The plastic surgery industry suffered along with many others when the economy took a downturn in 2008. Statistics released by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons showed that cosmetic procedures increased in 2010. Non-invasive procedures like liposuction rose by 5 percent while surgeries grew by 2 percent. Plastic surgeons haven’t seen growth since 2007.
Surgical procedures like breast augmentation, breast reduction and face lifts saw the sharpest decrease during the recession. However breast augmentation, with approximately 296,000 patients, is still the number one plastic surgery procedure performed on women in the US. Invasive procedures require time to recover so those patients must miss days of work and in tough economic times men and women were unwilling to lose those wages along with cost of the surgery.
The amount of non-surgical cosmetic procedures didn’t suffer as much as invasive ones, but did see an increase in 2010. Plastic surgeons around the country preformed 13.1 million minimally invasive procedures this year. Soft tissue fillers and Botox remain the most sought after cosmetic enhancement due to its cost effectiveness, but liposuction comes in at number two.
Women still remain the largest demographic for plastic surgeons over 9 million of them had cosmetic procedures like liposuction. Many of these women have recently been divorced and wish to look better as a mechanism of revenge. Over the years the number of men who have cosmetic surgeries have grown and surgeons preformed over 900,000 procedures on them in 2010.
