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 Doctors quizzed patients about their self-worth before the cosmetic
procedures, asking whether they agreed or disagreed with statements
like “On the whole, I am satisfied with myself,” “I certainly feel
useless at times,” and “I feel that I have a number of good
qualities.”
After the face-lifts, patients typically thought they looked about
nine years younger.
But average self-esteem scores were essentially the same before the
face-lifts and six months later.
Responses were scored from 0 to 30, with anything under 15
considered low self-esteem and totals over 25 considered high. At
the start, the average person’s self-esteem rating was 24.3, and
when doctors quizzed them a second time, it was 24.6.
“Patients were generally happy with their outcomes even though their
feelings of self-worth did not improve,” study leader Dr. Andrew
Jacono, of the New York Center for Facial Plastic & Laser Surgery
said by email.
Each patient had what’s known as a rhytidectomy, or face-lift,
performed by the same surgeon. These procedures are becoming more
popular, though they are generally not performed as often as breast
augmentations, nose jobs or liposuction, according to the American
Society of Plastic Surgeons.
The study included 59 patients at the start, and 50 of them
completed the follow-up questionnaires after living with their new
faces for six months. On average, they were about 58 years old,
although ages ranged form 37 to 73. All but two of the participants
who completed both sets of quizzes were women.
While the overall shift in self-esteem scores was too small to rule
out the role of chance, there were some sharper differences when
researchers sorted the patients based on their initial scores,
according to a report in JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery.
Patients with low self-esteem at the start of the study had an
average score increase of 3.7 points six months later.
People who started with high self-worth scores had an average
decrease of 3.1 points at the end of the study.
Those who had an ambivalent sense of self-worth remained little
changed after procedures, with an average uptick of about 0.5 points
in their scores.
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Shortcomings of the study include the high proportion of patients
who got other cosmetic procedures in addition to face-lifts, the
authors acknowledge. The additional procedures may have altered
patients’ feelings of self-worth in a way that makes it hard to
discern if all of their feelings were related to face-lifts alone,
the researchers note.
It’s possible that the patients with the highest self-esteem prior
to the face-lifts experienced a dip in self-worth afterwards because
they felt conflicted about their decision to get the procedures,
Jacono noted.
“Admitting that they needed to have something done could possibly
have made them feel as if they were not as great as they previously
thought,” Jacono said.
The results also confirm findings from earlier research that has
linked cosmetic procedures to improvements in body image without
necessarily altering self-esteem, noted David Sarwer, a public
health researcher at Temple University in Philadelphia who wasn’t
involved in the study.
“For many people, there is only a modest relationship between how
they objectively look to others and how they think and feel about
their appearance,” Sarwer said by email. “So even if some women felt
that they looked much younger, they still may not be happy or
satisfied with the appearance of their face.”
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1Q3ZUTE JAMA Facial Plastic Surgery, online
October 29, 2015.
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