|By TAP Staff| Dr David Alessi, the Beverley Hills-based plastic surgeon who helped many a celebrity transform their faces and body shapes to keep pace with the latest trend in high fashion, will soon be available in Dubai and Abu Dhabi for the benefit of people in the UAE and the region.
The founder and medical director of Alessi Institute located in Beverly Hills is currently here and is in touch with local institutions to finalize arrangements for his regular presence here. The ‘doctor to the stars’, who has put entertainers, athletes, royalty, business executives and physicians from around the world under his knife, is a double-board certified plastic surgeon by the American Board of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery and the American Board of Otolaryngology.
He has been selected as one of the Top Doctors in America and is continuously registered in The Heritage Registry of Who’s Who. In 2013, he received the RealSelf 100 Award for Online Commitment to Patients for his dedication to educate and enrich the lives of current and prospective patients.
In 2007, Dr. Alessi founded Face Forward Foundation alongside his wife Deborah Alessi, an inspirational charity helping women and children suffering from domestic violence by providing complimentary reconstructive surgery. He is currently working to expand the charity’s work to Abu Dhabi.
Dr Alessi has been featured on Larry King Live, The Montel Williams Show, CBS News, ABC’s 20/20 and Eyewitness News and in publications including Elle, Los Angeles Times, Men’s Fitness Magazine, Beverly Hills Times, and Glamour among others.
Dr Alessi told the Arabian Post he receives a regular stream of visitors from the region, including the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, to his Beverley Hills office, where Arab husbands bring their wives to undergo plastic surgeries to their faces and other body parts.
“Poeple come and say I want to look like such and such person. Arab regional preferences are mostly for local celebrities on Arabic TV channels and movies. Some will say they want lips like a particular celebrity or nose like someone else. The concept of what is beautiful keeps changing,” he said.
That the Arab women are fully covered when they go out is no reason for them not to go for makeovers. Once they are inside the house, they want to look beautiful and trendy. They want to look good in front of their husbands and children, especially since they think that looking good is very important for keeping their marriage intact and ensuring that the husbands don’t have wandering eyes.
“Plastic surgery and high fashion go hand in hand. When high fashion goes up, my office gets very busy. Just watch the fashion trends and you can almost guarantee that there will be an increase in demand for plastic surgery. Perhaps the media exerts a major influence. When young men grow up and they see the Playboy magazine, they feel this is how women should look like. Even in the olden times, commoners have tried to dress and make up like what the queen did.”
Explaining the scope of plastic surgery, Dr Alessi says it depends on what one is starting with. “In 30 minutes you can change the shape of the nose from A to B. He has so far done between 10,000 and 15,000 surgeries. Roughly 60 percent of these are cosmetic and 40 per cent reconstructive. Sometimes it is a combination of both.
In terms of popularity, rhynoplasty, breast implant, liposuction and buttock surgery are the most sought after. At one point of time Brazilian buttlifts were rarely in demand, but now-a-days these are very common. Dr Alessi explains that the association of cancer with breast implants is completely bogus. There used to be such a scare a few years ago, but large scale studies by academic institutions and FDA have proved that these assumptions were wrong. The incidence of RME disease is exactly same with breast implants or without breast implants.
The Alessi charity is involved with the life of women and children who are victims of domestic violence and sex trafficking. The move to set up the charity in the UAE follows requests that his wife received from some influential people here for such a branch. “One of the places was Abu Dhabi; it could be Dubai as well,” he said.
Dr Alessi says domestic violence has no cultural, economic or religious boundaries. “I can guarantee that it happens everywhere. One of the people helping my wife to open something here is an influential person from India. There are lots of acid burns in India and so we would like to do something to help these women. We just had a woman who came from Uganda; she was a professor, her husband was a professor too, and she faced a severe acid attack. Acid was thrown all over her face.
There was another woman whose husband was a priest in Florida and he set her on fire with gasoline. The most important thing about Face Forward is that the victims agree to accept psychological counseling along with the gift of plastic surgery or reconstructive surgery and they make an agreement that they would do something great with their lives. The idea is to help them rid of both physical scars and the emotional scars.
“The woman from Uganda just got a visiting professorship form the University of Pittsburgh. The other woman is a worldwide speaker against domestic violence,” Dr Alessi points out.
