Cosmetic surgery is, at its heart, no more than an intentional and committed grooming strategy enacted to ameliorate or improve body image. The bodies of women are socially and libidinally significant to themselves and to the world in which they engage. How a woman appears has always affected how she will be evaluated and received in the social world. Because of this, many women learn to evaluate themselves in the same ways they imagine others will judge them. Body image represents a component of self-perception, but poor body image readily infuses the entire self with a sense of its unworthiness with shame. Poor body image and the measures women take to address it are embedded within a dynamic that links shame and narcissism to its subsequent amendment.

By acting on this vast discontent, extremely profitable global organizations market an unprecedented range of personal care products and services designed to solve the problem. The media, with an unnerving and intentional agenda, which accompanies us in our bedrooms and bathrooms and apparently infiltrates our own psyche, is usually blamed for distorting the relationship that women have with their bodies.