BEFORE & AFTER: A younger face can result in better job prospects

Ginny Clark of Manhattan got a face-lift last April. She had several reasons for seeking out the procedure. Clark, 62, said she “wanted to look 20 years younger”. She was socialising with a rather youthful crowd ? dating a man 10 years younger than she was, and often dining out with friends in their 30s and 40s.

What’s more, as a stock trader for the investment firm Cantor Weiss, Clark was working with a lot of younger people ? a circumstance that gave her pause. Most of her peers, including a brother nine years her junior, were retiring from their Wall Street jobs. But Clark had no intention of quitting; a younger look, she believed, would extend her career. “Being a dinosaur in the business,” she said, cosmetic surgery “gives you a leg up if you want to stick around.”

Clark is among a growing number of people seeking out cosmetic surgery to get ahead in the workplace. From 2000 to 2004, the number of facial plastic surgery procedures and injections increased 34 per cent, according to the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, a professional organisation. In 2004, the academy reported that 22 per cent of men and 15 per cent of women who sought plastic surgery did so for work-related reasons.

Surgeons say they believe that sharp increases in the number of procedures performed on men result directly from workplace pressures.

The number of forehead lifts, Botox treatments and laser resurfacing treatments more than doubled for men from 2003 to 2004, the surgery academy reported. Doctors say they have seen increases in requests for operations from real estate agents, lawyers, airline pilots and business executives, among others.

“On Wall Street, most of these guys retire in their mid-40s. You have hedge fund managers who are 28 years old. So at 50, you feel old,” said Dr Alan Matarasso, who is Clark’s physician.

Dr Jeffrey D. Rawnsley, an associate professor of facial plastic surgery at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is also in private practice in Los Angeles, said: “People see themselves having to work longer and older, and they feel that they need to keep up: ‘If I’m going to have to work 15 more years, I need to look young.’ ”

The reward cannot be dismissed as illusory, proponents say. Wendy Lewis, a consultant based in New York who advises clients who are considering cosmetic surgery, said: “It’s not an isolated phenomenon. You get something done, you get the promotion.”

The surgery academy reported in 2004 that the average cost of a face-lift in the US was $6,505; a brow-lift, $3,439; facial and neck liposuction, $2,288; and Botox injections, $441 a visit.

For many years, studies have suggested that attractive people ? and presumably a young look is considered attractive ? are more successful than others in most aspects of life. And good-looking people may also earn more than their homelier comrades.

A paper published last year by researchers from Harvard and from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, concluded that there was a “sizeable beauty premium” in the labour market. A 1994 study by the University of Texas and Michigan State University found that men and women “with above-average looks receive a pay premium,” while “workers with below-average looks receive a pay penalty.” Partly because it is hard to quantify a procedure’s effects, few patients speak willingly of their own post-surgery windfalls. But many say they have seen increases in both their work performance and their pay.

“I’ve always been a confident person, and this just helped,” said Alan Horowitz, a real estate agent from Morristown, N.J., who had a neck-lift by Dr Matarasso last year and who said that business had improved noticeably afterward.

Micki Nolan, director for business development at Global Cash Card in Irvine, California, and a patient of Dr George Semel in Beverly Hills, said her procedures ? liposuction on her chin, work around her eyes and a chemical peel ? had helped her career, too. “The professional who’s out there and feels her best will perform better,” she said. “And the person on the other side of the table feels it, too.”

But a nip and a tuck do not automatically translate into workplace success, Ms. Lewis, the consultant, warned.

The standard advice about plastic surgery ? that you should pick your doctor and procedure carefully ? still applies, she said. An ultra-tight face-lift or too much collagen pumped into your lips could cause your career investment to backfire. “When you get back, it can become water-cooler talk,” she said. Most people who undergo a cosmetic procedure for work reasons, she said, prefer not to let colleagues in on the secret.

Still, Lewis says, she often advises the career-minded to acknowledge that they have had at least a little bit of work done, on the grounds that people can see the results anyway. She also advises clients to consider carefully how they will fit an operation ? or upkeep, if a client is having Botox injections or other small treatments ? into their work schedules. She steers busy working clients away from doctors who tend to run late on appointments, and discourages patients from undergoing complicated procedures that would keep them away from work for more than a few days. Some recuperation can require weeks. “A woman with 10 days off is not a candidate for a deep-plane face-lift,” she said. “She needs to do little things instead.”

Lewis said that many doctors were beginning to offer longer hours to accommodate more working clients. The surgery academy’s president, Dr Ira D. Papel, who practices in Baltimore, said his office has begun seeing patients as late as 7 pm And Saturday hours aren’t unheard of.

For a true believer, lost time is a small price to pay. “For me, being gone for a couple of days is worth it,” said Nolan, Dr Semel’s patient, who took a week off for each of her procedures.