Alexandra Louise Kuczynski (born December 6, 1967, in Lima, Peru) is a Peruvian American reporter working for the New York Times, a columnist for the New York Times Magazine and the author of the award-winning 2006 book Beauty Junkies about the cosmetic surgery industry. The book was translated into ten languages.
Her father, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Lima, is an economist and politician who is currently holding office as President of Peru, their native country. Her mother is Jane Dudley Casey (daughter of Joseph E. Casey, member of the U.S. House for the 3rd district of Massachusetts).
After graduating from Barnard College in 1990, she became a journalist with the New York Observer and then the New York Times. On September 10, 2001, she was transferred by Howell Raines from media reporter to the style section, where Kuczynski would write "the sort of pop-feature pieces that would appeal to the Times national audience. " She has been described as "a giddy blast. She always would have 10 ideas at story meetings and eight of them would be terrible and two would be brilliant. " Under her byline, the word "horny" first appeared in the Times, in reference to a story about female Viagra; she later said, "I wear that as a badge of honor."
Kuczynski married the investor Charles Porter Stevenson Jr. in 2002.
In 2006, she authored a book about the growth of the cosmetic surgery business: Beauty Junkies: Inside Our $15 Billion Obsession with Plastic Surgery (ISBN 978-0-385-50853-7). Reviewers have noted that readers of the book "may take a pass after reading this exposé about extreme makeovers. " Kuczynski concludes, "Looks are the new feminism, an activism of aesthetics. As vulgar and shallow as it sounds, looks matter more than they ever have—especially for women. "
In addition to her more than 1, 000 bylines in The New York Times, she has written for Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Allure, Town & Country and many other publications. She has contributed essays to National Public Radio.
