Time to 'operate on' plastic surgery industry

This week a piece of news occupied many news outlets’ headlines. A 37-year-old plastic surgeon and technical director of Lixingjiarui Medical & Cosmetic Clinic in northwest China’s Shaanxi province died on July 17 after a botched facial autologous fat transfer surgery at her own clinic.

It is believed that Xiaoli died of an anesthetic accident; her clinic was not qualified to administer general anesthesia.

Thanks to a burgeoning middle class with extra money to spend on non-essentials and Chinese women’s increasing obsession with looks in a social climate that increasingly values “good” looks, the plastic surgery industry is booming, having registered strong double-digit growth in the past few years. According to Citic Securities, China’s plastic surgery market will be worth 1.3 trillion yuan ($192.4 billion) in 2030.

However, the unbridled emerging market has also led to a number of accidents. Only 13,000 institutions are qualified to conduct cosmetic surgery but irregular surgeries were taking place in around 15 percent of them. There were more than 80,000 “black clinics” across the nation in 2019, says iResearch, a provider of online audience measurement and consumer insights in China. Also, there were only 38,000 certified practitioners and 100,000 illegal practitioners in 2019. The Citic Securities projects that the regular medical surgery market will count for only 58 percent of the whole industry in 2030.

Besides unleashing people’s consumption potential and stimulating the weakened economy when COVID-19 is still wreaking havoc, the barbaric growth of the cosmetic industry, often above 20 percent in recent years, should call for more timely and comprehensive regulation and supervision to prevent tragedies, as happened with Xiaoli, from striking again.

To begin with, the authorities need to check the clinics’ qualification to carry out surgeries, and tighten regulations to ensure that accidents are looked into and illegal institutions and malpractices don’t go unpunished. Consumers themselves should get more acquainted with the risks involved with cosmetic surgery and choose those clinics that have impeccable credentials. Moreover, the trend of valuing looks over everything else should end.

The author is a writer with China Daily.