Reality TV Meets Plastic Surgery: An Ugly Shame

In this essay, Anita Creamer discusses the issue of the rising popularity of plastic surgery reality television. Makeovers on television first began with remodeling and restoring old homes and updating other homes to the owner’s liking. Now reality television has a new fad, remodeling people and giving them complete makeovers because of their insecurities. Creamer questions the ethics and morals of Sha, a baby-faced 19 year old blonde whose life ambition is to look like Pamela Anderson and become a Playboy centerfold, as well as the rest of the people featured on MTV’s “I Want a Famous Face”- a show about young people who undergo surgery to look like their favorite celebrities. Creamer says that “ the eternal American habit of reinvention has come to this--remaking our faces and bodies instead of our lives; the annihilation of the self in the name of self-improvement”. These people feel that their outer self is flawed when the reality is that their inner self is really flawed.