Millions of people undergo cosmetic surgery procedures every single year in order to augment their appearances. Hundreds of different cosmetic procedures are practiced – many of them with roots that are more than a century old.
Some established cosmetic procedures have become high in demand, more so than others. With this in mind, the following article offers a quick rundown of some of the most popular cosmetic procedures, focusing on common cosmetic surgeries in the United States.
Botox Injections
Botox is a brand name chemical that relaxes muscles. When it is injected into a person’s face, it can reduce the appearance of wrinkles and laugh lines for a temporary period of time. Botox is extremely popular, not just due to how well it works but also because of how non-invasive the procedure is. No cutting or stitching is required: only a few injections.
Liposuction
Liposuction is a procedure in which body fat is removed using a pump in order to contour areas of the body that contain fat tissue. Contrary to popular belief, liposuction is not known to be an effective long-term weight loss solution and is not recommended to be used as such. Instead, it is used as a ‘sculpting’ solution.
Liposuction procedures are usually completed without general anesthesia and can be relatively painful affairs. Still, this has not stopped over 200,000 Americans from undergoing surgery annually.
Liposuction was invented by two Italian brothers – Arpad and Giorgio Fischer – in 1974. They pioneered the use of a blunt tunneling instrument attached to a pump. Since the 1970s, the procedure has undergone some improvements to reduce the trauma inflicted upon patients’ bodies.
Breast Augmentation
Over 313,000 breast augmentation surgeries were completed in the United States in 2018 – making it the most popular of all cosmetic surgical procedures. Modern breast augmentation surgery has an extremely high rate of cosmetic success. The most common material used in these procedures is silicon, which closely matches the consistency of human breast tissue.
Breast augmentation accounts for around 17.5 percent of all cosmetic surgery procedures completed worldwide.
Nose Augmentation
Nose augmentation – otherwise known as rhinoplasty – is one of the oldest forms of medically proven plastic surgery. Although the first paper on rhinoplasty was published in the nineteenth century, the surgery caught on during the Great War.
During World War One, staggering amounts of people were wounded in action on all sides. This was the first industrialized war, and artillery was used in numbers that had never been seen before. Facial injuries from artillery blasts were extremely common, and many men had their noses blown off or mutilated.
Doctors in the United Kingdom developed a standardized way of augmenting wounded noses by applying a flap of skin from the forehead. After the war, this new surgical method was taken up in the cosmetic industry and slowly improved with more recent and less invasive techniques. Rhinoplasty is still one of the most popular cosmetic surgeries in the world, with over 200,000 procedures performed in the United States in 2018 alone.