I was looking through the new Vanity Fair (with Kate Moss on the cover) when I came up to the “Beauty” section with a photograph of a woman with a face like a movie star that was swathed -- head, jaw, ears and neck -- in gauze. The piece was entitled “A Woman’s Work Is Never Done” and it was written by Alex Kuczynski whom New York Times readers currently know as the shopping reporter in the Thursday Styles section, and the article is an excerpt from her book coming out next month Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession With Cosmetic Surgery.”

Alex in good spirits

It turns out that the picture in the article is that of the author. This was astonishing because I know the author and didn’t recognize her. I’m looking at the picture as I write this and I still can’t quite recognize her from the picture. Maybe it’s the gauze wrapping or maybe I just haven’t seen her recently and have forgotten slightly what she looks like. Or maybe it’s the wonders of cosmetic surgery.

I personally have never given a lot of thought to plastic surgery except when I see examples of it that are glaring. Mrs. Wildenstein comes to mind. Or Elaine Young, whom a lot of readers probably never heard of. Mrs. Young, once a wife of the late actor Gig Young, was a well-known Beverly Hills real estate broker (she died last year) who had a bad experience with plastic surgery. Actually she had several bad experiences, and the result was a disfigured face that no amount of lawsuits could ever return to its original likeness. Actually, for all I know, it pretty much ruined her life because in the end it made her look like a serious burn victim after rehabilitation. Then there was also the old story about the gigolo in Palm Beach whose rich girlfriend took him to her doctor for silicone treatments to smooth out some of the wrinkles on his aging puss. One day, the story goes, he fell asleep in the Sun while lying on his side, and the silicone moved so that when he woke up, his face was lop-sided. People get a good laugh out of that one although I’m not sure it’s true.

I also have a friend who got into the habit of having her lips inflated (I’m not sure what the process was because I never discussed it with her). Frankly, I thought she looked awful but I couldn’t bring myself to tell her since … it was none of my business … and I didn’t want to tell her she looked awful. She’s a good-looking woman and the procedure exaggerated her lips to the point where they’ve seem like the most prominent feature on her face. Whether or not she has continued to have it done, they still are the most prominent feature on her face. But hey, I guess she likes it.

I’ve also known quite a few other people (probably scores of women, and no doubt some men -- although men are less likely to talk about it) who have had plastic surgery/cosmetic surgery with results that were not in any way disastrous. As a matter of fact, I’m not very good at spotting an altered countenance most of the time. I know this because readers are always writing in to comment on the face jobs of various women whose pictures appear on these pages and I really had no idea. Although that’s not true so much with men who get a lot of work done. I’m thinking of Kirk Douglas and the late Jack Lemmon whose surgery literally changed his face. That, I thought, was not a good idea.

Alex back in 2001

I’ve interviewed and written about Dr. Gerry Imber, one of the most prominent cosmetic surgeons in New York, and considered one of the very best. Dr. Imber has quite a few male clients, including major corporate executives who feel a need to have work done to preserve some vestige of youth in a competitive market. He recommends that a man start early, kind of sprucing up maintenance in steps, therefore avoiding a major overhaul that leaves you looking like someone other than your old (youthful) self.

I have never entertained the idea of plastic surgery mainly out of fear (and not being able to afford it anyway). What do I fear about it? Oh, I don’t know ... the anesthesia, the Elaine Young syndrome. I know a couple of guys who’ve had their eyes done and their chins done (removing that jowly excess). At first they looked more sculpted (although not necessarily younger), and then after a while ... they personify Sir Isaac Newton’s discovery.

Mrs. Kuczynski’s book, however, is very compelling reading whether or not you’re interested in the subject because she is willing to go into her personal involvement in the processes, and is characteristically rather frank and detailed about it. She explains something that I hadn’t realized: it can be an addictive or very similar to an addiction. The excerpt in Vanity Fair reads like a humano-techno-memoir because she reveals how she really got into the whole world/process of doing yourself over. The most gruesome is when she has some “saddlebags” (tiny ones) removed from her hips and has to wear a surgical girdle for a couple of weeks after. She describes the surrounding flesh of black and green.

Yuck. Or no, the most gruesome is when she gets an injection for her lips and her upper lip swells up so much that she has to hide her face even from the driver who takes her home and at first she thinks she’s going to look like that forever. In a way it was rather funny, reminding of those times when we do something stupid and it shows and we’re remorseful and angry with ourselves for doing it in the first place.

I first met Alex Kuczynski about ten or twelve years ago when she was a reporter for the New York Observer writing the weekly Calendar reviews. She’s a big girl – not fat, mind you, but tall and amply proportioned. She was a good-looking girl too, with longish brown hair and a very outgoing and assertive personality. We were never close friends although a few years later I introduced her to a close friend of mine whom she married. In the past few years, evidently while she was working on this book, she was also indulging in the subject. I didn’t know that and from what she writes, few people knew. I’d see her from time to time at Michael’s restaurant and although she didn’t look markedly different, she did look ... different. Not bad different; maybe good different. Her brunette hair went blonde, which was nice, and there was one day when she passed by my table and called out my name and I didn’t recognize her ... at first. It still didn’t occur to me that she had had work done. She didn’t look radically different. I couldn’t tell you exactly what was different about the way she looked – was it her hair, the length, the color? Yes, that must have been it.

As it happens in the great big flashy neighborhood that I write about, there were others, women that is, who would voice their suspicions that Alex had had work done. Suspicion is too mild a word. But women voicing suspicion about other women’s plastic surgery is usually a subtle (although not too) form of envy. Very often they are the women who have had something (or everything done) and deny it when asked. The fact is many people are fascinated by the whole process and maybe even more than many would like to have something done to themselves.

The question that always comes up for me is: what is the motivation? Probably it’s the race against time. A race none of us is ever going to win, incidentally. After confiding her cosmetic surgery activity in the VF excerpt, she ruminates on the “why’s.” She says in one sentence that she is not worried about “aging” but adds in another sentence about “getting old” and “getting that tired look that marks the faces of people who haven’t done what they want to do with their lives, people who shrink from life.” Spoken like the kid she still is. However, I’m quite a bit older than Alex Kuczynski and have already had a bit of a glimpse of what Old and Age are and do. It can best be described gently as “inevitable.” All my adult life I’ve had the privilege of knowing people who are/were much older than I who were/are always interesting because of what they know, what they’ve learned, where they’ve been and how they see things. Their minds are/were still fresh as youth although their faces and their bodies – even the best of them – eventually had to face the tune and pay the piper. The best of them acquired some kind of wisdom somewhere along the way. Not cynicism, but wisdom. In the long run, if there is a long run, this is the saving grace.