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Honey, I Shrunk Your Thigh

The perks of being married to a man with the powers of rejuvenation were first realized by Leonor de León, who dispatched her Spanish husband, Ponce, to Florida in the early 1500s to bring home a spritzer from the Fountain of Youth.

High-profile, attractive women continue to explore this route. Nina Griscom (Dr. Daniel Baker), Victoria Principal (Dr. Harry Glassman) and Laura Steinberg Tisch (Dr. Stafford Broumand) have all married cosmetic surgeons with varying degrees of success both marital and cosmetic. (Both Principal and Griscom are now divorced.) Still, when I hear someone is marrying a cosmetic surgeon, I automatically think, Smart lady. This is strange because (a) I almost never use the word “lady” and (b) because it’s based entirely on my own fantasy, which includes the following assumptions:

1. You could have everything done. And you would.

2. Your friends and family would get free consultations and discounts.

3. Should you divorce, you’d instantly age like “She Who Must Be Obeyed” in H. Rider Haggard’s “She.”

I decided to test these assumptions by interviewing five Beverly Hills cosmetic surgeons and their spouses. Like Leonor de León, I learned that the fantasy doesn’t always pan out.

With high cheekbones, a tiny nose and the kind of pillow lips that Lisa Rinna could point to and exclaim, “Wait, I meant those,” Jessica Fisher would seem to be the perfect floor model. But almost nothing is her husband Dr. Garth Fisher’s handiwork. She had her nose and breasts surgically altered before she met him. And those perfectly puffy lips are hers, says Dr. Fisher, adding, “No one believes it.” Ditto the cheekbones. “When Garth met me, he thought I’d had my cheeks done, but I was like, ‘No, I never did,’ ” Jessica says.

Fillers are another matter. “I try everything,” she told me. “I’ve done Restylane and Juvéderm, Botox, laser treatments . . . the usual thing.” She’s also devoted to Cellceuticals, the stellar skin-care system developed by — you guessed it — her husband.

Dr. Fisher, who was the original surgeon on “Extreme Makeover,” has never operated on his wife, except to remove a mole, but would not have any qualms about cutting into his beloved’s face. “People have said it’s illegal,” he tells me. “It’s totally not illegal.” (Some hospitals, like Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, do not allow surgeons to operate on spouses, but most cosmetic surgery is now done in surgery centers that have no such policies.) For Dr. Fisher, it’s all about results, and “if it’s something I do well, I want to be in control of that.” But it’s currently a nonissue since he insists Jessica needs no work.

For Dr. David Sayah, it will always be a nonissue, much to his wife’s dismay. “I’ll ask David for things all the time,” Deborah Sayah tells me in a Beverly Hills coffee shop. “All you need is for your pants not to fit one day and you’re like . . . lipo!” Her husband’s response is to make fun of her and offer to “amputate.” “If I ever need a straight answer from him, I actually need to make an appointment because at home he just laughs it off,” she says. Her husband admits to being “conservative” and even objected to his wife changing her nose about two years ago. “I happen to think she was absolutely beautiful before she did it,” he says.

So for her surgery, Deborah turned to the legendary Dr. Frank Kamer — known for having worked on Liz Taylor,Dolly Parton andCher — with her husband consulting. Meanwhile, Dr. Kamer’s own wife, Pam, wanted him to do her eyes about 10 years ago. But rather than risk a rejection, Pam decided to go through what she called “the back door.”

“I didn’t know,” he shot back before admitting it was just as well or he would have been nervous about it the night before, comparing the anxiety of operating on his wife to “cutting into the eyelid of an Academy Award winner.”

A pixieish 61-year-old, Pam says with a sigh that “everyone drops a little bit” and “at this point in my life, I could use some more.” Dr. Kamer, who recently retired after merging his practice with Dr. Sayah’s, protests and she quickly retreats, insisting she’ll just “keep the Botox going and wear turtlenecks.”

Greg Cassileth is the business manager and husband of Dr. Lisa Cassileth, one of the few female cosmetic surgeons in Beverly Hills. This makes him popular at social gatherings. “Women always ask me what Lisa does,” he tells me in his office. “Sometimes they tell me what they want to have done. Like at this child’s birthday party, a woman asked, ‘Does Lisa do everything?’ and I said, ‘Yeah,’ and she said, ‘Good, because I got a whole list.’ ”

Dr. Cassileth has operated on many family members, friends and even her nanny’s friend. She does so happily (except for the one friend who did not follow post-op instructions) and laughs about how people now think her older sister is younger than she is.

Dr. Sayah also has no problem operating on family and friends, including his mother and his mother-in-law, which actually makes me gasp. “I think the mother-in-law was probably the most difficult,” his wife says, nodding.

Still, for sheer awkwardness, Dr. Raj Kanodia (who has tweaked the famous noses ofCameron Diaz andJennifer Aniston) wins. Dr. Kanodia is single, but, fortunately for his girlfriends, he doesn’t hold off on his “services” until after marriage.

“With previous girlfriends, I’ve always done something — a little injection, a little Botox, and several of them I’ve done noses either during the relationship or after we broke up,” he tells me in his office. Not only that, but ex-girlfriends have brought him their new husbands to work on because, Dr. Kanodia claims, “there was so much trust.”

Verdict: Family and friends definitely score.

3. Should you divorce, you’d instantly age like “She Who Must Be Obeyed.”

For four years, the actress and “Dancing With the Stars” champion Brooke Burke was married to Dr. Fisher. They split up in 2005 and share custody of two daughters. Although Dr. Fisher insists that his ex-wife needs no surgical enhancements, he’s confident that “she would not let anyone else touch her if anything were going to happen.”

I spoke to Burke on the phone to see if that was true. “Absolutely,” she says. “If I was going to have a procedure done, it just wouldn’t be intelligent for me to go anywhere else.” Then she paused. “But it is a little bit weird. I mean even now, after the fact, you know, to go onto a table under the knife with him, I . . . I . . . it’s just a little bit strange.”

Burke, who has given birth to two more children with the singer/actor David Charvet, remains on good terms with her ex and happily still receives free Cellceuticals products.

“What I don’t miss,” she volunteers, “is seeing how comfortable women are to talk about their breasts in a restaurant. I cannot tell you — no matter where we would go, women would come up to us and blatantly thank Garth for their beautiful breasts and just flaunt them so proudly.”