By Judith Newman

updated 9:22 a.m. ET Feb. 20, 2008

“No, Judith. Just … no.”

Lee A. Gibstein, M.D., a plastic surgeon with offices in New York City and Miami, crumpled up the photo of the shiny, preternaturally line-free celebrity I’d brought with me and tossed it over his shoulder. “Oh, c’mon. Why not?” I whined.

“Because you’re a walking advertisement for me, and I don’t want my patients looking as if they belong in Madame Tussauds,” Dr. Gibstein said, setting down his syringe.

I admit: I was having a Moment. The day I visited the doctor, I was convinced that expressionlessness looked ethereal. And I thought it might be interesting to give that otherworldly look a whirl. The good thing about Botox? Go too far and, as with an ill-advised haircut, you have to live with it only a few months. The bad thing? As Dr. Gibstein pointed out, using too much would make not only me, but him, look like a freak.

On reflection, I’m glad Dr. Gibstein didn’t do what I wanted. And as it turns out, in his refusal to play along, he is joined by many of his colleagues. In a sense, plastic surgeons have become victims of their own success. For years they’ve warned women about the risks of going overboard on face, forehead and eye lifts. They’ve urged us to start early with nonsurgical procedures — chemical peels, lip injections, wrinkle fillers and laser removal of spots and fine lines — while we are young and have more resilient skin. But now women are overdosing on those, too.

Too much, too soon
“You can overdo even seemingly minimal procedures,” says Allen Rosen, M.D., a plastic surgeon in Montclair, New Jersey. “We are telling people ‘No’ more frequently, because everyone wants everything; they want procedures they’re not candidates for, and they want too much, too soon.” Although minor procedures carry fewer health risks than piling on multiple invasive surgeries at the same time, as Donda West did, surgeons warn that too much cosmetic intervention of any kind can mar your looks and lead to infections, rashes and other health risks. (It can also empty your wallet, though surgeons tend to downplay that risk.)

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The popularity of some major surgical procedures has gone down since 2000: Liposuction has dipped by 14 percent, face-lifts by 22 percent and forehead lifts by 57 percent, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons in Arlington Heights, Illinois. At the same time, women are getting 70 percent more nonsurgical treatments.

“It’s like that ad for Lay’s potato chips. You can’t eat just one,” says Elizabeth Ard, 49, an aesthetician in Warren, New Jersey. She started Botox and Restylane injections to zap wrinkles at 40 and two years ago had a thread lift, a less-invasive variation on a face-lift in which surgeons insert sutures into the tissue around the eyes, cheeks or neck, then pull them tight and anchor them with a series of tiny hooks. Ard also had her lower eyelids defatted, but when she asked Dr. Rosen to do the same thing to the upper lids, “he told me no. Same with the Restylane I wanted in my lips.” Ard says she knows she’ll have the procedures eventually, but she’s heeding her doctor’s advice. At least for now.

Looking a little 'done'
I relate to Ard’s dilemma: Just because a procedure is minimal doesn’t mean people don’t occasionally feel the urge to max out on it. God knows I never had much of an investment in my looks; in fact, I used to cling to the notion that every woman has some period in her life when she looks really good … and my time was right around the corner. And I was sort of right. Without cuteness or beauty in youth, I somehow didn’t fall off the cliff as I aged. At the very least, I’ve stayed the same: Years of living like a mole rat, working and never going out in the sun, ensured I had fewer wrinkles than my contemporaries. But now I’m facing a high school reunion, and I feel as if I’ve got to look my very best, no matter what it takes. I was such a shapeless, bespectacled dork back then. Somehow, I got this idea that with enough Botox and Restylane and laser mojo, I had a shot at getting noticed, even if I looked a little “done.”

That’s what led me to sample the laser stylings of dermatologist Bruce Katz, M.D., in his Juva Skin and Laser Center in New York City. I had a few age spots on my face — splotches of brown pigment. Not a big deal, but why not get rid of them? I semireclined in a comfortable chair, a nurse placed goggles over my eyes and I was treated to the feeling of small, extremely concentrated beams — the Alexandrite laser — searing my flesh. Ow. Ow. Ow. But five days later, the scabs fell off and voilà! The skin was pink and a little raw, but after a couple of weeks, there was fresh, glowy skin where my spots had been.

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