Who says looks don’t matter and it’s what’s on the inside that counts?

Certainly not the producers of the American show Extreme Makeover (Win, 7.30pm, Sunday), which sells the idea that beauty really is in the sharp end of a scalpel.

The aim of this program seems to be to take average-looking Joes and Joannes, then strip them bare both literally and emotionally to convince the audience that they have a multitude of physical flaws which need correcting.

I’d never seen it before last night, but was sucked in by a trailer featuring Jeanene, a tattooed, pierced and dreadlocked factory worker who was to be transformed “from goth to glam”.

Poor Jeanene was ambushed at a punk-rock show, where her muso boyfriend pulled her up on stage to announce the impending “make-under”. Then she was whisked away for an interview where she tearfully told how she had cultivated her “extreme” look so people wouldn’t notice anything else about her.

In reality, she confessed, she wanted to get rid of the bright red dreads, the large nose piercing, the stretched holes in her ears and all the other trappings of gothnicity so she could become “normal”.

Oh, and while she’s under the surgeon’s knife, maybe he could manage a boob job, lip augmentation and a bit of lipo to give her ordinary figure a lift.

Meanwhile, unbeknown to Jeanene, her goth boyfriend is also given a “normal” hairstyle and popped into a conservative suit.

You can just imagine all the “oohs” and “aahs” at the Extreme Makeover unveiling. Take two rather unique individuals, send them to a plastic surgeon, a hairdresser and a make-up artist, and – voila! - you have two, ahem, “normal”, preppy-looking individuals who can’t stop cooing with pleasure at their new look.

Victim number two, Lina, was a recent graduate with what most of us would consider to be a rather ordinary appearance – she was certainly no glamourpuss, but a new frock, a few gym workouts and a new do probably would have worked wonders.

Lina, however, was convinced nobody would employ her because of her looks, a view which Extreme Makeover was at pains to reinforce.

She had the figure of a woman at least twice her age, the cosmetic surgeon exclaimed! She also needed a nose job, laser surgery on her eyes, a boob lift, a lower eyelid lift, a brow lift, laser hair removal, porcelain tooth veneers and whitening, all-over liposuction, and photodynamic therapy (whatever that is).

After being sent off to a personal trainer for three weeks, Lina was ready to go under the knife, with a surgeon boasting about using the latest form of liposuction to shift fat from here to there and then giving her a “Brazilian butt lift”. All that fat sucking looked pretty gross, not to mention painful, but heck, it’s tough being a girl.

In the end, Lina certainly didn’t look ordinary any more … she didn’t look much like a graduate, either. She had been transformed into one of those overly made-up, plastic-looking faux femmes you find in second-rate beauty contests.

Of course she and her husband were so excited they could barely speak. I, on the other hand, just felt unspeakably sad.

Neither of these women had serious flaws to begin with, but were driven to dramatically alter their unique individual appearances to conform to some idealised form of “normality” and “beauty”.

I wonder if they were still so ecstatic six or 12 months later, or if the underlying psychological and emotional issues which caused their angst to begin with had resurfaced.

Our society is quick to blame skinny models for the eating disorders and low self-esteem felt by many young women, but programs like this – which portray ordinary women as somehow ugly – are equally culpable.

One of Jeanene’s goth friends summed it up pretty well when she saw her new look. “They’ve turned her into a freak!” she squealed.

— SUZANNE KEEN

What do you think of Extreme Makeover? Do you agree that it reinforces the insecurity many ordinary people already feel about their appearance?

Would you undergo an Extreme Makeover yourself?