From Beirut’s War Torn Past Springs a Nation of Cosmetic Surgery Enthusiasts
On the northern side of Beirut’s Mediterranean seaboard stretches a promenade called Corniche, a popular walkway for strollers, power walkers, and shoppers alike.
It doesn’t take much time to realize that the people walking buy are unusually good-looking, many of them with exquisite bone structure and flawless skin. However, not all of this beauty is due to good genes and hereditary inheritance, Beirut has become a hot spot for cosmetic surgery, making the procedures easy to come by through easily attained bank loans and discounts and deals from the dozens of clinics that have sprung up seemingly over night in the city with a scarred past.
City cosmetic surgeons learned their craft in the trenches of war. Twenty years ago a massive civil war was tearing the country apart, most of the needs for surgery stemmed from war wounds and doctors found themselves involved in reconstructive surgeries as they patched together broken bodies and tried to make the scars of war less noticeable. Now that peace has come, these same doctors have transferred they expertise to capitalize on the growing interest in cosmetic surgery.
Perhaps to forget the past, perhaps to reach out to a more modern future, the citizens of this cosmopolitan city have embraced all things cosmetic, reaching out for beauty even if it takes a transforming surgery to get it. Even in difficult financial times such as these, local banks are fueling the public mantra that “beauty s no longer a luxury” as they hand out loans for much as 5,000.00 USD at ultra-low interest rates for medical procedures.
Lebanon’s First National Bank asks few questions and hands out the loans under the blanket statement “to cover all your plastic surgery operations.” For a country that has so long suffered on medical needs of another kind, the concept of elective surgery empowers a nation anxious to gain control of their future.
A stroll down the Corniche can make one feel like they are surrounded by fashion models and not just merely every day citizens on their way to the ark of the grocery store. Beirut’s new found glamour has its roots in the operating rooms of former military doctors who have traded sewing up soldiers for sewing up the of their customers, who like Beirut, are anxious to show a new face to the world.
