The Javier de Benito Institute on Madrid’s affluent Serrano Street bustles with activity on a Thursday at five in the afternoon, although not a soul is seen outside its silent and elegant cubicles. That’s what it’s about, not seeing anyone who doesn’t want to be seen. It will be the clients, later, who will say, if they wish, if they have passed through the hands of this plastic surgeon. like the ex honorable molt president of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol, who had De Bentito operate on his eyelids and eye bags. Or the television star Carmen Borrego, who had a double chin surgery in 2018. But we are in the last week of April 2024. The doctor is half an hour late from the appointment time and, due to the anxious expression of the solicitous collaborator that excuses him, one imagines him muddied in the middle of the task, putting the last stitches to the suture of the umpteenth lifting, or finishing flattening the bridge of a stubborn nose, before washing your hands and taking care of the interview. When he finally appears, tall and dynamic in his immaculate short-sleeved pajamas, he displays his charm, friendliness and old-school gallant chivalry and says that he has all afternoon. Because of him, we would still be chatting.
Is it coming from the operating room?
Almost, this morning I made two facelifts, and tomorrow, two more. But now I come from a consultation. Consultation is almost more important than intervention. That’s where the cards are put on the table.
Do your patients choose you or do you choose them?
I choose them. And I say “the” because women are more than 85% of those who come.
Why do you choose them?
By virtue of whether I believe that they listen to me, that they understand me. Whether they have a clear concept of their image and what they want to achieve, whether I believe I can achieve it, even if they want to fix something that has been done to them somewhere else. Now, if someone tells me that he doesn’t have a boyfriend because he has a big nose, no matter what I do to him, we will fail. All this is a work of psychology, in addition, or more, than surgery. Because the patients’ problem is not in their physical appearance, but in how their brain interprets it.
What is a good job for you?
Success, said my friend and teacher Ivo Pitanguy, does not depend so much on what you do, but on what comes out of the operation and how it is interpreted and lived by the person. I have patients who have told me that I have changed their lives. That is total success.
And the failure?
The worst failure is when a patient, after the operation, tells me: “I can’t see myself.” There is little to do there. You can see her fantastic, but she is the one who has to be seen.
How many times do you say “no”?
Oh, a lot. I don’t need the money. If I say no to someone, a lot of people still come to the clinic, so I can tell the truth to my patients. And I tell them when they want things that you know you can’t get, when what they are looking for and what they complain about is only seen by them, when they ask me to remove wrinkles that they don’t have to prevent them from appearing. You cannot take clean clothes to the dry cleaners to avoid them getting dirty. Of course, if you want to wash it, don’t wait until it is very dirty.
Do you recognize one of your operations?
No Hahaha. I recognize the patient, if I haven’t seen her for long. Sometimes, they greet me effusively on the street and thank me, and I don’t remember what I operated on them for. So, I tell her that she is gorgeous, and she touches her nose, or sticks out her chest, and then, I fall. In any case, if I recognized an operation of mine, I have done something wrong. Supposedly, if I operate on you, I’m going to make you better, but I’m not going to change you so much that you won’t be recognized.
Is the wrinkle beautiful?
The wrinkle is beautiful in the soul because it means that you have lived a lot. And the ones outside can be beautiful if you are happy with them. Laughing causes wrinkles. Now, if you want to keep laughing and they bother you, I can help you.
Have them today, with so much offer of aesthetic medicineIs it poor?
There are two things there. Aesthetic medicine costs, of course. We all know fit 90-year-olds who are happy with the way they look, but why wouldn’t you do something, if you can afford it, to make your chronological age more in line with your biological age and your sense of self? herself? When people criticize whether an actress has touched herself too much or too little, if she is happy and wanted that, leave her alone. Who are we to judge her.
You look great. Are you wearing your catalog?
I had my eyelids done when I was 50, because patients, at eight in the morning, told me that I had a bad face and that I hadn’t slept, and a surgeon can look anything but tired. I also had a hair transplant to appear better on TV and in photos: that’s what you see, mine has fallen out. I had some liposuction on my chin and, well, now I would have to get my eyelids done again and a lifting. I don’t rule it out, because I have to be well, my problem is time.
Are surgeons the doctors with the most ego?
It’s not my case. There are two things I have not had in my life: neither jealousy nor vanity. When I die, with all the fame I may have, the difference between me and a man who sweeps the streets is that, like me, they will take a photo of me in the newspaper. But we will be in the same place, whatever we have done.
Well, his hands don’t save lives, like those of his general surgery colleagues.
