Can Botched Plastic Surgery Be Undone?

What goes up must come down. Although the cliché is not generally applied to Victoria Beckham's assets, rumour has it that last year the Queen of WAGs allegedly went under the knife -- not to make her breasts bigger or firmer, as is usually the case, but to make them smaller; closer, indeed, to how nature intended. Then there is Katie Price, aka Jordan, the poster girl for oversized breast implants. Last December, she flew to the US to have her 32FFs reduced to a rather more humdrum 32D. Courtney Love, meanwhile, has been completely upfront about her plans to go surgically back in time, so to speak. "I just want the mouth God gave me," she wrote on her blog. "It was perfectly cute."

There is nothing new about celebrities treating themselves as works in progress -- their faces are their fortunes, botched or otherwise. But as plastic surgery increases at an alarming rate among us mere mortals (up 12.2 per cent from 2006 to 2007), surgeons have seen an upsurge in people going under the knife to repair damage caused by previous procedures. Somewhere along the line, this trend was dubbed "undo-plasty", and its prevalence has brought home what a complex and unpredictable business it is to have a nip and tuck.

When Georgina Graham booked herself in for some plastic surgery, all she wanted was a confidence boost after an altercation with a burglar had left a dent in her face. After much thought, she opted for a face-lift and -- to repair the damage -- for fat from her stomach to be injected into her cheek. Unfortunately, things did not go to plan. "The surgeon injected the fat too high in my face and it sat in a bag under my eye. I was left with really bad scars," she says. "I was pretty devastated."

In the end, the fifty-something Londoner chose not to have more invasive surgery ("I didn't want to go through all that again"), but undertook a course of injections with non-invasive specialist Dr Michael Prager. "He injected my face with something that dissolved the fat and then built the area back up." Unfortunately, Graham's scars are there to stay. And therein lies the truth about "undo-plasty" -- there is often no such thing as "undoing" plastic surgery. There might be room for improvement, but there is no going back.

Plastic surgeon Alex Karidis believes the rise in "undo-plasties" has been misunderstood. "Plastic surgery has been on the increase over the past five years, so statistically you're going to have a higher proportion of people having problems," he points out. Having said that, Karidis concedes that "some patients' expectations are well off the radar... It's not an exact science, and people must realise their limitations."

Bristol-based surgeon Nigel Mercer has experience of this rising demand for repair work. "From infected breast implants to areas of skin that have died, in the past month alone we've had three patients admitted who had surgery done elsewhere for a variety of things," he says. Indeed, in November, the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS), of which Mercer is president-elect, reported that a third of plastic surgeons had dealt with "much more" repair work in the past five years; in the past year alone, 14 per cent had seen nine or more patients requiring repairs after undergoing cheap overseas surgery. It's an issue that concerns Mercer. "I saw an advert recently for a clinic in Tunisia. You've never seen the surgeon, you've never seen the clinic and you don't know if the nursing staff speak English. You'd never go for a heart operation in a place like that, so why a face-lift?"

Despite BAAPS' concerns, Jane Wanniaratchy was pleased with her overseas repair work. The 42-year-old personal trainer flew to Prague last summer with Europa International to have her breast implants taken down a notch. Back in 2000, Wanniaratchy had a breast augmentation in the UK after breast-feeding had taken her cup size from a C to an A. "There was loads of empty skin," she says. "I just wanted the surgeon to fill it up, but when I woke up I was a size E. They were colossal." After seven years of being called "Jane Big Boobs", she booked herself in for a resize, and has never looked back.