Chasing Beauty: My Cosmetic Surgery Takeover

As seen on the TODAY show: http://tiny.cc/wl17ow Foreword by Dr. Michael Yaremchuk of Massachusetts General Hospital: http://tiny.cc/0xa8ow Chasing Beauty is the true-story tale of how and why an ordinary woman surgically rearranged her entire face before age thirty-six. To Never Age! or face social invisibility - as well as a lack of feminine identity - had to Jamieson Dale seemed lifelong threats to women. Chasing Beauty shows emotional and physical consequences of both choices: ignore or chase the social demand for beauty. It asks where the real risk lies. After reading through the author’s myriad cosmetic surgery disasters, women might know that the answer to “WHO AM I?” isn’t found from a scalpel. A “What” (beauty) cannot create a “Who” (feminine identity). Chasing Beauty also exposes reality of the plastic surgery experience: that it is more than a simple cosmetic treatment. It is not a toy. It is serious medical surgery. It is often gruesome, sometimes with deforming complications that the author endured such as permanent facial nerve damage. The book ultimately aims to show the futility of trying to make a person from an image. Through cosmetic surgery, Jamieson Dale wanted to buy herself a beautiful face, to metamorphose into a whole, actual person: one worthy of love, of a full female existence. The author wanted - fifteen different times - to believe in the magic of social success implied in a cosmetic surgical transformation. She failed - fifteen different times - to find it; but in the end found peace, not with herself as ‘an aging woman,’ but simply as herself. Chasing Beauty concludes with peace as she quits looking externally, especially to men - perhaps an apt metaphor for the chased beauty - for a sense of completion.