think a lot of people
think the Instagram body is hourglass.

And I think it's actually
more of the spoon shape.

[narrator] And that body is often paired
with a certain kind of face.

[man 2] Big lips, the fox eyes.

[woman 1] A slim little nose.

[woman 4] I guess like Kylie Jenner
and like that kind of group.

[woman 5] I definitely think
the Instagram look is not real.

[narrator] It depends
what you mean by real.



It's true, some of those faces
may have been altered with preset filters

or using apps like Facetune,

where you can make
minute tweaks to your photo,

resizing, smoothing,
shifting the very structure of your face.

There are all of these slight tweaks
that we've been able to see on ourselves.

And more and more people
with the access to pursue them

are starting to adopt that face
for themselves in real life.

[narrator] The number 
of cosmetic procedures

has nearly doubled in the last decade.

They've gotten safer,
cheaper, and more sophisticated.

And the patients receiving them
have gotten younger and more diverse.

It feels like we're moving toward a future

where our appearances
are fundamentally changeable.

So, is that a bad thing?



And, is plastic surgery
changing the way we see ourselves?

You will be an entirely different man
by the time the healing is complete.

[man] A fountain of youth at the end
of a relatively painless syringe.

[woman] But there's no guarantee
it will all end in smiles.

I think they need to expect
a little bit of pain.

Well, it's a matter of looking
the best you can for as long as you can.

It makes no difference what I'm feeling.
My face never changes!

[laughter]

[Cattrall] The things we do to look good
exist on a spectrum.

On one end,
you have things like taking a shower,

wearing makeup, dyeing your hair.

That's long been considered good.

Enhancing your natural beauty.

As soon as you start looking
at the language of beauty,

beauty talk is moral talk.

It's just got morality all over it.

So, "You deserve it. You're worth it."

"Don't let yourself go.
You shouldn't have let yourself go."

Anytime you get shame,
blame, praise, reward,

then you've got a moral claim going on.

[Cattrall] Then,
on the other end of the spectrum,

things are riskier,
more painful, more permanent.

And people make moral judgments
about that too.

Take The Swan, a 2004 reality show
that whipped America into a frenzy.

The show knew it was pushing boundaries,
calling itself…

The most unusual competition ever devised.

[Cattrall] A team of surgeons,

plus a cosmetic dentist,
therapist, trainer, and life coach,

crafted self-described
ugly ducklings into swans,

and then pitted them against each other
in a final beauty pageant.

Viewers loved it.

Millions tuned in every week.

But reviewers,
they reacted with near-universal horror.

They called it ghastly,
ridiculous, hurtful, and repellent.

It even made it onto CNN Primetime.

You don't make them ugly.
And you don't even make them mediocre.

I mean, you dress 'em up,
and, you know, you give them breasts.

Unfortunately, some people
reacted negatively to the show.

[Cattrall] Cindy was
a contestant on Season 1.

[Ingle] I'll start from the top.

So I had an eyebrow lift.

I had cheek implants.
I had some fat removed under my eyes.

I had buccal fat removal,
chin reduction, and a mini face-lift.

Breast augmentation.
Then I had a tummy tuck.

And light liposuction on my inner thighs.

I started giving plastic surgery
more thought

after my second child.

My body had went through
such a physical change.

After I finished nursing my son,
my breasts were just really misshapen.

No matter how much exercise
or crunches, sit-ups I would do,

I was not losing my baby belly.

[Cattrall] But they were a young family

and couldn't spare the money
for cosmetic surgery.

So when The Swan had
a casting call commercial on the radio,

at that point,
I knew that I needed to at least try.

-[Cattrall] And she has no regrets.
-I'm very happy with the results.

That freaked me out.
I had a teeny, tiny waist.

I'd never really had a waist before.

Love my nose. Love my nose.

I was really happy that day.
It's kind of cool.

[Cattrall] After that season came out,

half a million women
applied to be on the next one.

More people than live
in the entire country of Iceland

were willing to go on television
to get plastic surgery.

In the early 2000s,
our idea of extreme was changing.

But this whole spectrum
had actually been shifting gradually

for almost a hundred years.

[loud gunfire]

World War I was like
nothing humanity had ever seen before.

Modern weaponry, tanks, machine guns,
poison gas killed millions,

reduced cities to rubble,

and left in their wake
a generation of injured soldiers,

many of them with faces disfigured
by shrapnel and bullets.

Surgeons had never seen
injuries like these before.

So to fix them, they had to get creative.

Crafting noses
out of cartilage borrowed from ribs,

reforming shattered jaws
with bits of leg bone,

and filling in hollowed cheeks
with patients' own fat and tissue.

Surgeons spent years
working on the same patients,

striving to make them
look like themselves again.

And if they couldn't do that
with flesh alone,

they hired actual artists
to craft prosthetic masks.

Their work wasn't just about function.

It was about form.

One of those World War I surgeons

is now sometimes known
as the father of aesthetic surgery.

As Joseph wrote,

"Someone who simply wants
a normal appearance,

wishes to be inconspicuous,

should not suffer the odium of vanity."

