I found this evening’s lecture on plastic surgery incredibly interesting. Cosmetic surgery is aimed at improving one’s physical characteristics. In more recent years, plastic surgery has become increasingly common. Celebrities have gone under the knife extremely publicly and advertised their benefits from it. Their endorsements made the idea of plastic surgery appear trendy. Interestingly enough, plastic surgery seems to have targeted a female audience. As seen in the advertisement in People magazine, a male doctor was examining his wife. In this advertisement, there are countless areas marked up for ‘improvement’ on his wife’s body while there was only one label for the man. There has even been a television show called The Swan that put women through extreme plastic surgery to ‘improve’ their looks. The contestants were not allowed to look in a mirror throughout the healing process and there was a grand reveal in the end. The show perpetuated the idea that after going through this surgery, the women’s real or natural self is no longer trapped in an ugly exterior. In today’s magazines, photo shop is often used to change model’s bodies and looks. For quite some time now, women in particular have been held to unobtainable beauty standards in magazines and other published things.