Some malls now offer more than just the GAP and Borders, a few around the country are beginning to offer cosmetic procedures, such as Botox injections.

One of the companies in the $12-billion-per-year industry is Klinger Advanced Aesthetics, which offers medical cosmetic procedures in addition to full-service beauty treatments in malls, eliciting a strong response from students at SF State.

"I think it's a shame that people aren't more comfortable with themselves," said 26-year-old German grad student Bryan Aja. "I think of beauty in other ways besides facelifts, which is essentially what Botox is."

But there is also concern for the blurring of the line between medical and cosmetic procedures. Nurse practitioners are trained to give the injections in the mall-based medical offices, according to a New York Times article on Oct. 24.

"Even if people want to change something, I would not recommend going to a mall," said SF State health educator Kamal Harb. "If somebody wants to do cosmetic surgery, they have to research the doctor, the background, how many surgeries the doctor has performed. I don't know how people can trust somebody in a mall."

But liberal studies major Hudson Soule, 22, says that location shouldn’t affect a person’s choice in obtaining the cosmetic procedure.

“I’d never do it,” he said. “But if I wanted to, I wouldn’t care where I’d get it done.”

Business major Melissa Bernal-Silva, 20, said she would never have such a procedure, much less in a mall.

"I think it's kind of creepy because you're making something that, at one point, for whatever reasons, was for medical purposes and they're changing it into something that is purely superficial," she said.

It's also a concern for some that by offering cosmetic procedures in a mall, the standard of beauty is being raised to impossible levels.

"If you look at magazines, we are bombarded with so many images of how the ideal body should look like, how a person should look like, what the standards of beauty are," Harb said. "You look at magazines, television, movies, everywhere, people are bombarded by the ideal of what is beautiful. The ideal is so hard to get."

Bernal-Silva agrees.

"In a social sense, you're making something that was not readily available now available to mass populations," she said. "So that will bump up the standards of what people are 'supposed' to look like, and that takes away the individuality that I think people should pride themselves on having."