Patients think Botox gives them a “competitive edge” at work

A Northwestern University team has carried out the first multi-centre poll of cosmetic surgery patients and found that the most common reason for getting injectables was to look “better” in a professional context.

Researchers polled 511 people to get an idea of what’s motivating them and found that more than half of patients (54.8%) said they got the procedures to look good professionally and more than a quarter (26.8%) because they believed it gave them a “competitive edge” in their field of work. 

Reasons for cosmetic surgery were broken down into categories including: cosmetic appearance, emotional wellbeing, social wellbeing, physical health, success at work or school, and cost/convenience.

Psychosocial well-being was another common motivation with many saying they wanted to feel happier or better overall, to improve their quality of life, or to feel rewarded. Worryingly, however, 69.5% had turned to cosmetic surgery not simply to look attractive, but to address serious psychological and emotional issues. 

“Patients seeking cosmetic procedures were found to be motivated by factors much more complicated than vanity, including impairments in emotional, physical, social, and professional quality of life”, lead author Murad Alam, MD, a dermatology professor at Northwestern in Chicago and his colleagues wrote in the study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.