In Flushing, Queens, surgeons have their attention trained a few feet 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 carefully tailored to their cultural preferences and ideals of beauty. Just as they can find Lebanese grape leaves or bowls of Vietnamese pho that taste of home, immigrants can locate surgeons able to recreate the cleavage of Thal?a, the Mexican singer, or the bright eyes of Lee Hyori, the Korean pop star.
They can also find a growing number of doctors offering layaway plans to help them afford operations. If the price is still too high, illegal surgery by unlicensed practitioners is available in many neighborhoods.
As these specialized clinics reshape Asian eyelids and Latina silhouettes, they provide a pore-level perspective on the aspirations and insecurities of immigrants in 21st-century 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.”
Dr. Alizadeh, himself 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 scan their appointment books and 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.
About 750,000 Asians in the United States underwent cosmetic procedures, from surgery to less invasive work like Botox injections, in 2009 — roughly 5 percent of the Asian population, and more than double the number in 2000, according to projections by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Among Latinos, the number was about 1.4 million, nearly 3 percent of that population and a threefold increase from nine years earlier. In 2009, about 4 percent of whites had cosmetic work done.
In New York, new clinics have opened in immigrant enclaves, and existing practices have expanded to keep up with demand.
The extreme makeover is, in many ways, a tradition among the city’s immigrants. A century ago, in the early days of cosmetic surgery, European Jews underwent nose jobs and Irish immigrants had their ears pinned back in attempts to look “more American,” said Victoria Pitts-Taylor, a professor of sociology at Queens College who has written about popular attitudes toward plastic surgery.
“The bulk of those operations were targeted at assimilation issues,” Ms. Pitts-Taylor said.
Today, the motivations appear as varied and complex 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.
“My patients are proud of looking Hispanic,” said Dr. Jeffrey S. Yager, who speaks Spanish and has tripled the size of his office since opening it in 1997 in Washington Heights, a largely Dominican neighborhood in Manhattan. “I don’t get the patients who want to obscure their ethnicity.”
While clinics that advertise in the local Russian, Spanish and Chinese media have much in common with one another and with those serving nonimmigrants — everyone wants a flat stomach and a smooth forehead — their core businesses are as different as the languages spoken by their patients.
Dr. Holly J. Berns, an anesthesiologist, feels as if she is on a seesaw when she travels from Dr. Yager’s office to suburban clinics. On Long Island, she said, “they’re doing everything they can to get the fat taken out of their buttocks.” In Washington Heights, “it’s the opposite — they just want their rear ends enlarged and rounded.”
Italia Vigniero, 27, a Dominican patient of Dr. Yager’s, 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.”
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