So, perhaps plastic surgery will help people feel more attractive; if that’s true, it should improve their happiness, though again we are not forced to guess. There is research that directly addresses the question of whether having plastic surgery improves psychological well-being. One recent study (link is external) revealed benefits across a wide range of outcomes, including anxiety, social phobia, depression, body dysmorphia, goal attainment, life satisfaction, mental and physical health, self-efficacy, and self-esteem. A fairly recent review study (link is external) found more evidence like this, but also qualified the main idea to some extent by demonstrating that expectations matter—if you have unrealistically high expectations of what the surgery will do for you, you are likely to be disappointed and wind up less happy than you were to begin with. Interestingly, this study also broke down the psychological benefits of plastic surgery by type of procedure. Breast augmentation and reduction were most uniformly associated with positive emotional outcomes—greater social confidence and self-esteem—while rhinoplasty and face lifts presented a more mixed picture. Another side point is that males tend to exhibit greater dissatisfaction overall with these procedures than females.