He didn't just treat the wounded.

Joseph was Jewish,
and so were many of his patients,

who wanted him to erase
the markers of their ethnicity,

allowing them to be inconspicuous

in a society that was hostile
towards them.

He helped put plastic surgery
on the spectrum

as something you could do
for aesthetics alone.

In the mid '20s,

half of America was going
to the movies every week

and lots of budding stars
were having their faces shuffled

and reassembled for the screen,

because those faces
were their stock-in-trade.

Comedian Fanny Brice
famously got a new nose,

and heartthrob Rudolph Valentino
had his ears reshaped.

In 1924, a newspaper even launched

what may have been
the first plastic surgery contest.

A search for the homeliest girl
in New York,

so they could turn her misfortune

into a fortune.

A woman named Jacqueline Naagel won,
and it worked.

She scored a movie contract
and moved to California.

And in the decades since,

plastic surgery has only gotten cheaper,
safer, and more accessible.

There are more providers.
There are more types of providers.

Different price points.

It's become like other services,
so you can find it across a range.

What is the difference
between routine and extreme?

Is it about the time taken?

Is it about whether you can do it at home
or it requires an expert to do it for you?

Is it about how risky and painful it is?

Usually, all we mean is what we would
do ourselves, or would like to do.

[Cattrall] Is a push-up bra extreme?

How about braces or laser hair removal?

Cutting off a mole?
Freezing off your fat? Fillers? Botox?

[Widdows] It wasn't very long ago
when Botox was viewed

as this crazy thing
that mad celebrities were doing,

injecting poison into their faces.

Oh, it's changed tremendously.

I think, before my time,

as a plastic surgeon,
there was a lot of stigma.

But in general, now what I see
is there's less guilt feeling,

there's less secrecy.

[woman] Prior to having children,
I had a shape.

In my twenties, I had a nice shape.

When I…

I did show the doctor my wish pic,

but it was me younger.

I started to notice changes.

My eyes started to look a little bit
more heavy, a little bit more tired,

and I didn't feel that way,
I didn't feel tired.

I felt great, but I looked tired,
and it bothered me.

I had gynecomastia as a child.

Uh, and then, when I got older,

I sort of just had a double mastectomy,

which is removal of breast tissue
and fat tissue.

I believe that if you look good,

everything is gonna come
smoother in your life.

I just always noticed women
who would walk by,

and I was always like,
"That woman's so beautiful."

It was always large-breasted women.

[Cattrall]
Everyone's spectrum is different.

It depends on who you are
and the culture you come from.

[Widdows] There are places
where cosmetic surgery is just routine,

a rite of passage.

[Cattrall] Like South Korea,
where one in three women in their twenties

have gotten work done.

And there's a special name

for surgeries undertaken
just to improve your job prospects.

Or in Brazil.

[Widdows] There's a narrative
about the right to beauty

and there's a whole thing about
how the mistress, no more than the maid,

should have that right.

[Cattrall] And, in part,
that's thanks to this man, Ivo Pitanguy,

a world-renowned surgeon
to the rich and famous.

A lucrative business.

He bought his own private island.

But he also operated
on the destitute for free,

earning him the nickname
"The pope of plastic surgery,"

and the status of a national hero.

Here he is at Carnival in 1999,

surrounded by a sea of dancers

atop his very own elaborate float.

Pitanguy was a pioneer.

He developed techniques for tummy tucks
that hid scarring below the bikini line,

championed less invasive mini face-lifts,

and developed the Brazilian butt lift.

The BBL is a procedure where fat is sucked
from elsewhere in your body,

usually the thigh or belly,

and injected into your butt.

Back in the '80s,
Playboy Brazil published a cover story

that called butts a national passion.

And decades before that,

Brazil's contestant in the 1954
Miss Universe Pageant, Martha Rocha,

had more curves
than the average woman on that stage.

[announcer 1]
Miss Brazil is a stunning stepper

as the contest narrows down
to the finalists.

[Cattrall] She lost.

[announcer 2] And it's Miss USA.

[Cattrall] Because the judges said
her hips were too big.

I remember when white women
were scared to have fat asses.

Like I remember
that being part of history.

Of Sir Mix-A-Lot's infamous song.

♪ I like big butts and I cannot lie ♪

The skit at the beginning,
it captures that perfectly.

Oh, my God. Becky, look at her butt.

And what really helped to mainstream that
was Kim Kardashian.

And the rest of her sisters,
one by one, kind of slowly following suit.

[Cattrall] And the BBL became
the fastest-growing procedure by far.

Brazil's passion for big butts
has gone global.

But if you read Playboy for the articles,

you'd have found a much darker story.

A sociologist claimed
the curvy beauty ideal

could be traced back
to enslaved African women

who bore the children
of their white slave owners,

resulting in eugenic aesthetic experiments
that avoided Africanoid exaggerations.

In other words,

a Black woman's butt

on a body that otherwise looked white.

