It’s amazing when, in the course of an interview with a cosmetic surgeon, you can go from feeling quite confident you don’t look like an asymmetrical troll, to being utterly convinced that you do. I’m sat in the office of Dr Dean Cunha-Gomes of the Bahrain Specialist Hospital in Juffair listening to him reel off a list of his most common procedures. ‘There’s body contouring – here we are talking about liposuction and tummy tucks, we are talking about breast augmentation or reduction.’ Sure, I’m by no means overweight, but the spare tyre that has been gradually inflating since I moved to the Arabian Gulf now starts to spill over the arm of the chair.
‘Noses are very common,’ he continues, ‘and I do difficult noses as well – crooked noses.’ I catch his eye in an attempt to ascertain if I have a ‘difficult nose’. ‘And then I do a lot of eyelid cases, both upper and lower eyelids, along with cheek lifts, face lifts, brow lifts, pinning back the ears, chin augmentation, chin reduction – we do the works here.’ By the time he has finished I feel like a wannabe Michael Jackson.
Ten years ago, cosmetic surgery was all about secrecy. The rich and famous would go from fag ash lil one day to a blow up doll the next and vehemently maintain it was the work of Mother Nature. Come 2010 and anyone over 40 is ridiculed for not pumping their face with botox, while a wrinkly old head is a sign of either poverty or dementia.
I was under the impression that plastic surgery was red in tooth and claw and involved drills, scalpels, knives and lots of screaming. It had taken a fortifying swig of rescue remedy before I could even get through the door. But the Cosmetic Surgery Clinic in the Bahrain Specialist Hospital is more high class health club than blood bath. It is a clinic equipped to the hilt with the latest laser equipment and massage machines, and they are even planning a spa.
In preparation for the interview, and realising that anything worth knowing these days can be gleaned from American TV series, I watched several episodes of Nip/Tuck, the show credited with making cosmetic surgery acceptable and even desirable to millions of people around the world. In one episode I sat through, a woman marched into the clinic and demanded to be transformed into Angelina Jolie. I wanted to know if this sort of thing happened in real life.
Dr Gomes doesn’t find the question odd. ‘A lot of people will come with a photograph and say, “I want lips like this”. I discourage this because the rest of them might not be like Angelina Jolie, and it will not match their face. You can clone one person’s face onto someone else, but in my opinion plastic surgery should be very close to natural, whether you are doing botox, fillers or surgery.’
In fact, rather than simply nipping in and demanding a face/off, getting the go ahead for cosmetic surgery is slightly more of a challenge than one might initially think. Dr Gomes recalls, ‘There was a girl who was very thin and wanted very large implants. I told her that I could not do that. Those implants might pop out – she didn’t have that amount of skin, and it would be too big, it would look obnoxious.’ And so he told the disgruntled woman firmly no. ‘What we require from surgery today is a natural result, not someone who looks like a plastic surgery patient.’
And it’s not only women who are obsessed with radically changing the way they look. ten percent of the patients at the clinic are male, and the blokes ask for everything from breast reductions to nose jobs. So, I press him, admiring his terribly straight nose, wide eyes and pert face, what has he had done? He chuckles and frowns (presumably to demonstrate that his face is pre-surgery and mobile) and says, ‘No, I have never had any plastic surgery done myself. Though I do a little bit for my wife, I do botox for her.’
Having worked in numerous clinics around the world (including in Brazil and Sweden – though quite why there should be any demand for cosmetic surgery in these countries I can’t possibly imagine), and seen fashions change and the perceptions of beauty shift, I ask Dr Gomes, who has spent a lifetime making people prettier, what the cornerstone of beauty is. He replies, ‘In my opinion, symmetry is attractiveness.’ I’m left thanking God for nice personalities.
Dr Gomes’ four steps to staying young and beautiful
1. Eat healthily
2. Stay out of the sun (or use high factor sun protection)
3. Exercise regularly
4. Go to a good cosmetic clinic
The Cosmetic Surgery Clinic in the Bahrain Specialist Hospital is one of the Gulf Region’s foremost cosmetic surgery centres, with prices around a third of those in the US and half those in similar clinics in the UK. For more information, contact 17 812 009 or visit www.bsh.com.bh
