MORE and more of us are happy to go under the knife.

Cosmetic surgery undertaken by both women and men soared by more than a third last year, with thousands of us demanding the chance to alter what Nature gave us or to fight off the effects of ageing.

Speaking as a wrinkly fifty-something with an aversion to facial injections and bits sliced off quite casually, I think this is generally a bad trend.

While anything that makes people feel good about themselves can be a positive thing, the over-emphasis on how we look and not how we behave is worrying.

Of course there is peer pressure to look good, seem young and be lively. But why is it so important to look like some glitzy robot who happens to be this year's paparazzi favourite?

It used to be that "handsome is as handsome does". In other words, whatever you look like, it is the person inside that matters.

Now, everyone seems to be judged by how attractive they are and whether their features are acceptable. And the definition of that currently is, whether they have a pert nose, chiselled cheekbones and a full, pouting mouth.

Well, that is not how people were necessarily made. There was not a single special mould, one face fits all.

In any case, in the most impressive faces, it is the irregularities that are memorable not the everyday ones. So why, as we get older, should we not glory in our individuality rather than try to join the clones?

This huge lobby to conform (and, yes, we in the media are largely to blame for creating these icons to be slavishly imitated) means that anyone with more unusual facial features and figure is made to feel odd, out of kilter with the current vogue.

Comedian Jackie Mason had it right. He noted that the American love-affair with cosmetic surgery meant that when you entered a room you thought you had just missed something really important because everyone looked so surprised.

The reality of the situation would indeed be laughable if it were not so tragic.