The obsession with big butts
is definitely appropriative,

and it makes it so that now Black women
who do not have that body type

are somehow seen as, like, less Black,

or less attractive as Black women.

Wish me luck.

I would see my boyfriend
scrolling through social media sometimes

and the type of girls
that he would like their pictures,

it didn't reflect what I looked like
or what my body type looked like.

And I just felt like,
"Here's a lane for me to get it done.

Why not fix something that I don't like?"

I just finished my surgery, guys.

[nurse] A little pain, sure. Without pain…

You know, what is beauty?

What is beauty without pain?

[Cattrall] And then there's
the Instagram face,

which is basically a mash-up of features
borrowed from different ethnicities.

Those slanted fox eyes
and big, pillowy lips

have been mocked
in racist caricatures for centuries,

and people now pay for them,

getting their temples pulled back
with little dissolvable threads,

and their lips plumped
with a few syringes of filler.

With more people being able to pursue

this body type that has been
heavily influenced by tech

and by social media and by entertainment,

the expectation
on what you should look like,

because we now know what you can look like
based on the possibilities,

is getting smaller and smaller.

That window is getting more narrow.

What is normal is becoming narrower
and is converging.

And that's new.
We've never had that before.

So, for instance, body hair.

If you go back a little bit in the West,
you find it's much more of a social norm.

[Cattrall] Some people removed
their body hair. Some didn't.

Iconic beauty Sophia Loren
often chose not to.

But then hairlessness became the standard.

We've normalized a hairless body,
and we've done that globally.

We forget it's beautification,
it's artifice.

[Cattrall] It's a feedback loop.

We make choices
to bend to the beauty ideal

and that helps reinforce it,

moving the target of perfection
even further out of reach.

[Kat] Growing up, I was kind of obsessed
with the Victoria's Secret Angels.

Like, "Wow, look at these women."

It was like, "Va-va-voom,"
and I just wanted to look like that.

So I do struggle with wondering,
if Victoria's Secret never existed,

if I had never seen those runway shows,

would I still have been boob obsessed?

Would I have wanted a breast augmentation?

[Cattrall] Our beauty ideal
is now shaped by plastic surgery,

which means
it's harder to achieve without it.

Things that were once extreme
have become routine.

And at some point,

things that are routine
can start to feel required.

But it's like anything else.
If everybody dyes their hair

and you just have white hair
at a certain age, are you an outlier?

Yes.

[Cattrall] And pretty much
everyone would say

dyeing your hair
is less extreme than surgery.

Especially something like the BBL.

There's a risk
of injecting fat in the wrong place,

releasing it into your bloodstream,
where it can stick together,

blocking arteries in your brain or lungs,

leading to infection, stroke, or death.

There's something strange going on there,

as we take practices
that are deeply harmful and risky

and yet see them as benefiting ourselves.

It is constraining,
but it does also provide some joy.

[Cattrall] Researchers have tried
to measure the benefits of plastic surgery

and results have been mixed.

But one roundup
of some of the best studies

found that, overall,
it does seem to improve quality of life.

How much though, depends on the surgery.

Plastic surgery allows some people

to maybe exist in the world
a little bit easier.

For some folks,

plastic surgery is a way
to affirm their gender identity.

[woman] I had my brow bone shaven down.
I had a brow lift.

I had a nose job,
and I also had my chin done.

Surgery helps you feminize and helps you
become the woman you want to be, but it's…

It's so much more than that.

The more passable I am
as a cisgendered woman,

the more safe it is
to walk down the street

or to just live a normal life.

We need to stop thinking
about self-worth and self-value

and self-confidence
as these arbitrary ideals.

I often say that I'm not in the business
of making people look better.

I'm in the business
of making people feel better.

I'm more open to putting myself out there.
I'm more open to meeting new people.

I've made more friends, I think.

And that comes from
me just feeling better about myself.

Just feeling stronger.

It really is freeing, because I know that,

every day, it's only gonna get better

and I'm just gonna become a thousand times
more confident than I ever have been.

It just made me more confident
in every aspect of my life.

Individually, I think it could be
oppressive or empowering.

Collectively,

as something we think it's a good idea
for human beings to generally do,

ideally we need to live in a world

where we don't need to cut up our bodies
to be our best selves.

In regards to my daughter,

I-- I even struggled with telling her
where I was going today,

because I didn't even know
how to explain it to her

without telling her,

"Yeah. My boobs are fake.
I had a breast augmentation."

How do I even explain that to her?

And I don't wanna plant the seed of,

"You need big boobs to be pretty,"

because then
that's just gonna be in her mind,

like, "When I get older,
if my boobs aren't as big as mommy's,

then I need to change that."

I mean if we could get old boobs,
saggy boobs, breastfeeding boobs

and just have them on every bus stop,

we'd quite soon
stop thinking of normal boobs

as these completely pert, round things.

There needs to be less conversations

about the good or the bad
of plastic surgery itself,

and more dialogue about what it means
to be a person in a marginalized body

and why desirability is even so important
to that experience in the first place.

[closing theme music playing]