MaKe over on a dime
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> Plastic surgery is affordable and plentiful
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> By Kenneth Rapoza
> Special Correspondent
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> March 9, 2005
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> Rio de Janeiro * The aesthetic plastic surgery field that has taken the world by storm is still largely only accessible to those with disposable income. But in Brazil, a nation known to have some of the worst social class divisions in the world, plastic surgery is for everybody.
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> "If you make under 1,000 reals per month [$333] and live in a shanty town, you can have a facelift in Brazil," said Dr. Ewaldo Bolivar de Souza Pinto, a Sao Paulo surgeon who has been performing aesthetic surgery on working class and poor patients since 1989.
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> Brazil is known as an image conscious culture. Some of the world's top models, like Ana Hickmann and Gisele Bundchen, come from this nation of 179 million inhabitants, of which 22 percent live on a dollar or less per day, according to the World Bank. The tropical climate lends Brazilians to reveal their bodies more than their counterparts in the United States, the world's plastic surgery leader.
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> More than 500,000 plastic surgery procedures were performed in Brazil last year, up from 200,000 five years ago, according to the Brazilian Society of Plastic Surgery. The average cost is between $1,000 and $3,000.
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> In big cities like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, it's not uncommon to see women walking around with cloth bandages on their noses and other parts of the face after recovering from a plastic surgery procedure. Clinics in Sao Paulo advertise surgery financing for 12 months without interest.
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> "Plastic surgery was for those who could afford it. But in the last few years it's become more democratized," Luiz S. Toledo, a Sao Paulo surgeon in private practice since 1975, said in a phone interview.
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> Fatima Duarte Chavier, 39, had three operations this year -- liposuction, a breastlift and eyelift -- her most recent one last month. The first two cost her about $600 each, the eyelift $200. Surgical residents performed the operations.
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> "Without this type of clinical support, I'd never have been able to do it," said Chavier, a homemaker with two school-age daughters.
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> Doctors Toledo and Pinto both said that Brazil's plastic surgery populism owes everything to surgeon Ivo Pitanguy, 76, who introduced plastic surgery to the masses. He has also trained more than 400 plastic surgeons in Brazil.
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> "We are training doctors to take a philanthropic approach to plastic surgery," said Pitanguy, whose own clients are generally affluent.
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> "We are training surgeons to open more schools and clinics because, ultimately, people like to feel good about themselves," he said, opening the door to room 41, where Anna Alyria, 77, was recuperating from her third facial procedure in 20 years.
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> "This was done to make her feel better, not to make her look 40," Pitanguy said.
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> Some patients describe their transformation at Pitanguy's clinic as life-altering, if not miraculous and affordable.
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> Maria Claudia Gondomar, 26, a theater producer, recently experienced her first kiss, thanks, she says, to plastic surgery.
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> "It's my first time for everything," she said. At 5-feet-10, Gondomar weighed 264 pounds two years ago before walking into Dr. Paulo Muller's office at the Ivo Pitanguy Clinic. She had a gastroplasty -- an operation that allows less food into the stomach -- liposuction on the thighs and hips and plastic surgery on her mid-section and breasts. She now weighs 138 pounds after spending about $14,300, about the cost of a new Volkswagen in Brazil.
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> "It's good and bad at the same time. I'm the same person inside, but people thought of me as a monster before," she said. "I can do things now that I couldn't do. I get treated nicely when I go clothes shopping. I'm still getting used to this."
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> Mirian Masteesouz, 27, has had more than a dozen operations in order to look like famous samba dancer, Scheila Carvalho.
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> "You don't have to do it to look more like somebody else," she said. "You do it because it makes you feel better."
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