Steve Erhardt
http://www.steveerhardt.com/
Obsessed with Plastic Surgery
Why Do Some People Go Under the Knife Time and Time Again? Four People Tell Their Stories
It doesn't take a trained eye to spot someone who's had too much work done on his face. But when does a person move beyond simply sporting frozen features into the realm of obsession? "There is such a thing as too much plastic surgery," says Dr. Roxanne Guy, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Too much, she says, is when patients repeatedly turn to the scalpel "to fill an emotional need." They may run up debts of hundreds of thousands of dollars and alienate family and friends in order to undergo multiple invasive and potentially risky procedures. Are they addicted? "It's not an official diagnosis," says Dr. Katharine Phillips, a psychiatrist at Rhode Island's Butler Hospital body image program. "But certainly patients can feel very driven to get cosmetic procedures; that it is their only hope." In some instances, patients may be suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, a debilitating preoccupation with slight or nonexistent flaws that afflicts 1 to 3 percent of Americans, but up to 15 percent of cosmetic surgery patients. With a high suicide rate, BDD "is not vanity," says Phillips. "It's a serious illness." Rather than more surgery, says Guy, people suspected of BDD "need to be referred for a psychological evaluation. Part of our ethical standards is not to operate if there isn't a need." The individuals on these pages—driven to cut and recut their faces and bodies for a variety of reasons—share stories of confronting their fixations.The former farm boy has had 37 cosmetic procedures to help him feel he fits in the Beverly Hills beauty industry
Steve Erhardt, 49
There's nothing in the Beverly Hills city charter that says residents have to have cosmetic surgery, but tell that to a beauty school grad from rural Pennsylvania who found himself working in an upscale salon there. Twenty years ago, when Steve Erhardt took a job with celebrity stylist José Eber, "I saw the [cosmetic] work up close in my chair," he recalls. "Everyone was so beautiful. I wanted to be beautiful too." Getting a client's recommendation for a surgeon, he began with a nose job—making it narrower with a shorter tip—and had a cleft put into his chin. Pleased with the results, he returned to the same doctor within a few years for an eye lift. The surgeon, Erhardt says, "told me to go away and come back in 10 years." He found a more willing surgeon in Dr. Nikolas Chugay, a Beverly Hills-based osteopath certified in cosmetic surgery. In the last dozen years, says Chugay, who has sometimes imposed a waiting period on Erhardt but never turned him away for any of his 30 surgeries, "we've done just about everything on him. He's very smart about giving himself time to heal." Still, even strangers approach Erhardt to implore him to stop having plastic surgery. His family, says Erhardt, who has run his own salon in Hollywood since 1999, "doesn't want to talk about it. Maybe I'm a little obsessed, but I'm just trying to look presentable." Go below the surface, however, and Erhardt admits that he tends to get work done when he's lost someone. "When my grandmother and stepsister died in a plane crash, I had a face lift. My mother just died, and I think I'll get a cheek lift. The world just cannot see me this down. I don't want to look sad and old."
STEVE ERHARDT'S PROCEDURES
His cosmetic work has cost him $250,000 over a period of 20 years
2 NOSE JOBS
2 EYE LIFTS
3 BODY IMPLANTS
1 FACE LIFT
3 FOREHEAD LIFTS
10 MOUTH IMPLANTS
4 FACE TATTOOS
7 LIPOSUCTIONS
2 HAIR TRANSPLANTS
PLUS Botox and Restylane
3 times a year
(source: people.com)