These days it seems like everybody is getting plastic surgery. It is important to remember that this is a fairly recent phenomenon as up until recently it was not common at all to have surgery. This does raise the question of just why has plastic surgery become so popular and when did this happen. The answers are actually pretty easy to come by.
Plastic surgery has not been around for all that long, it is really only a hundred or so years old. To be sure that have been surgeries to repair or correct the appearances of people with birth defects or injuries for thousands of years but the first appearance of plastic surgery did not appear until the First World War when it was pioneered as a way to repair the damage that soldiers suffered. This was largely how things continued for the next fifty years or so, plastic surgery was largely limited to repairing injuries.
The main reason that plastic surgery was limited to being used only on people who had disfiguring injuries is that the procedures simply were not good enough. Surgeons were not able to get people back to looking normal let alone make them look better so there was little demand for the surgery for cosmetic reasons. This started to change during the sixties when both the procedures and the materials that were available to surgeons improved. The biggest areas where improvements came from was in improved methods for doing skin grafts and the creation of silicone implants that could be used in various body parts.
Once plastic surgeons reached the point where they could actually improve the appearance of people they started to get more and more patients looking for procedures. This started during the sixties and it was during this period that surgeons really started to promote the idea of cosmetic surgery. It was not until the eighties however that plastic surgery actually became what we would call commonplace. In large part this was due to the fact that changes in society started to make appearance more important than it had ever been before.
Plastic surgery has only grown in popularity over the last twenty years. There are a few reasons for this, the most obvious is that techniques have improved dramatically even from the eighties. Not only are the results better but the actual surgeries are less invasive which makes them much easier for patients since recovery times are shorter. In addition there has been much greater awareness of plastic surgery and a lot more media attention on it. In fact you would be hard pressed to find any high profile figures who have not had surgery. This has trickled down to the population in general who are now much more likely to have plastic surgery than before.
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