A CUT ABOVE
Six-pack etching. Biceps implants. Moob reductions. Body-sculpting surgeries are on the rise among men. Critics say it’s cheating. Proponents say that’s not the point
Carl still remembers that day. He was sore and bruised, held together by a compression garment. It hurt to undress. But when he did, he was left speechless by what he saw. ‘It was like being in someone else’s body,’ he recalls. Carl was marvelling at his new six-pack, the result of muscles being surgically ‘etched’ on to his abdomen the day before.
He had only told his mum and close friends that he was having the procedure – but afterwards, seeing his newly sculpted stomach, Carl felt like spreading the word. ‘I started telling people because I was amazed at the results,’ he says.
‘It’s one thing seeing it on Instagram – it’s another actually unveiling, unwrapping the thing and thinking, “Oh my god, this is my body.”’
Mere decades ago, plastic surgery was the preserve of the rich and famous; an outlandish indulgence as likely to inspire pity as envy. Today, such enhancements have lost much of their charge – positive or negative – to become almost as unremarkable as teeth-whitening and fake tan.
Celebrities who used to strenuously deny having had work done now freely discuss their nose jobs, for example. And so-called ‘tweakments’ such as anti-wrinkle injections are accessible on every British high street, sometimes for less than a hundred quid, while many of us know someone who has come home from Turkey with a new hairline.
An enduring cosmetic surgery boom has been reported on both sides of the Atlantic, despite fears of recession and a decline in consumer spending. The British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) reported that more than 31,000 procedures were performed last year, a 102% increase compared with 2021 and over 3,000 more than before the pandemic – indeed, it was the highest annual rise since the BAAPS’s record-keeping began in 2004.
In the US, the upwards trend reaches further back. Between 1997 and 2007, the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery (known as The Aesthetic Society) recorded an increase of nearly 450%. Sixteen years on, the numbers are still climbing, even for the more intrusive ‘body procedures’ such as liposuction and abdominoplasty, which drove the rise between 2020 and 2021.
It’s not just women, either. The latest BAAPS figures showed a 118% increase in the number of male patients in the year to 2022.
‘It’s been democratised,’ says Alex Karidis, a cosmetic surgeon and the medical director of the Karidis clinic. Now based at the St John & St Elizabeth Hospital in north-west London, Karidis has
