As the young woman, whose top lip is so fleshy her mouth seems to be closed even when she smiles wide, begins to cry, the cameras angle in close. Caught in the frame are her tears and her lips and her pain, and it is a moment of such intense vulnerability, it hurts to watch.
Kine Corder, 29, a barber from Chicago, says she has never talked about her swollen lips to friends and family. But now she’s telling ABC that she knows she won’t be selected for its "Extreme Makeover" program unless she opens up, and she doesn’t want to grow old pretending that she doesn’t ache.
In that moment, it doesn’t matter that on some level you know you’re being manipulated.
That the lights and the music and the montage of touching images have been carefully crafted for television.
That the interviewer herself is near tears when she tells Corder she won’t have to suffer anymore.
There is something powerful that tugs at us about the ones who think they’re ugly ducks and want to be swans. Perhaps that’s why cosmetic-surgery footage is popping up all over the television dial.
The second season of "Extreme Makeover," the reality show that pays for and follows people through cosmetic surgery, premiered at the end of September.
The Discovery Health Channel series "Plastic Surgery Before and After," among the network’s highest-rated shows, begins its new season on Oct. 13, and earlier in September, Discovery aired back-to-back the cosmetic surgery specials "Trash Can of Skin" and "Cosmetic Surgery Under the Knife."
The cable network FX even has a racy dramatic series, "Nip/Tuck," set in a South Beach plastic surgeon’s office. The show, which airs on Tuesdays, is among the highest-rated new series on cable.
"It’s a perfect fit for television," says Jan Adams, a Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeon and the host of "Plastic Surgery Before and After." "You have a before and an after. You’ve got these stories and these great visuals, and people can’t turn away."
It can all feel rather bizarre, like another symptom of a hysterical, insecure culture once again propelling itself end-over-end beyond the boundaries of taste and self-control. And you wonder: Would we want to see Bette Midler look more like Britney Spears?
You wonder about Jimmy Durante and Woody Allen, comedian Wanda Sykes and rapper Jay-Z, and all the other interesting-looking people our culture has loved. About how difference and imperfections are part of the richness of the world.
Then you wonder: Would you ever want to be the interesting-looking one at the party? And you think about whether you’ve ever called somebody ugly.
We like to say that looks don’t matter, it’s who we are on the inside that counts, but that’s just another fiction we cling to when we recognize something about ourselves that ought to be true but isn’t.
"We live in a society where the fact is you are going to be judged by the way you look," says Elayne Rapping, a professor of women’s studies and media studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo. "There’s no question that people who are good-looking are more successful."
Amid all that noise and abstraction are the people who chose to have plastic surgery on television.
And you wonder now, eight months since the first group of folks had their extreme makeovers in February, did it change their lives? Was it everything they hoped for?
Kine Corder says she didn’t pay attention to her lips until she was 10 or 11, when kids began asking, "What’s wrong with your lips?"
For a while she didn’t understand. She’d look in the mirror but, cocooned by a family that adored her, she couldn’t find anything bad.
Then one day she saw a close-up photo of herself. She saw the lips that had taken over her face and her identity. And for the first time, she felt shame. She hid it well.
Always smart in school, Corder became even smarter. With a mouth to match. One kid in her school had a mark on his face from chewing a wire when he was small. When he teased Corder about her lips, she told him: "At least I was born with these lips. You have your mark because you’re stupid."
"I worked really hard to be confident," she says. "I wanted them to feel like you cannot affect me, you can’t belittle me."
Especially as she grew older and became interested in guys, she’d walk right up and start talking. She’d think, "There are so many good things about me that if you don’t see those good things, then you don’t deserve me."
Her family had no idea how she felt. They thought "I was stronger than the insults."
She became interested in public speaking, volunteering to visit young women in jail. Always a trail of whispers would follow her to the podium: "Look at her lips, did you see her lips?" She’d make the teasing part of her story.
"That would open them up," Corder says. "They’d be like oh, OK, she knows."
