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By Anthony Belavitch and Parker Hallowell
History BA Students at Cal State East Bay
The United States believes in many rights, but beauty is not one of them. Despite leading the world in cosmetic surgeries, the United States still has a negative view of these procedures. On the other side of the equator, however, the next major surgical powerhouse has similar statistics but vastly different cultural views on what it means to have reconstructive surgery. By analyzing the history of reconstructive surgery in Brazil, we can examine the differences in how Brazil and the United States view plastic surgery.
Brazil considers health a basic human right and provides free healthcare to all citizens, with plastic surgery falling under that “basic human right” category, thanks to Dr. Ivo Pitanguy. Pitanguy, also known as the “Pope of Plastic Surgery,” convinced President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), a former physician himself, that the right to beauty was as basic as any other health need (Jarrin 2018). After a circus fire in Niteroí, Brazil left hundreds dead and disfigured, Pitanguy claimed that performing reconstructive procedures on these victims taught him the importance of appearance on one’s emotional well-being. Pitanguy made the case that ugliness caused so much psychological suffering that physicians and politicians had a responsibility to do something about it. In a 1981 interview with Play Boy, Pitanguy opened up about how working in the emergency room led him to plastic surgery.
He witnessed how traumatized people were about things like a “scar on their forehead and other things,” and he felt deeply “how human beings are highly sensitive to their own image.” He sees plastic surgery as “restructuring the anatomical dignity of the human being” (Cardozo 1984).
The son of a general surgeon, Pitanguy studied reconstructive surgery abroad in the United States, France, and the United Kingdom due to the lack of practice in Brazil at the time. In the 1950s, Pitanguy served as the chairman of plastic surgery at Santa Casa da Misericordia, a public hospital in Rio de Janeiro, where he performed surgeries on low-income patients and trained young surgeons in common procedures. In 1961, Pitanguy opened a public hospital and school called the 38th Infirmary in Rio de Janeiro, where he and his students worked for free for Brazilian citizens who could not afford reconstructive surgery for burns, cleft palates, and deformities. In 1963, he opened a private practice called Clinica Ivo Pitanguy, where he trained 586 plastic surgeons as well as thousands more for short-term courses (Singer 2026).
Although Brazil has more plastic surgeries per capita, the United States has more plastic surgeries overall. In the United States, the total number of plastic surgeries in 2021 was 7,347,900, with a whopping 5,355,604 being non-surgical. The total number of plastic surgeries in Brazil in 2021 was 2,723,640, with 1,089,420 being non-surgical. The average age of surgery in both countries also differs, with it being 35-50 years in the United States and only 18-35 years in Brazil. Regarding plastic surgery procedures, Brazil and the United States are the top dogs. The United States and Brazil accounted for 33% of all plastic surgeries in 2021 and accounted for 30.6% of all plastic surgeons (ISAPS Global Survey).
Novelist Eduardo Galeano, best known for his book Open Veins of Latin America, explains that the world spends five times less on the cure for Alzheimers than it does on plastic surgery, and that one day we’re going to have “old women with huge tits and old men with hard penises, but none of them will remember how to use them.”
Despite both these countries having the two highest numbers of plastic surgeries in the world, they both have different outlooks on the procedures. In Brazil, plastic surgery is considered a way to get personal satisfaction in how you look. If you look good, you feel good. While in the United States, plastic surgery is seen and associated with low self-esteem and vanity. Dr. Ivo Pitanguy is the main reason plastic surgeries are seen in a more positive light in Brazil because he allowed people to see that beauty isn’t about trying to look better than somebody else but looking beautiful for yourself. Patients in Brazil are thought of as having the “right to beauty,” which allows for these free plastic surgeries, but it is not without risk. Just like any procedure, there is a risk to having plastic surgery, and some people in Brazil felt like they were guinea pigs for young doctors to work on (Jarrin 2018). Even with this risk, people in Brazil feel like it is worth it to get these procedures. Because working on yourself is valued within the culture, beauty is so central to Brazil that it is crucial to finding a job or a spouse. People take this risk with the surgeries because they say “it is an even bigger risk to be living without beauty” (Jarrin 2018).
Overall, the world has no standard of what it means to be “beautiful.” Despite cultural differences behind the motivations to receive reconstructive procedures, the definition of beauty will never be universal. While beauty is central to both Brazilian AND American cultures, the definition of it, as well as its position in naturality, remains inconsistent. As the view of reconstructive surgery remains undecided on a global scale: How will the struggle between plastic surgery being a vanity project and a personal road to wellness be viewed?
Bibliography
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