With headline hooks such as ‘I Had An Alien Cyst’ and ‘Model Who Cut Off Her Perfect Big Breasts’, every so often the girls in the Models Direct offices are suckered into a trashy mag or two as curiosity takes over.

Having indulged our guilty pleasure recently in Love It! magazine’s October issues, our addiction ended there and then as we were sickened to discover a competition called ‘Britain’s Got Body Issues!’

Doesn’t sound too bad, you’re thinking. Models Direct is well aware of the seriousness of body image issues, and as a result, continuously campaigns for diversity in the modelling industry. So what then, we ask, is Love It! doing to help readers who are excessively concerned about their body image?

Perhaps counselling? No, that’s not it. Maybe modelling for a body-positive photoshoot, à la Gok Wan’s How To Look Good Naked? No, that’s still not it. Of course, how silly of us, the publication, which by the way is aimed at young women, is addressing these issues by giving away a free boob job.

This may sound like a joke, but unfortunately the magazine’s standard trash level was indeed taken up more than just a notch as it announced it was “launching a month of free plastic surgery!” All the ‘lucky reader’ has to do to have their body cut up is agree to be filmed throughout the process. Week one saw the magazine “starting with what most girls want…BIG BREASTS!” followed by a tummy tuck the next week, a nose job the week after that.

Shocking as this all is – it gets worse. As this is, after all, a competition, we hear you wondering ‘how are the winners chosen?’ Well, why leave a life-changing and potentially deadly decision in the hands of an expert when “readers can vote on who most deserves the surgery”. As The F Word’s bloggers Michelle Williams and AJ McKenna put it nicely, “this really is the aesthetic surgery equivalent of The X-Factor”. But, rather than competing with their talents, women are judged to see who has the most worthy fried eggs, or the most convincing tale about how awful it is to grow up without double Ds.

And what does this ‘lucky reader’ get? To be cut open – all without a whisper of counselling for what could be serious underlying signs of body dysmorphia.

The worried look on our team’s faces became a little more skewed when they then heard that the first 200 readers to text in their entry get 20% off surgery at the centre offering the procedures. The terms money-spinner and publicity stunt tend to override any claims that the partnership between the clinic and magazine has been established to help unhappy women.

The Models Direct team aren’t the only ones outraged by the offers. Consultant plastic surgeon and British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons (BAAPS) President, Fazel Fatah, said: “I find it staggering that any reputable UK surgeon could contemplate or partake in such a crass marketing gimmick aimed at young women – not only does the offer of a surgical procedure as a prize, under any guise, violate both ethics and good taste but readers are also under pressure to ‘text in’ within a certain time period to be eligible.

“This clearly goes against well established codes of medical practice where time-linked initiatives are prohibited. More worryingly, readers of the magazine are the ones who finally select which candidate they deem to be the most ‘worthy’ of surgery! Surgery cannot be treated as entertainment; such a process severely compromises the normal doctor-patient relationship regardless of what safeguards are ostensibly in place,” he said, adding that both he and the BAAPS unreservedly condemn the initiative.

The offer was also condemned by the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive and Aesthetic Surgeons (BAPRAS), who warn on their website that “members engaging in such activities will be the subject of investigation”.

Offering a boob job, nose job or tummy tuck as a prize just goes to show how the trivialisation of cosmetic surgery has gotten out of hand. The decision to have surgery should never be taken lightly and by offering this up in a cloud of hype, excitement and competition, Love It! and the surgery involved has taken trashy too far.

Keep checking back on our blog as we attempt to find out what Love It! has to say in defence.