Teens learn looks count(2)

Peer pressure

Peer influence is a major reason why many of the teenagers choose to go for the procedures. The most frequent phrase that Yang used when talking to Metropolitan was "many of my friends did it."

"It's generally accepted among us, and we can just tell each other - there's nothing to be ashamed of," said Yang.

High school student Ren Tianying, 18, thinks that she looks fine and doesn't need any changes, but she is not bothered about the fact that many of her friends get procedures like whitening shots and hyaluronic acid injection.

"Many of the Korean and Japanese singers had plastic surgery in their teens. It's no big deal," said Ren, pointing out that some of her friends even went to Korea for "minor cosmetic surgery tourism," which means sight-seeing and getting their faces altered at the same time.

Some models, actresses and television presenters come to enlarge their eyes or have injections at Zhang's clinic, and many don't mind talking about it. This undoubtedly also influences young people.

Zhang's main target customers are women aged between 18 and 30. About 40 percent of Zhang's customers are under 20. Some school kids aged 13 or 14 come to the clinic too. Most of them are accompanied by parents, and they wanted to enter schools of the performing arts, said Zhang. She says the clinic only asks for identification cards when the customer seems under-aged.

Beauty is skin deep

The most popular two procedures at Zhang's clinic are no-knife double eyelids for 7,600 yuan and canthus cutting for 15,000 yuan. (The canthus is the corner of the eye where upper and lower eyelids meet.) Zhang explains that Asians tend to have epicanthic folds, the skin fold of the upper eyelid covering the inner angle of the eye. In Zhang's view, it gives the impression of being unintelligent. She says cutting a tiny chip out of it can make the eye look bigger, improving one's facial proportions. This procedure requires about two weeks for recovery.

Other popular choices include hyaluronic acid injection to shape or sculpt their faces, and eyelid liposuction.

Ten years ago, the biggest group of customers was women in their forties and fifties who wanted to look younger through a face lift. "Although very effective, those procedures were painful, left large wounds and scars, and took a long time to recover from," Zhang said.

Now more and more young people choose minor procedures as technology develops. Based on her 20 years of experience in the business, Zhang attributes this to two main reasons - first, people don't wait around until they are old to solve their problems any more; second, fast-paced modern society doesn't give people much time to rest and recover from surgery. "Not to mention that people still cannot easily accept a sudden, big change in other people's faces," said Zhang.

The biggest advantage of the new procedures is that people only need one or two days to rest at most. Take the double eyelids operation as an example. After a traditional surgical operation, a patient will have to wait seven days before taking out the stitches, and a few months before the swelling subsides.

"Thanks to the new technologies, many of our customers can just do it at noon, and go to parties or for a blind date in the evening with natural double eyelids," said Zhang.