At a plastic surgery clinic in Upper Manhattan that caters to Dominicans, one of the most popular procedures is an operation to lift women’s buttocks, because - as the doctor explains ? “they all like the curve.”
In Queens, surgeons have their attention trained a bit higher, on upturned noses that their Chinese patients want flipped down. Russian women in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, are having their breasts enlarged, while Koreans in Chinatown are having jaw lines slimmed.
As the demand for surgical enhancement explodes around the world, New York has developed a host of niche markets that allow the city’s many immigrants to get tucks and tweaks that are tailored to their culture’s beauty ideals.
As these specialized clinics reshape Asian eyelids and Latina silhouettes, they provide a pore-level perspective on the aspirations and insecurities of immigrants in 21stcentury New York - a mosaic portrait buffed with Botox.
“When a patient comes in from a certain ethnic background and of a certain age, we know what they’re going to be looking for,” said Dr. Kaveh Alizadeh, the president of Long Island Plastic Surgical Group, which has three clinics in the city. “We are sort of amateur sociologists.”
Italia Vigniero, 27, is a Dominican patient of Dr. Jeffrey S. Yager in Washington Heights, a largely Dominican neighborhood . Ms. Vigniero received breast implants in 2008 and is considering a buttocks lift to attain, as she called it, “the silhouette of a woman.”
“We Latinas define ourselves with our bodies,” she said. “We always have curves.
“My personality doesn’t go with small breasts,” she added. Using the words “pecho” and “personalidad” - Spanish for “breast” and “personality” - she coined a term that could serve as Dr. Yager’s motto: “Now, I’m a person with a lot of ‘pechonalidad!’ ”
In a Queens neighborhood full of recent Asian immigrants, Dr. Steve Lee, a native of Taiwan, said some Chinese believe that prominent earlobes are auspicious, so Dr. Lee was not surprised when a male client asked him to inject a cosmetic filler into his earlobes to make them longer.
“The bigger the earlobes, the more prosperous you are,” said Dr. Jerry W. Chang, another plastic surgeon . Other patients request that an upturned nose be turned “all the way down,” in keeping with a traditional belief that prominent nostrils allow fortune to spill out, Dr. Lee said.
Perhaps the most sought-after procedure among Asians is “double- eyelid surgery,” which creates a crease in the eyelid that can make the eye look rounder.
Dr. Alizadeh, an immigrant from Iran, admits that the results can seem less like science than like stereotyping. Still, he and other doctors who work in ethnic communities say they can spot unmistakable trends: Many Egyptians are getting face lifts. Many Italians are reshaping their knees. Dr. Alizadeh says his fellow Iranians favor nose jobs.
And there is no questioning the surge in demand in immigrant neighborhoods, where Mandarin and Arabic are spoken in the operating room and patients range in age “from 18 to 80,” as one doctor put it.
The motivations appear as varied as the procedures. Rather than striving to fit in to their new country, many immigrants reshape themselves to their home culture’s trends and tastes.
For all the cultural differences, New York plastic surgeons acknowledge that ethnic neighborhoods are not islands. American culture, they say, has a strong influence. Dr. Elena Ocher, a Russian immigrant, attributes the wave of young Russian women requesting breast implants to American culture, not Russian. “The new generations of Russians are very American, and there’s something in America about large breasts,” she said. “What is this fixation?”
Dr. Ocher said she has noticed that Italians tend to care more about their knees. “The knees should look young,” she said. “Italian girls wear a lot of miniskirts.”
By SAM DOLNICK
