ike it or not, young women and men today have more options than we ever did to adjust any facial features they don’t like. That is actually not really a revelation, as everyone aged three and up now has a better aesthetic sense than preceding generations, especially once the kids grew up enough to dress themselves.

These kids are not just alright, they are very stylish, and they know what to do when their hair has a bad day, or their face does. More power to them. We learn something new from people decades younger than ourselves everyday.

But when it comes to slightly more permanent solutions, someone from a specific age bracket may stop and think. We have been taught that beauty has to be ‘natural’, and anything that requires, or gives you the option for surgical intervention, is definitely sus. To think that younger men and women now are considering, and getting, cosmetic surgeries and enhancements is met with varying degrees of shock, disapproval, pity, or all.

Dr Kausar Rehman, breast oncoplastic surgeon, takes a calm view of everything. In a podcast that aired recently, Dr Rehman revealed that her clientele increasingly includes younger women who want some cosmetic enhancement before their weddings.

“Usually, they will ask for something like breast augmentation or a breast lift,” she says,” and some girls will ask for dimples too!”

The interesting thing here is that Dr Rehman isn’t simply advocating for or facilitating these procedures because it is her job, she’s doing it because she truly believes everyone has the right to feel as pretty as they want. While a lot of us might side-eye the groom whose bride feels bigger breasts or dimples are a prerequisite for their marriage, Dr Rehman thinks that often, the issue is that of self esteem.

“Years ago, women requested breast augmentation because they felt intimacy was affected by smaller breasts. I almost always wanted to tell them that the size of the breast isn’t the actual problem,” she says.

Women are no strangers to their nearest and dearest picking on the way they look. The lessons that they have learnt about the beauty standards set by them from Bollywood to local television dramas hasn’t helped. The fact that younger generations of women all follow younger women influencers who have had cosmetic enhancement in some manner definitely hasn’t helped. They’ve seen the Kardashian-Jenners’ faces and bodies evolve in front of their eyes. Locally they have seen the constantly plumped lips and lightened skin tones of TV stars. Scoff all you want, but some of these women are going to go out there and get themselves some fillers.

And fillers might not be such a bad thing, as Dr Rehman explains in the podcast. It’s hyaluronic acid, which our skin needs anyway, and as we age and lose the fat in our cheeks which is useful in making us appear youthful, we might want to consider it.

As for other things - everyone has at least one feature they wish they could change, and for a lot of us, it’s our noses. Not only did the pre-partition nanis, dadis, and other flora and fauna in our families convince us that life just wasn’t worth loving if our noses weren’t straight and sharp like a razor, this trauma was so deeply ingrained across generations that people felt it perfectly polite to always comment on the shape or size of someone’s nose. So yes, if your nose, chin, fine lines and wrinkles are costing you peace of mind, by all means go ahead and get them adjusted to a shape and size you like.

However, do a self-check and be concerned if you find you’re altering a physical feature to appease someone else, or to look exactly like someone else. Also, one question to consider would be how much is too much? In what kind of increments within which areas should you be focusing your aesthetic realignment? We have seen women in the public eye go for some alterations, but those sometimes end up making them look like completely different people.

“An aesthetic job is a wide description of either improvement or bringing changes, improvements may include getting fillers, enhancing your cheeks, chin, lips plumped up to an extent where they can look very artificial,” said Dr Rehman when Instep reached out for some basic education. “Face surgeries result in minor to dramatic changes that actually change your looks. These include nose jobs, may even involve maxillofacial surgery, cheek implants, or chin implants.

“When you go for such surgeries, they are of course, the patient’s choice. At times we have to help them understand our limitations, because there is only so much change a surgery can make to someone’s appearance. We also have to coach our patients on the fact that the references or requests they have might not look exactly as they have pictured them in their mind. It’s like when you read a book and picture certain things a certain way, and then watch the movie based on the book and everything looks slightly different.”

Overall though, Dr Kausar Rehman believes in doing what makes you feel better in your skin. When we presented Anushka Sharma as one example of someone whose face looked like one version of her face rather than completely her own post her first brush with surgery, Dr Rehman pointed out that though the actor had undergone some massive changes to her facial features, she looked good. A surgery well done, “though of course when someone asks for all those changes, they will come out of them looking very different,” she points out. “On the other hand, when someone asks for natural-looking tweaks, the result is quite different.”

Dr Rehman cites actor Sonali Bendre as an example. “Sonali Bendre has aged, had cancer, and undergone chemo, but her face retains the features of her youth. The work she has had done is natural, and she wears her age well.”

As Dr Rehman states in her podcast appearance, “beauty is expensive, and there will be no pain without gain. Whether you’re just getting a needle prick or a fully invasive procedure, you will incur some discomfort, both physical and financial.”