[Trendzilla] Our Community's Chest Meets Ready-to-Wear Breasts

A A A Comments (1) By VICKIE CHANG Wednesday, Nov 25 2009

Our Community’s Chest

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Orange County, why you gotta be so Orange County all the time?

Between dodging the big-boobed, big-truck-ed, big-McMansion-ed Real Housewives stereotypes and Ugg-ed Alpha Beta Gamma whatevers and the perma-stoned surfer, explaining this place to an out-of-towner can get pretty silly. (Most common questions asked: “Is it really like The O.C.?” “Do people really call it The O.C.?” “Is Chino really that scary?”) But mostly it just gets tiring even trying to defend where the hell we choose to call home. And uh, that’s mostly because, well, even we have to admit the Real Housewives and perennial Ugg wearers really do exist here. En masse.

I know, I know: collective sigh.

And if this press release the Weekly just received in our mailboxes is even a little bit correct, we’ve got even bigger—literally—things to worry about. Like, say, the latest plastic surgery procedure being championed as “Ready-to-Wear Breasts”—“The new trend in fashion this season,” it says.

Also known as “hydrodissection axillary breast-implant surgery,” the new technique is the “revolutionary signature procedure” of one of Orange County’s supposed top plastic surgeons, Dr. Sid Mirrafati of Mira Aesthetic in Costa Mesa.

The top boasting point of Ready-to-Wear Breasts? A safe procedure that lasts just a few hours—plump up those boobs on a Friday and get back to the office on Monday! Fancy.

The surgery involves custom-designed surgical instruments that allow the doc to enhance breasts without puncturing the breast tissue—less trauma, shorter procedure, and no tell-tale scars or off-kilter nipplage. It’s done through a small incision in your armpit.

In 2008 alone, according to the American Society for Aesthetic Surgery, 307,230 females underwent breast-augmentation surgery. And as this handy press release further states, “Celebrity Heidi Montag is proud about showing off hers, style icon Victoria Beckham wouldn’t be seen without them, and we’ve all heard about Carrie Prejeans [sic] and, not to mention, some Victoria Secret [sic] models”—though I definitely wouldn’t call former Orange Countian/bringer of secondhand embarrassment Montag a celebrity.

Really, plastic surgery is hardly morally defensible: It promotes vanity; lofty, impossible-to-obtain standards of beauty slapped on us by MEN [feminist fist shake at the heavens!] and media; and inner-beauty-is-all-that-counts, blah, blah, etc., blah. And then there’s the whole argument—further solidified by the not-too-long-ago death of Donda West—about the extreme excessiveness of going under the knife to fix something entirely superficial and, really, unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

Though no one is really in any place to judge those who choose to inflate their breasts to improbable sizes, it’s another issue when one lets the end result of said plastic-surgery procedure define one as a person.

Or, more specifically, letting it define us as a county. Fuck you, Bravo.

(Okay, just kidding. Bravo, I love you. Now: Bring back NYC Prep so we can focus on somewhere else.)

vchang@ocweekly.com

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