She auditioned for "Extreme Makeover" thinking maybe they’d need a barber. Instead she became a candidate. Corder agreed because 29 years is a long time to live in minute-by-minute self-consciousness.
The plastic surgeon said she had redundant lip tissue, the worst he had ever seen. He did a lip reduction. She also had a breast lift, liposuction on her tummy and her teeth whitened and filed.
Since it was free, "I might as well make the perfect girl," she says.
Corder isn’t a Chicago barber anymore. She’s moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.
Plastic surgery won’t change your life, she says. It has changed hers, "but that’s more like serendipity." The surgery doesn’t make you love yourself, Corder says; that’s something you have to have inside.
Sharon Vesche, 28, a homemaker and mother of three from Livonia, Mich., used to be the lesser twin.
When she was 13, a karate classmate kicked her in the nose, making it larger and rounder than that of her identical twin, Karen, a model. Making it something people focused on.
"Especially being a twin, you’re more under the public eye than somebody just having a big nose, because people have an expectation of what a twin should look like."
Kids called her Big Nose.
"I had a boyfriend when I was 16. After we had been dating awhile, he told me I was his second pick," after Karen. She felt she’d always been the second one, the ugly one.
After Vesche had her third son, she suffered an umbilical hernia. The surgeon corrected the problem, but it left her bellybutton smashed, "like I had been run over," she says.
She had also breast-fed and says that before her kids, she was a large B to a small C cup. After, she was smaller than an A.
She felt ashamed to take her clothes off when she took her son to swimming class.
"I’d have to squish him in the bathroom with me," Vesche says.
She felt ashamed to undress in front of her husband.
"I didn’t want him to think of me as grotesque," she says. "Even though he kept telling me it didn’t bother him, psychologically it bothered me."
After she saw the first "Extreme Makeover," she says her husband said jokingly, "You’ve always had those things that have bothered you, why don’t you apply?"
She had a nose job, chin implant, breast enlargement and full dental restoration, and her bellybutton was repaired.
"Mommy, your nose is fixed," said her oldest when she returned from six weeks of surgery and recovery.
"It made them feel good to see that Mommy was happy."
Vesche, who, like her sister, has begun to do local print modeling, says she wants to be a role model for people who’ve had accidents. She wants to say you don’t have to live with people poking fun at you.
"It’s not that you want to become this gorgeous person," she says. "You just don’t want society to be so judging on you."
David Patteson, 39, a National Guardsman from Farmville, Va., says he and his wife, Norma, used to argue because they didn’t go out enough.
She thought it was because they were an interracial couple and he was ashamed that she was black. That was why they used the drive-through instead of going inside at fast-food places, she thought. That was why they never went to the movies.
Truth is, David Patteson says matter-of-factly, he never wanted to get out of the car because he was ashamed of his looks. As a child he took medication that stained his teeth.
"I had a big nose and an undeveloped chin, so I kind of looked like a turtle," he says, which is what the high school kids called him.
"I think it hurt me inside, but it also helped me because I had to prove myself all the time."
Even with his family, he could be withdrawn and hypercritical. And vulnerable. He says his 5-year-old son once told him, "’Ugh, Daddy, your teeth are yellow and black.’ That hurt the worst," he says.
Norma Patteson says he was so self-conscious early in their marriage that he refused to have children.
"He would say, ‘Look at me, Norma, look at my chin, look at my nose, look at my teeth. If you don’t look good, people don’t have nothing to do with you.’ "
David Patteson had a nose job, a brow lift, upper and lower eye lifts, a chin augmentation, a neck lift, his teeth whitened and porcelain veneers applied. Although he suffered weeks of pain, he says he’d do it again. He’s still not perfect, he says, but chasing perfection is a dangerous thing.
When he returned to work, he said, some folks said they didn’t see much difference. "But I see a big difference in me," he says.
So does his wife. She says her husband is more relaxed, more open and more intimate.
"We’ve got celebrities, and I don’t really see any ugly celebrities," Norma Patteson says. "Why do they "get to be the only ones who have a happy life? Why can’t people who work hard and live a decent life have some nice things happen to them?"
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
