Your New Body Blog.com | A Cosmetic Surgery Blog Presented by PlasticSurgery.com

In a time when families are struggling just to make ends meet, many are balking at headlines proclaiming six figure plastic surgery bills for the likes of Madonna and Demi Moore.

Ringing up at a combined total of $500,000, the amount that these two celebrities purportedly paid doesn’t just outweigh the costs of 48 years at Berkeley (enough tuition for ten students to get bachelor’s degrees); their bill also exceeds the actual costs of the cosmetic procedures they received.

How could that be?

In Your Face, a plastic surgery blog hosted by the Orange County Register, offers three explaining factors: overcharging, premium pricing, and good old-fashioned media exaggeration. The first two contributors to the inflated price tag for celebrity plastic surgery easily make sense. When celebrities go to the stadium, fly to New York, and dine at restaurants, they pay extra. They see the same ball game, arrive at the same airport and eat the same filet mignon as everyone else but in exchange for pampering and privacy, they’ll pay 10 or 20 times more for the experience.

The principle is the same with plastic surgery, where celebrities might pay surgeons top dollar for a transatlantic house call. Also, celebrities tend to hire surgeons who are celebrities themselves.

So how much does a non-celebrity typically pay for cosmetic surgery? For patients of Dr. Andres Taleisnik, a plastic surgeon in Newport Beach, breast lifts cost a mere fraction of what celebrities pay. By comparison, the national average surgeon’s fee for a breast lift is about $4,414. While fees vary by procedure and location, and are therefore slightly higher in Orange County, breast augmentation, breast implants and breast rejuvenation prices are far more reasonable than the figures cited in Us Weekly.

But in spite of being exempt from the “celebrity tax,” Orange County plastic surgery patients get the same level of attention and expertise as someone paying the same surgeon an exorbitant sum. As one Newport Beach plastic surgeon explained in the aforementioned In Your Face article, celebrities and others who shop by price “don’t get more. They pay more.” Plastic surgery, it seems, proves that sometimes it pays not to be a celebrity.