Looking at the wide square mirror next to his bed in the morning, 20-year-old Victor Furusho, who has a small nose and lips, clean-cut eyebrows, and brown skin, thinks he looks better than he did yesterday. He is satisfied with the results of the Botox injections he had done a couple of weeks ago. Victor’s obsession with expensive skin therapy treatments, clothes, and make-up quickly puts him in a financial bind. He calls his mother constantly to feed his desire for perfection.

“Mom, I need some money for school,” he begs and lies.

Eventually she gives in. A few days latter, he smiles at his reflection in front of the ATM machine.

Furusho is a high-maintenance guy. He has an obsession with becoming even better looking, always has problems with his appearance, and can’t stop going for skin therapy treatments or shopping. But he’s never satisfied with his looks. He thinks wearing expensive clothing lines makes people look better.

“I don’t wanna wear cheap clothes,” Furusho says, “That’s not my style.”

According to the American Journal of Psychiatry, 5.8 percent of the American population (which is more than one in 20 people) is obsessed with shopping. Once they start collecting clothes, especially expensive or famous clothing lines, they cannot stop buying, whether they can afford them or not. Furusho, who doesn’t work at all, uses his parents’ money to fulfill his habit.

With the funds he receives from his mother, he pays for surgical skin rejuvenation, which can cost as much as $600 per visit. He doesn’t like having wrinkles around his forehead so he eliminated all his wrinkles by injecting Botox. Following the session, he cruises around his favorite stores; Diesel, G-Star, Chanel, Prada, and Gucci to buy more clothing than he can afford. Furusho easily squanders hundreds of dollars on each spree. Once he spent $2,000 just on clothes in three days.

When he comes back home and looks in the mirror with the latest clothes on, he grins at his new look.

“I look perfect,” Furusho says with a low voice. He’s wearing a black jacket, G-Star jeans, Bape shoes, and a cap with a word “I V Jesus.” But after only a few days, he worries about his looks again. “I wanna look cuter.”

Jeffery Kaye, a licensed psychologist in San Francisco, believes the reason people keep buying clothes but are never satisfied is their concern with others’ reactions. “People worry about rejection,” Kaye says, “and they definitely don’t want that.”
Furusho’s problem started almost a year ago. One morning he woke up and realized that there was something wrong. His clear and shiny skin was full of pimples. Once he started to worry about his face, he couldn’t stop questioning himself, “Does my skin look bad?” He even began asking friends, “Do I look fat today?”

Furusho’s best friend, Yoko Yamada, says he has to check himself in the mirror at least once an hour. She says he keeps asking whether he has gained weight. If she says “yes” to him, he questions her about where and how much he has gained.
“He always cares what others think of his looks,” Yamada says, “He almost cares too much.”

Carole Morton, a licensed psychologist who offers integrative psychotherapy, says addiction and compulsion comes from feelings of fear of not being good enough or being inadequate.

“[Furusho] is attempting to gain his worth through good looks,” Morton says. “He doesn’t know deep inside of himself, that he is enough and that he has worth.”

The Girl Scouts of the United States found that 59 percent of girls have dissatisfaction with their body shape along with 66 percent of them desiring to lose weight. People tend to have problems with their body image and their looks, especially in adolescence. One of the reasons they face obstacles with how they look is from the media and advertising. The media sells junk food by using thin and gorgeous celebrities like Paris Hilton and Beyoncé Knowles. The media uses models to sell make-up products. And even children play with dolls that are tall and thin like Barbie dolls. Those images urge people to lose their weight because of the notion that “they are all skinny but me…”

David John Mclntyre, a psychologist who works at Foster City, says shopping and wearing make-up are ways to distract them from being concerned about themselves and about their appearance. Low self-esteem and insecurities are about how they feel about themselves and the addiction comes in when they will go to any extremes to try and change themselves no matter how it affects their whole life.

“Addiction is about how they feel they want to change right now,” Mclntyre says.
Just like Furusho, everyone has reasons to get obsessed with something. One might say they go shopping to distract themselves from studying or from stress they might have. Others might say they go shopping because they like collecting things.

“All the cute guys out there are the reason I wanna look better,” Furusho says and grins while probably thinking about cute guys behind his brown eyes. “So I go shopping.”