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not her job to dictate taste. Dr. Steve Lee shares space with a chiropractor and a hand therapist in a neon-lit building in Flushing, Queens. This would seem to place him a world away from Kwan’s office in the Upper East Side, but until recently, both had stock photos of the same Asian model with translucent skin and enormous eyes on the home pages of their websites. And both have made forays into controversial off-label procedures more commonly seen overseas. That off-label spectrum also includes, at its extremes, tabloid body-horror tales grouping elaborate Korean surgery with black-market scam artists who inject butts with cement and baffling fads like Japan’s “bagelhead” phenomenon, inviting readers to gawk at faces unlike their own. (The reading experience is what I imagine attending a 19th-century freak show would have been like, conflating foreignness with deformity in the pursuit of titillation.) But whereas Kwan slims faces by breaking and shaving bones, Lee will shoot 20 units of Botox straight into a patient’s masseter jaw muscles to wither them temporarily: “I hate to use the word side effect, but if you use a higher dose of Botox, not only do you paralyze the muscle, but you can shrink the muscle,” Lee explains, pointing to before-and-after pictures of a square-jawed woman whose lower face he narrowed. “It makes biting and chewing a little weaker. I tell people, ‘If you want a good result, don’t chew gum.’ ” The less you chew, the smaller your jaw. The same tactic can be used to slim the muscles in a woman’s legs, using “several times” the paralyzing agents necessary to slim a jaw. Kwan has experimented with permanent musclereduction techniques pioneered overseas, where there is less governmental oversight. “You actually cut the nerve to the muscle,” he explains, displaying his leg and pointing to a spot below the inside of his knee. “There are some risks to it. There’s a scar associated with it. And you could really cripple someone.” When blepharoplasty goes wrong, the result is usually correctable—a crease that becomes uncreased, or droops a millimeter or two over time. When it goes really wrong, though, a patient may be permanently unable to close his eyes. “Technically it’s not that they can’t close their eyes, it’s just that there’s still a little gap when they do it,” Lee explains. He performs a Google image search for blepharoplasty complications (never do this) and pulls up photos of a man trying and failing to fully blink. To reduce costs and keep patients out of the surgery room, Lee often defaults to injectable solutions. He raises the bridge of the nose with fillers like Juvéderm, the squishy substance commonly used for plumping lips and filling wrinkles. He has also shot fillers into the earlobes of superstitious Chinese patients; large lobes signify luck. “Everybody wants something simple, easy, fast, cheap,” he says. But some accept the price of blepharoplasty as the cost of doing business in America. “One example was a bus driver,” Lee recalls of a recent patient in his 30s. “He had droopy eyes. His supervisor jumped in: ‘Are you sleeping on the job? Why is it every time I see you, you’re sleeping on the job?’ He was worried, and I felt bad because he’s just a bus driver, not like he’s a high-powered CEO or something. But he said, ‘I want to look more awake so I don’t lose my job,’ and I said, ‘Okay, let’s do it.’ ” Lee’s Asian blepharoplasties cost in the neighborhood of $2,500. He has since seen that patient driving his bus in the neighborhood. He says he looked alert. But even if the idea of ethnic plastic surgery makes you queasy—even if plastic surgery, in general, makes you depressed—the more you talk to people who have actually undergone these procedures, the harder it becomes to view their choices as simple racial capitulations. (Still, I think I’ll skip that blepharoplasty Kwan recommended.) With Jamaican ancestry, a British upbringing, and a career that includes fashion journalism for Essence and InStyle, 47-year-old Zumba and fitness instructor Tina Redwood is something of a test case in multicultural aesthetics. “Growing up with pretty sisters and a beautiful mum, I was the one they called ‘Noseybonk,’ ” she tells me at a coffee shop a few blocks from her home in Harlem. Following the birth of her daughter and the death of her father, Redwood went through a body-image reckoning that included a dramatic weight loss and a nose job. After ruling out a surgeon who created a digital composite that looked like a Caucasian nose pasted on a black face (“Yikes! Don’t want that”), she chose Ofodile. He filed down part of her nose and inserted a modest implant, causing her brother to call her a “traitor” to the Redwood name. “I said, ‘Hey, man, hallelujah. You can carry that look.’ “Older women have asked me if I wanted to look less black. Don’t be ridiculous. Since landing in this country with a British accent, people always thought I was white.” She gestures to the diverse crowd at the coffee shop: “I don’t know what being black is anymore,” she says. “I remember when I was fearful of the weave,” she continues. “Because people were like, ‘Oh, she’s trying to be white with that Korean hair?’ ” Only later, listening to a recording of our interview, do I realize the irony of that accusation. “What’s his name, my sweetheart, Al Sharpton? He said to judge a man by what’s in his head, not on his head, back when he used to have that
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