Product placement is still frowned upon on British television, but making the best-looking woman on Celebrity Big Brother a cosmetically enhanced former pop singer called Pete Burns must have been worth its weight in collagen to the British plastic surgery industry. Not that it needs the plug. On Monday, the grandly titled British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons announced that the number of operations carried out under its auspices had soared by 35% last year. The middle classes, it gloated, were basking in the new "cultural permission" to plump for plastic or cosmetic surgery. Let's hope they all turn out like Pete Burns.
Cosmetic surgery has traditionally been criticised by feminists, but many of those operations will have been carried out on teenagers or young women, and most of them do not care a fig about the moral strictures of feminism. They are more likely to think of cosmetic surgery as an aesthetic modification of their bodies, a positive and empowering lifestyle choice.
Body modification through plastic surgery is only one aspect of a more general vogue for transforming and manipulating everything we can call our own. Young people do it best and, as everything migrates into the digital world, teenagers are quietly becoming expert at modifying everything that falls into their laps. In November of last year, a survey by the American Pew Institute found that nearly one in five American teenagers don't simply steal video or images from the world wide web but rejig them into something distinctively their own - adding their own ending for the latest Star Wars film, for example, or reworking their favourite novel or cult TV show.
In North America, futurologists have begun to dub this fetish for branding our bodies and our immediate surroundings as "curation nation" - a world in which we have all become artists and curators of the minutiae of our own lives, capable of sampling, editing, or cutting and pasting anything that crosses our path. Among futurologists, it is heaven-sent. For at least a decade, most of them have been entertaining audiences with the prediction that mass culture would give way to a world of "mass customisation" - in which everything from the trainers we wear to the cars we drive would be tailored to our own specification and made to measure by companies with access to swanky new technologies. That prediction has stubbornly failed to materialise, but now, as young people get their hands on the technology, it is being dragged into being from the other end.
This DIY culture, however, is better understood as a cultural rather than a technological phenomenon, and is darker than the boosters imagine. Another survey last November estimated that a million British adolescents have considered self-harm and more than 800,000 actually inflicted injuries on themselves. Many will see themselves as curators or artists, etching out something of beauty on the only thing they really control. They may even be right. But the real problem - one much more hair-raising than a routine facelift - is that many young people are turning inwards in search of inspiration, and have given up the chance to paint on a broader canvas.
