The Workplace: Having a face-lift to bolster a career

http://iht.com/articles/2006/02/14/business/workcol15.php

The Workplace: Having a face-lift to bolster a career
Eryn Brown The New York Times
TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 14, 2006
Ginny Clark of Manhattan got a face-lift last April. She had several reasons for seeking out the procedure. Clark, 62, said she "wanted to look 20 years younger." She was socializing with a rather youthful crowd - dating a man 10 years younger than she was and often dining out with friends in their 30s and 40s.

In addition, as a stock trader for the investment firm Cantor Weiss, Clark was working with a lot of younger people - a circumstance that gave her pause. Most of her peers, including a brother nine years her junior, were retiring from their Wall Street jobs. But Clark had no intention of quitting; a younger look, she believed, would extend her career. "Being a dinosaur in the business," she said, cosmetic surgery "gives you a leg up if you want to stick around."

Clark is among a growing number of people seeking cosmetic surgery to get ahead in the workplace. From 2000 to 2004, the number of facial plastic surgery procedures and injections increased 34 percent, according to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, a professional organization. In 2004, it reported, 22 percent of men and 15 percent of women who sought plastic surgery did so for work-related reasons.

Surgeons say they believe that sharp increases in the number of procedures performed on men result directly from workplace pressures. The number of forehead lifts, Botox treatments and laser resurfacing treatments more than doubled for men from 2003 to 2004, the surgery academy reported. Doctors say they have seen increases in requests for operations from real estate agents, lawyers, airline pilots and business executives, among others.

"On Wall Street, most of these guys retire in their mid-40s or 50s," said Dr. Alan Matarasso, who is Clark's physician. "You have hedge fund managers who are 28 years old. So at 50, you feel old."

Dr. Jeffrey Rawnsley, an associate professor of facial plastic surgery at the University of California-Los Angeles, who is also in private practice in Los Angeles, said, "People see themselves having to work longer and older, and they feel that they need to keep up: 'If I'm going to have to work 15 more years, I need to look young."'

The reward cannot be dismissed as illusory, proponents say. Wendy Lewis, a consultant based in New York who advises clients considering cosmetic surgery, said, "It's not an isolated phenomenon. You get something done, you get the promotion."

The surgery academy reported in 2004 that the average cost of a face-lift in the United States was $6,505; a brow-lift, $3,439; facial and neck liposuction, $2,288; and Botox injections, $441 a visit.

For many years, studies have suggested that attractive people - and presumably a young look is considered attractive - are more successful than others in most aspects of life. And good-looking people may also earn more than their homelier colleagues.

A paper published last year by researchers from Harvard University and Wesleyan University concluded there was a "sizable beauty premium" in the labor market. A study in 1994 by the University of Texas and Michigan State University found that men and women "with above-average looks receive a pay premium," while "workers with below-average looks receive a pay penalty."

Partly because it is hard to quantify the effects of a procedure, few patients speak readily of their post-surgery windfalls. But many say they have seen increases in both their work performance and their pay.

"I've always been a confident person, and this just helped," said Alan Horowitz, a real estate agent from Morristown, New Jersey, who had a neck-lift by Matarasso last year and said that business had improved noticeably afterward.

But a nip and a tuck do not automatically translate into workplace success, Lewis, the consultant, warned.

The standard advice about plastic surgery - pick your doctor and procedure carefully - still applies, she said. An ultratight face-lift or too much collagen pumped into your lips could cause your career investment to backfire. "When you get back, it can become water-cooler talk," she said. Most people who undergo a cosmetic procedure for work reasons, she said, prefer not to let colleagues in on the secret.

Still, Lewis said, she often advises the career-minded to acknowledge that they have had at least a little bit of work done, on the grounds that people can see the results anyway.