Well, I’m a doctor, before I’m a plastic surgeon. I tell this to my residents, who come to my clinic to learn from everyone. In our specialty we have reached a point, sometimes frivolous, where we tend to talk about tits, asses, eyelids, bellies, double chins, eyes. I tell them: “Never forget that behind every ass and every tit there is a human being who has his motives, and you, first, wanted to be doctors to help them.”
Do you have patients or clients?
Patients. They are not sick, a priori. But they are patient because of their motives and emotions: they have a problem. They do not have a virus or cancer, but they may have a psychological problem interpreting their image. They are not happy with something they have or don’t have, and so looking good makes them feel better. In that sense, I cure, or try to cure, their discomforts. And don’t forget that, in an operating room, a patient can die. I have three premises: preserve life, preserve functions, and, only the third, that I be more beautiful and enjoy life more.
I have read that he has an 18-month-old daughter with his second wife, Irina, and he chose her sex in an assisted reproduction process. Don’t you think that goes against bioethics?
Not at all. I wanted a girl, I have another daughter who is 37 years old and I have always loved girls. Girls are more at home, they pull their parents more, they take their boyfriend home. In kyiv, where my wife, Irina, is from, with whom
I am very much in love, we decided to do the process, you can choose the sex of the embryo and we did it. It is not a baby on demand.
What have you learned from women, as the title of your book says?
That you are the stronger sex. You have enormous advantages over men. You are smarter. You don’t need us as much as we need you. There are only a couple of days a month when hormones play tricks on you, and that is if you decide that you want to have fun that day. I have always said that a man needs a place to get laid, and a woman needs a cause. For a long time now, you haven’t needed us financially either, you can live the life you want, because before you depended on a man, and now, you don’t.
How have you witnessed the emergence of feminism?
Look, now the kids are scared. They don’t know how to handle women in many ways. We have gone from one extreme to another, and the extremes always get confused. It happens even to me. I was taught to be polite and open the door to everyone: well, the other day a 50-year-old woman snorted at me for opening the door for her in a restaurant. That’s not machismo, it’s civility.
He says he is not vain, but in the book he talks about how he displays his “peacock feathers” before the ladies.
Well, but that’s not vanity, those are the weapons that one has. All that about playing tennis, being a good conversationalist, I’ve done it because, if I had been like George Clooney, just by getting out of the car I would have gotten laid right there because I was handsome. But, not being handsome, I have been a worker, of that and everything, of the exhausting kind. I have cut through stone mountains and, in the end, they said yes out of exhaustion.
With so much operation you will be mega-rich. What are your luxuries?
I’m not poor. I had a boat, but I sold it, because I understood that it is much better to have rich friends who have one. Luxury is seeing the sun rise when I wake up. Be with friends at dinner and enjoy. Luxury is like beauty: for me, beauty is not a perfect nose or ass or tits, but that harmony that, through the senses, delights our minds.
Are you afraid of death?
No, I believe in reincarnation, I have had very strong experiences with mediums. I don’t want to die, of course. I am very happy and I have a great time. Since I have this Judeo-Christian education, I would work until 20 minutes before dying and, when I saw death appear, I would try to seduce it to operate on its nose and make it let me continue living to see the result.
CONSULTATION NOTEBOOK AND OPERATING THEATER
The happiest days of Javier de Benito’s life were, according to himself, when he was born and when he decided to dedicate himself to cosmetic surgery. They are not even equal to those of the births of his daughters: one is 37 years old and the little one is only 18 months old. “I adore them, but their future is yet to be written, I can already say that my life has been great for being born and for having chosen to be a surgeon,” he argues. De Benito, born “on January 14 of an even year of the 20th century” – we must insist that he provide the exact date (Barcelona, 76 years old) -, son of a textile businessman and a woman dedicated to the home, graduated in Medicine and Surgery, and the contacts he made in Marbella during his student years, working in the summer as a tennis teacher in a luxury hotel, opened his eyes and the doors to an ecosystem, that of the rich and famous, which, Later, throughout their professional lives, they were good clients of their clinics. He was president of the International Society of Plastic and Aesthetic Surgery and is considered one of the 10 best professionals in the field in the world. Now present the book What I learned from women, in which she tells succulent and funny anecdotes and particularities of her profession after having treated more than 30,000 women in 50 years in at least 17 clinics in several countries: Russia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands and the United States, among others. . What little hair she has left, she admits, is implanted. In the language, she has no. He doesn’t bite it either.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
_
#Javier #Benito #plastic #surgeon #doctor #cure #patients #discomfort
