From Egypt Gazette: Egypt Cosmetic surgery all the rage

CAIRO - There has been a lot of controversy over ex-MP Anwar el-Belkimy’s cosmetic surgery and it seems that many men like to indulge in such surgery.

El-Belkimy was kicked out of Egypt's ultra-conservative Nour Party after it was discovered that the bandages covering his face were not, as he had been claiming, the result of a vicious beating meted out by armed gunmen, but rather of a nose job.

This, Egypt's first political scandal in the post-Mubarak era, was made especially scandalous because Nour belongs to the Islamist Salafi movement, which views cosmetic surgery as a sin.

In Egypt, men who have cosmetic surgery keep it under wraps, in more ways than one, while women always make a show of having surgery to make them look like film stars.

Some men have cosmetic surgery before marriage; it may be to get rid of an ‘unpleasant shape’ in their bodies or it could be something more serious.

Ahmed, a 30-year-old engineer, decided to have a mole removed from his face. Since childhood, people had kept asking him about it; some of them refused to have anything to do with him, as they felt alienated by this ‘scary’ black lump.

“I asked a girl to marry me, but she said no. When I heard about a clinic using lasers to get rid of moles, I went there straightaway for treatment," he says.

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