The study, which polled people considering plastic surgery within the next two years, found almost 30% reported average household incomes of less than $30,000. Forty-one percent had annual incomes of $31,000-60,000, and 16%, $61,000-90,000. Only 13% claimed salaries of more than $90,000 per year.

You may be noticing more wrinkles in the faces of the people you see. Though worries over the bad economy may be to blame for some of them, there could be another reason. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), the number of Americans opting to undergo cosmetic plastic surgery fell to 6.6 million in 2002, down 12 percent from the year before.

Procedures that require people to go under the knife seem to have weathered the recession better than have the nonsurgical ones. In 2002, 1.6 million people opted to have a surgical procedure in the name of beauty, up 1 percent from the year before. Surgery is less likely to be an "impulse buy" than cosmetic procedures like chemical peels and therefore aren't as affected by recession-based decreases in impulse spending.

As plastic surgery has become a common cultural phenomenon, its critics have grown increasingly vocal. Some view it as radical conformity to artificial standards of beauty perpetuated by mass media, and its most strident opponents are particularly concerned that women have aesthetic operations more often than men and that even adolescent girls sometimes elect surgery. Nonetheless, each year more cosmetic procedures are performed than ever before, and many plastic surgery patients attest to the psychological benefits of feeling younger, thinner, and more attractive. Perhaps the most notable, if ambiguous, commentary on cosmetic surgery has been offered by the French performance artist Orlan, who explores standards of beauty by undergoing repeated plastic surgery.