Britain's first magazine dedicated to cosmetic surgery is launched this month, and nobody could accuse it of beating about the bush. "Beauty is skin deep," declares the coverline of Body Beautiful, a quarterly promising to help you get "the body you want - as fast as you can".
It's a market waiting to be tapped: the magazine claims that 65,000 cosmetic operations are performed each year in the UK, and there's certainly been a "huge increase", according to the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons - indicating that the eightfold rise in the US over the past decade may soon be duplicated here. Controversy should attract a few readers, too: from worries over children seeking cosmetic modifications to speculation about the exact degree of Britney Spears' acquaintance with the surgeon's knife, it's a subject on everyone's lips, collagen-enhanced or otherwise.
Sure enough - doubtless to the delight of its publishers - Body Beautiful's launch issue has created a controversy of its own. Cindy Jackson, who spent £60,000 on more than a decade of improvements to her waist, breasts and face, and who is copiously quoted in issue one, is unimpressed. "There's a lot of good information in there, but there's also a lot of incorrect information," she said. "I don't know how a person is supposed to decide which is which. There's a lot of self-promotion... There are few mentions of the risks."
It's true that Body Beautiful doesn't dwell on the alleged dangers of certain treatments - "the major problems with implants are local but not life-threatening complications" is among the glibber statements. Yet even though it reads, superficially, like a glossy 147-page ad for the "cosmetic enhancement" industry, it's hard to see how it will really help its bottom line. For there can be few experiences short of unanaesthetised plastic surgery quite as wince-inducing as reading Body Beautiful's blow-by-blow accounts of slicings, enlargements, reductions and extensions.
Gravity-defying breast modifications are the main focus, illustrated with the magazine's trademark before-and-after photographs (before: poor lighting and frowns; after: good lighting, make-up and smiles). But there's abdominoplasty, rhinoplasty, ankle liposuction, chin-cheek implant, blepharoplasty (eyelids) and - most eye-watering of all, for this reader at least - an excruciating first-person account of penoplasty, or penis extension. "I'd be lying if I said it was painless," writes "Ian", 34 years old and a master of understatement. "Erections were a tearful business. Put it this way - I got through a lot of packets of frozen peas... my penis was, unsurprisingly, red and angry for a week."
One of the more amazing claims Body Beautiful makes is to be found in its media pack: "According to NatWest bank, the most common reason for taking out a bank loan is to pay for plastic surgery or cosmetic enhancement of some kind."
"Er, no, that's wrong," said a NatWest spokesman, confirming that cars and holidays remain the most common reasons for borrowing money. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the purchasing of life subscriptions to Body Beautiful is about to become another one.
