Is it really in the eye of the beholder?

Ever since she was 10, Nadia begged her mother for an operation to pin her ears back so that her peers at school would stop bullying her and calling her Dumbo for her "elephant ears." Read the article here. Four years later, a charity provides Nadia with a free otoplasty, but they don't stop there- adding on to the laundry list of corrective, elective surgeries rhinoplasty and mentoplasty, all totaling $40k. 

At the risk of sounding insensitive, my initial reaction to this was disappointment. Want to deal with the psychological effects of bullying by resorting to surgery? Fine. Join the 90 thousand other teens who went under the knife for cosmetic surgery in 2007. But, courtesy of a charity foundation, deciding to add on a bucket list of multiple corrective and cosmetic measures to fit a certain mold of aesthetic "beauty" defined in the eyes of our American culture and society is..well-- sad.

                                                                                                                         ~Ro