'Botched' plastic surgeons a cut above

E! BRAND SHOOT -- Season: 2014 -- Pictured (l-r): Dr. Terry Dubrow, Dr. Paul Nassif -- (Photo by: Brian Bowen Smith/E!)

E! BRAND SHOOT -- Season: 2014 -- Pictured (l-r): Dr. Terry Dubrow, Dr. Paul Nassif -- (Photo by: Brian Bowen Smith/E!)

Published Apr 23, 2015

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CELEBRITIES go under the knife all the time. But taking a page out of their book isn’t always the smartest thing to do.

After all, Lil Kim, Mickey Rourke, La Toya Jackson and Donatella Versace are living proof of how shallowness can betray all sense of rationale. Sometimes the deeper the pockets, the greater the addiction.

Heck, what starts out as a little nip/tuck can often snowball into the person being almost unrecognisable. In fact, late last year Renée Zellweger (Bridget Jones’s Diary) weathered some pretty scathing comments about her “new look”.

And this quest for beauty and youth has started to afflict those on the periphery of Hollywood’s doorstep and beyond.

The desires vary from wanting a more impressive cleavage to fuller lips, a tummy tuck, perhaps some liposuction, rhinoplasty or a brow or butt lift. But, of course, these are the more common surgeries. It gets progressively more intense. Let’s just say, if some of these guys bagged a role in a zombie movie, the make-up artist wouldn’t have to do much work.

Although, there is certainly nothing wrong with a person wanting to enhance their features. After all, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. But there is a risk, especially if a fly-by-night surgeon is on the other end of that scalpel.

That is where Dr Terry Dubrow and Dr Paul Nassif come in. They pull off those rose-tinted glasses to reveal the ugly side to plastic surgery. The patients on their show Botched turn to them for salvation from the images that haunt them in the mirror every day. They are turning heads, but not in the ways they envisioned.

So the doctors try to correct the botched surgeries as best they can.

Dubrow says: “We show a side of plastic surgery that you normally don’t see. Normally, plastic surgery television shows show patients coming in wanting to make a change and it’s fabulous, everything goes great. I did a show called The Swan. It was all about these amazing changes. But we (with Botched) turn over the other side of plastic surgery and show how it can go really wrong. There are a lot of untrained physicians doing crazy procedures in this country and all over the world. By the same token, we are able to, in most cases, really change their lives for the better.”

Nassif, who has been best friends with Dubrow for years and takes his good-natured jokes on the chin too, adds: “It’s a cautionary tale of what not to do. We have known each other for 16, 17 years now. And the funny thing is when you watch this show, this guy’s a joker all the time. But that’s all real, too.”

Recalling one of the most difficult procedures they took on, Dubrow says: “It was a patient who went to Mexico to have discount plastic surgery. Opposed to using an anaesthesiologist, in order to save money, they put a block of ice on her abdomen to numb it. Unfortunately, she got frostbite and it basically killed her entire abdominal wall. Although her tummy tuck was, technically, successful – she lost all the skin from underneath her breast to her pubis.”

Meanwhile, Nassif chips in with an unforgettable case for him.

“Something patients will go to the extreme with is rhinoplasty, or nose jobs. And they have the most unfortunate things happen.

“For me, one of the toughest cases was a patient who came in – she had had surgery years ago and had been living with the complication for 22 years. Basically her nose became… take Michael Jackson’s nose and amplify that by about four. It was pretty much no nose on her face. So we reconstructed it and got a pretty darn good result. Now her life is pretty much back to normal. So it’s incredible.”

By the way, Janice Dickinson appeared on the show, too. And she slotted into the “most unbearably difficult patient” category.

Dubrow notes: “It was a wild ride. She is enormously challenging. You want to see that episode. She’s lucky the editors and producers were very nice to her. They were kind to her because what you see is bad. What really happened was significantly worse.”

Of course, with the show’s popularity on the rise going into season two, they had more people knocking on their doors. But they worked from a risk-benefit ratio. They also looked at their psychological state of mind, looking for any signs of dysmorphia.

Nassif hints: “If you watch season two, there will be some celebrities. We can’t discuss who they are. I can reveal that we had over 500 to 600 celebrities try out for the show.”

 

• Botched season two airs on E! (DStv channel 124) on Sunday at 9pm.

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